This article addresses the role of house music as a nomadic archival institution, constituted by the musical history of disco, invigorating this dance genre by embracing new production technologies and keeping disco alive through a rhizomic assemblage of its affective memory in the third record of the DJ mix. This exploration will be illustrated through a close analysis of a specific DJ set by a Chicago house music producer, Larry Heard, in the setting of Rotterdam, 2007, in which American house music is recontextualised. Refining the analysis through close attention to one of the tracks played during that particular set, Grand High Priest's 2006 "Mary Mary", the analysis shows how DJ and music production practices intertwine to produce a plurality of unstable cultural and musical connections that are temporarily anchored within specific DJ sets. The conceptual framework draws on the work of Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault, as well as Baudrillard's sense of seduction, with the aim to introduce a fluid notion of mediated nomadic cultural memory, a type of countermemory, enabled by the third record and thereby to playfully re-imagine the dynamic function of a music archive.

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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.

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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.