Conference Agenda

Participants in the hardcore punk subculture often describe a feeling of being “made” to mosh by the music, responding to musical gestures in ways experienced as unconscious or involuntary. Such sentiments echo common descriptions of affect as precognitive or pre-discursive (Desai-Stephens and Reisnour 2020). Drawing from ethnographic research in the hardcore punk scene and literature on affect, embodiment, and dance, this paper thus considers how affect theory might be productively mobilized to explore how music begets movement in mosh pits. I argue that affective qualities of the music—in dialogue with subcultural practices and discourses—spur specific movements in the mosh pit, and that these embodied experiences are integral to participants’ engagement with the subculture. Utilizing Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta’s concept of “sonic tactility” (2023) and Deborah Kapchan’s “aesthetics of proximity” (2022), I analyze specific sonic gestures common in hardcore punk music and their attendant affective manifestations. I argue that through these gestures, musicians engage in a sensory dialogue with audience members to encourage particular, often physically violent kinds of movement. I thus consider how these sonic and affective intensities dialogue with nuanced subcultural ethics regarding the acceptable threshold for violence in the mosh pit. Following recent scholarship on the “affective turn” in music studies, I posit that a deeper understanding of the music’s affect lends crucial insight into the role of sound in reflecting subcultural politics, which often aim to subvert normative behaviors and cultural formations.

Existing scholarship on Japanese anime has predominantly focused on its role as a socio-cultural prism, examining issues of identity, gender, and transnational fandom. However, recent scholarship has identified a significant gap in approaching anime as cinema (Pellitteri 2024). This neglect overlooks the fact that anime itself is a distinct media genre with its fundamental audiovisuality and unique cinematic language, in which music plays a constitutive role. Rather than being confined to the screen, anime’s cinematic language is structured to invite continuous fan engagement through musical performance. Yet how anime’s cinematic language is sustained, constantly generated, and extended beyond the screen through fan musicking has remained largely unexamined.

This study uses anime cover music – fan-generated performance videos based on original anime soundtracks and circulated on digital platforms – as a critical site in examining how anime’s cinematic language is rearticulated and performed. Drawing on music performance studies (Cook 2007), paratextual theories (Genette 1997; Gray 2010), and media fan studies (de Certeau 1984; Jenkins 2012), this paper first coins Performative Para-Poaching as an analytical framework that comprehensively captures the core mechanism of anime cover musicking as a fan creative practice. Through case studies of the song ‘Avid’ (2021) from 86 (A-1 Pictures 2021-2022) and its three covers on Bilibili, this research reveals how anime as language invites constant fan musical practices. First, melody acts as an affective anchor constantly mobilized through rearrangement to activate the affective power of anime’s cinematic language. Second, anime cover music functions as paratexts where fans rearticulate virtual narratives through diverse embodied performances, extending anime into the physical realm. Third, synchronous performativity through Bilibili’s barrage commenting system turns covers into a shared space for audience-performer co-creation. By generating independent affective authority, cover musicking breaks the traditional gap between original works and fan creations, establishing a non-hierarchical media ecology. This paper illustrates that anime cover musicking is a vital variation of anime’s cinematic language, demonstrating anime’s inherent capacity for continuous performativity as a media genre. Furthermore, it offers a new analytical path for musicology to examine how musical meaning is collaboratively sustained through digitally mediated fan practices.

Against the widespread ubiquity of the digital music economy, the cassette endures. Since its invention in 1963, the compact cassette has altered listening habits, facilitated movements, and embodied the spirit of anti-corporate music sharing and appreciation. I critique narratives of the cassette’s obsolescence by framing intimacy and durational listening as affordances of the format that support a contemporary movement of resistance against the hyper-acceleration in music consumption and criticism.

Building on the work of Jonathan Sterne, Peter Manuel and others, I develop a multidisciplinary analytic framework that investigates how the materiality of memory—theorized through tape degradation and physical fragility—inspires richer listening and reflection across multiple listens. I argue that the materiality of cassettes feeds an emotional attachment that eludes digital streaming. Cassette curation and slow listening techniques offer a deliberate technological deceleration that re-engages a deeper critique than algorithms allow. This paper sees how tape tests the tension between ownership and renting through increasing access to physical media. Drawing on audio, visual and written music criticism released during the promotional cycle of Lady Gaga’s eighth studio album Mayhem (2025), I present a case for mixtaping pop albums with well-chosen commentary onto cassette to hallmark the album’s themes, document its critical reception, and ultimately, reclaim the pop object from the market. Curating Mayhem defends boundaries between my individual listening experience and the sway of market forces and hype.

With an unavoidable 1:1 recording and playback ratio, the cassette continues to live at the intersection of musicology, sound studies, and material culture; it invokes the notion of the marketplace and corporate finance as essential, rather than peripheral to understanding twenty-first century performance and production. As the cassette continues to contend with digital economic market forces, the tactile experience of archival labor in cassette culture continues to reorient listening from passive consumption to an environmental and embodied encounter that requires temporal engagement.