Labels are vital institutions that generate meaning and value around music. As social formations, they mediate the abstractness of a musical work and its conceptual bearings with the materials through which these works are presented to the world. Production practices are communicative processes (Stobart 2006); those of labels involve specific skills, connoisseurship, curation and the cultivation of social relations. When inscribing the significance of music through materials (a vinyl record, tape, or CD), labels also document their production processes, communicative intentions, and the specific resources they had at hand at the moment of each release. As such, labels are fertile locale for examining the intersections between music, material culture, valuation practices (Tucker 2010, Taylor 2016) social formations and emplaced musical relations (Dorr 2012). In this paper I draw from ethnographic research with independent labels in Lima (Peru), across multiple popular music genres. In particular, I study a specific practice that has popularized over the years: reissuing albums of ephemeral bands which labels deem as not having previously received proper valuation. In analyzing the practices and processes through which labels grant “asynchronous valuation” to these musical works I examine the specific materialities, skills, social relations and valuation practices involved in presenting these older works to contemporary publics. I end by examining the impact of domestic reissue practices in specific music scenes, by allowing community members to produce alternative narratives around popular music styles in Peru against those that have been globally imposed.

Nowadays, women, enby, and queer-identified luthiers in South America are challenging the traditional cis-male-dominated lutherie industry by offering affordable, unique, and locally sourced custom-made instruments to working musicians and amateurs. Instead of using exotic, endangered, and imported woods, these luthiers’ use of local woods (Allen 2023) and communal crafting expertise defetishize the guitars and change the material culture and economy of handmade instruments. How can this new luthier workforce effectively defy patriarchal standards, including the fetish existent within custom-made musical instruments, and transform the lutherie material culture economy? I argue that craft making demographics can only change concomitantly with changes to the material culture and valuation practices of instruments, which are dependent upon milieus where those valuations are inculcated. In the case of South American lutherie, it was in universities and work/social collectives where gender equality access opened up a space for women, enby and queer luthiers to attain professional stature. This paper, influenced by global feminism (Mohanty 2003) and music scenes (Finnegan 1989, Straw 1991, Cohen 2007), is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in São Paulo, Brazil in 2023-24, including workshop visits and interviews with women guitar makers, and interviews with members of Red Lutherística, a community of women, non-binary and queer-identified luthiers based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Gear cultures are a new kind of cultural formation connected by specific sets of fetishized material objects. The gear cultures around hardware modular synthesizers, originating in 1995 in newsgroups and listservs, now include >250,000 people worldwide, over 1100 who became professional module designers. Gear culture participants are connected via trade-show festivals, regional modular meetups, numerous online platforms for this niche music-adjacent interest and, most of all, by the problems and promises these objects impart. Paradoxically, these objects are expensive, difficult to use, bulky, obsolete, and therefore shouldn’t by any rational account exist. How do communities form around material objects, and how do those objects form communities around them? I focus on one key facet, modular valuation, particularly within routine acts of conspicuous consumption: the sharing of personal experiences of GAS and FOMO. To understand how economic valuations (of objects) relate to modular values (what’s right and wrong), I trace a theoretical arc beginning with fetishism and widely shared assumptions about object agency (Erofeeva 2019). Fetishism articulates gear cultures’ predominantly hegemonic masculine frame (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005), yet both are in tension with the dissolution of subject-object binaries that constitute synthesizers’ queering potential (Barad 2007). This draws upon multimode research conducted since 2016 in the US, UK and Europe, at trade-show festivals and DIY soldering events, online, and as a modular-themed festival producer. Gear cultures, as social formations held together by gear rather than music production, performance, or reception, pose salient questions for ethnomusicology’s normative assumptions about music’s social lives.