Gear

A critical examination of the twenty-first century fetishization of professional audio technologies, and how it led to a new social formation: gear cultures.

Gear: mixing consoles, outboard effects processors, microphones. These are professional studio recording-related technological objects—the tools of the recording industry—yet their omnipresence in the broader music industries and prosumer markets transcends the entrenched pro audio engineer guild. In Gear: Cultures of Audio and Music Technologies, authors Eliot Bates and Samantha Bennett ask: How does gear become gear? Why is it fetishized? And how is it even relevant in the predominantly digital twenty-first-century music technology landscape?

This multisited, multicountry, multiplatform, and multiscalar study focuses on gear in the present day. The authors trace the life of gear from its underlying materialities,… Keep Reading