Freely improvised and non-academic electroacoustic music {as}[by] urban folk[s] ~ part 4
from: Emergence at the frontiers and in fringes & trenches of contemporary music
Music is a performing art. Almost all musicians, as performing artists and (sound) emitters, will (with the — as always — noteworthy exception of a small number of die-hard outsiders) feel a strong need to share their art with (sound) receptors (an audience, whatever its size). Music (making) very much is a social activity and for social acts to thrive one needs space, one needs (a, preferably, variety of) places and the vicinity of people that will want to gather there. Such places and people are most easily found in urban centres, which (partially) accounts for the ‘urban’ in ‘urban folk’, for the UR in URFOlk.
Whereas rural areas provide the breathing space and time for retreat and isolation sought by the outsider artist, big cities provide the breeding ground and infra-structure needed for sub-cultural initiatives, sprouting mostly from the informal networks that are formed by the artists themselves and that -in a D.I.Y spirit- are extra-institutional, non-academic, self-managed and operating with no or minimal financial support. The events that they organise will most of the time take place in places that match the available (no-)budget and the type and size of the audience they will attract: small clubs, squats, industrial spaces, artist studio’s …
