Conference presentation on archival ecologies and affective atmospheres

Over the last few days I have been in Brisbane (Queensland, Australia) attending the International Association for the Study of Popular Music Australia-New Zealand branch annual conference. This year the theme was Popular Music Communities, Places and Ecologies and the conference sought to foster scholarly engagement with the various ways in which music, people and place are connected (see the original call for papers here).

Visit to the Nederlands Jazz Archief

Over the last two mornings I've been at the Muziekgebouw aan't IJ to visit the new office of the Nederlands Jazz Archief, a DIY institution founded in 1980. The NJA is still in the process of setting up their office following the closure of the Music Centre Netherlands at the end of 2012 (the NJA had been part of the MCN for the past 4-odd years). The cessation of the MCN has led to a separation of the people at the heart of the archive's activities from the archive's collection which will now be housed at the University of Amsterdam (where Ditmer Weertman will continue its curation). This is a very new situation and as Paul Gompe described it, the NJA is in something of a "twilight zone" as they start figuring out how the "new" enterprise will move forward.