Riffs

Issues

ISSUE 1 – Volume 1, Issue 1 – February 2017

Guest Editor: Nicholas Gebhardt, Birmingham City University (UK)

“Here are mutes, liquids, aspirates – vowels, semivowels and consonants. Now we see that words have not only a definition and possibly a connotation, but also the felt quality of their own kind of sound.” (Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook). 

ISSUE 2 – Volume 1, Issue 2 – October 2017

Guest Editor: Simon Barber, Birmingham City University (UK)

A song can be about anything

About peace or war, or the sins of industry

Or the discontents of fame, or of obscurity

Or how we first met, on the warmest day

And how I hadn’t planned to love someone until you came

Or how we survived on happiness and sleeping on the floor

Or how you used to love me but you don’t even know me anymore 

– Dan Wilson, ‘A Song Can Be About Anything’ from Love Without Fear

ISSUE 3 – Volume 2, Issue 1 – July 2018 

Guest Editor: Laura Snapes, Deputy Music Editor, The Guardian (UK)

“There is nothing wrong with hating rock critics” – Of Montreal, 2003

ISSUE 4 – Volume 2, Issue 2 – December 2018

Guest Editor: Dr Simon Jones, Middlesex University (UK)

“Playing MUSIC, for me right, it gets some heads together…gets a little TRIBAL thing going on, you know. Get the FREQUENCY up…..Everybody’s on the frequency. It’s always been about that…and EXCITING people and changing their frequency“, Robbo Dread, Birmingham, 2017

ISSUE 5 – Volume 3, Issue 1 – April 2019

Guest Editor: Nicholas Gebhardt Birmingham City University (UK)

In partnership with Ideas of Noise festival, Birmingham.

ISSUE 6 – Volume 3, Issue 2 – November 2019

Issue Editors: Craig Hamilton and Sarah Raine

The fiesta was really started. It kept up day and night for seven days. The dancing kept up, the drinking kept up, the noise went on. The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta. Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences. It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta. All during the fiesta you had the feeling, even when it was quiet, that you had to shout any remark to make it heard. It was the same feeling about any action. It was a fiesta and it went on for seven days. – The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway.

ISSUE 7 – Volume 4, Issue 1 – July 2020

Guest Editor: Edmund Hunt, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (UK)

’Technology is something I love and hate at the same time. One one hand the absence of any kind of technology means silence (or an environment of natural sounds which we hear much clearer because of the general silence); on the other hand, you need technology to make art’. – Christina Kubisch, ‘Artists’ Statements II: Christina Kubisch’, in The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, ed. by Nick Collins and Julio d’Escriván, 2nd edn (Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 2017:176)

ISSUE 8 – Volume 4, Issue 2 – December 2020

Guest Editor: Edmund Hunt, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (UK)

ISSUE 9 – Volume 5, Issue 1 – August 2021

Guest Editor: Ash Watson, UNSW Sydney (Australia)

“Perhaps only imagination, in its full processes, can touch and reach and recognise and embody… There are many other kinds of writing in society, but these now—of past and present and future—are close and urgent, challenging many of us to try both to understand and to attempt them” – Raymond Williams

“Good prose is like a windowpane” – George Orwell

ISSUE 10 – Volume 5, Issue 2 – December 2021

Guest Editors: Shane Blackman and Rob McPherson, Christ Church Canterbury University (UK)

Autoethnographic and Qualitative Research on Popular Music