Modern Records, Maverick Methods

From the Fairlight CMI through MIDI to the digital audio workstations at the turn of the millennium, Modern Records, Maverick Methods examines a critical period in commercial popular music record production: the transformative digital age from the late 1970s until 2000. Drawing on a discography of more than 300 recordings across pop, rock, hip hop, dance and alternative musics from artists such as the Beastie Boys, Madonna, U2 and Fatboy Slim, and extensive and exclusive ethnographic work with many world-renowned recordists, Modern Records presents a fresh and insightful new perspective on one of the most significant eras in commercial music record production.The book traces the development of significant music technologies through the 1980s and 1990s, revealing how changing attitudes and innovative techniques of recording personnel reimagined recording processes and, finally, exemplifies the impact of these technologies and techniques via six comprehensive tech-processual analyses. This meticulously researched and timely book reveals the complexity of recordists’ responses to a technological landscape in flux.

Bennett provides loads of details and analysis in her diverse linkage of process, technology, and the people whose maverick methods sought to combine and overlay analogue and digital technologies ... A valuable book for musicians, fans, and scholars. It is an interesting read for others as well., In this deeply researched study of commercial popular music production in the 1980s and ‘90s, Samantha Bennett turns the digital vs. analog debate on its head, revealing the hybrid “maverick methods” recordists developed as they blended technologies and practices from both analog and digital domains in a rapidly changing studio environment. Rich in technical detail and musical analysis, the book nevertheless underscores the human element of record-making as recordists’ choices and attitudes influenced the sound of the “modern records” they produced., In Modern Records, Maverick Methods, Sam Bennett not only provides a hugely detailed study of the linking technologies and methods that characterise the two decades between the ‘golden age’ of rock recording in the 1960s/70s and the current world of the DAW, she also provides a fascinating analysis of the tortured and complex process through which attitudes to recording technologies both developed and changed. This is an important and welcome addition to the literature., Modern Records begins with a simple question: “How are recordings made and why do they sound the way they do?” The answers to that question take Bennett deep into the processes of recording and are as fascinating and diverse, profound and fun as the music itself. Process, technology, sound and music are at the heart of this study and the strength of Bennett’s approach is how she links them together – an illuminating read for musicians, fans and scholars alike.

Samantha Bennett is Associate Professor of Music at the Australian National University. She is the author of Siouxsie and the Banshees' Peepshow (2018), part of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series, and co-editor of Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound (2018) and Popular Music, Stars and Stardom (2018). Her journal articles are published in Popular Music, Popular Music and Society, The Journal of Popular Music Studies and IASPM@journal.