Musicking Assemblages and the Material Contingency of Sound: Mostly Other People Do the Killing’s Re-enactment of Kind of Blue

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper provides an in-depth cultural analysis of the album Blue, by Mostly Other People Do the Killing – a detailed, note-for-note recreation of Miles Davis’s jazz classic, Kind of Blue. While the group’s undertaking has been widely regarded as a postmodern deconstruction of genre and history, this paper adopts a new materialist framework to demonstrate how the re-enactment makes perceptible the material contingency of sound and music. Focusing on the processes of emergence, it argues that Blue calls attention to the material-energetic flows that underlie both the production and reception of music. As such, the album might encourage us to rethink the notion of musical works via a materialist model of intensive forces and their immanent capture within musicking assemblages.