Unconscious Music: Listening to the Background Sound of Motown

A listening session and talk hosted by Dr Louis Moreno and UCLs Urban Laboratory with invited guest speaker Dr Rachael Finney playing a selection of Motown Records from the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Drawing on Finney's research into the aural archives of Motown's background singers, the session will listen closely to the extraordinary vocal work of the Andantes and the Blossoms asking 'what work has to be rendered unconscious in order for a song to become a hit record?'.

Thinking about how the relationship between memory and the city, people and history is spatially produced and musically repressed, listening to the Andantes and the Blossoms opens up a mode of phonographic occlusion -- what Finney calls the sound space of the ‘back/ing/ground’.

• https://www.ucl.ac.uk/urban-lab/events/2...