The acid, a museme, is the unstable element in acid house. It is arguably both the spiritual and hedonistic apex of psychedelic music, enabling a shift in perception. In electronic dance music, the journey of the acid museme seems to have developed from Phuture's "Acid tracks" during the mid-1980s in Chicago club the Muzic Box. The new sound of acid house, as well as acid's implicit reference to the psychedelic drug LSD, inspired a moral panic in the UK during the late 1980s. By the early 1990s, acid house further influenced the development of trance music in Germany and elsewhere. Yet, a similar musical figure can be recognised in earlier electronic acid rock experiments of Tangerine Dream. The discussion first maps out the development of this museme by placing key-moments geographically. However, this paper concludes that musical memory seems to operate rhizomically, in a deterritorialised 2 (displaced) manner.

In the 1970s, compact cassettes ("C-cassettes") were rapidly changing music listening practices. This paper studies the introduction and marketing of compact cassettes to Finns. C-cassettes answered important needs of music consumers: users remember them as essential devices in constructing and conveying one's identity. An active role as mix-tape assembler and recommender of new music was welcomed by Finnish music listeners, especially young people. But were they ready to accept the roles and ways of using cassette technology suggested by advertisers? The material analyzed consists of magazine advertisements from the 1970s and users' memories of C-cassettes.

The ways in which technology mediates the relationship between people and music has increasingly evolved since the advent of playback devices. With the arrival of digital music, and its inherent culture of digitality, new issues have emerged regarding musical engagement at the level of fan and/or consumer. This paper will explore what and where people are engaging with music, as mediated by technology. These two issues will be categorized by: (1) the immense quantity of popular music available digitally is promoting a culture of eclecticism, whereby people are not tied to specific genres when defining their tastes. Personal genre alliance has fallen out of favour, and replaced by fluid definitions of genres and artists, that are user-driven and highly personalised and subjective: for example, folksonomies. (2) One of the primary ways in which people consume music is through portable media devices, such as the iPods. My data shows that people are predominantly utilising these devices in three sites of engagement: mobile, immobile and quasimobile activities. These issues are explored through the results of a large-scale, international study, utilising both quantitative and qualitative approaches, in the form of interviews and surveys, both conducted online and in person. Throughout this paper, I make distinctions between how digital youth, or digital natives, those under the age of thirty who have grown up entirely immersed in digitality, and those over thirty, or digital immigrants, have developed diverse systems of musical engagement. I argue that digital youth, whose relationship with music is increasingly mediated by digital technologies, such as the iPod, are no less emotionally engaged with music than their older counterparts, but their tastes are less genrefocused.

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This paper inquires into the role of the dub plate within the creative practice of the dubstep DJ. Dub plates are important to dubstep for a range of historical and aesthetic reasons. As a concept, the dub plate connects dubstep genealogically and rhizomically to the cultural memory of 1970s Jamaican reggae sound system practices. As a one-off cut, a dub plate provides an aura of authenticity to the DJproducer. In the dubstep music scene, however, dub plates seem to appear in a variety of media formats, from analogue lacquered aluminium ("acetate") and vinyl to digital CDR. Finally, when inquiring into the current practices of digital dubstep DJs in the UK, the dub plate functions as a residual concept of a unique, authentic, event.