[PMH 4.2 (2010) 220-241] Popular Music History (print) ISSN 1740-7133 doi:10.1558/pomh.v4i2.220 Popular Music History (online) ISSN 1743-1646 © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010, 1 Chelsea Manor Studios, Flood Street, London SW3 5SR. Paul Graves-Brown Nowhere man: urban life and the virtualization of popular music 1 Paul Graves-Brown is an archaeologist special- izing in modern material culture/technology and the archaeology of the contemporary past. Principal publications include Matter, Material- ity and Modern Culture (ed. 2000) and ‘Avtomat Kalashnikova’ (Journal of Material Culture 2007). He has also performed, composed and recorded music for more than 30 years, working as a sound engineer for BBC Radio, engineering for live bands, creating incidental music for theatre and very occasionally producing. Recent work can be heard at myspace.com/slightlymuddy and slightlymuddy.com. Llaneli, Wales slightly.muddy@virgin.net Abstract Music is not a physical thing, but an event and an action, and since modern urban and post- urban ‘places’ are fragmented, topological and often virtual, the attempt to monumentalize popular music seems misguided. The monumental sense of place is based on concepts of tenure and ownership that are challenged by the fuidity of modern urban life. Rapid transport and the media of instant communication have created a non-Euclidean sense of place, and the development of recording and other audio media over the last 130 years has been integral to this process, emphasizing time axis manipulation over the fxity of location. This paper does not seek to refute the connection between music and place, but rather to see both making and listening to music as involving a dynamic construction of place which is necessitated by the ephemeral, kinetic nature of music itself. Keywords: heritage; monument; non-place; performance; placelessness; recording; virtualization 1. For their help, comments and suggestions, I would like to thank John Connell, Tom Cullis, Carolyn Graves-Brown, John Schofeld and Dillon Tonkin. I am grateful to the Disoriental Club for permission to reproduce their fier which was frst published in Sound Tracks (Connell and Gibson 2002).