Blurring the lines between inside and outside, civic and social, The City Is the Club Is the City is a spectrogram film that asks, “What if the club and the city were the same?” This piece was originally conceived of and created as a part of Tradewinds, an exhibition approaching DC’s go-go music club culture from dual angles of photography and soundscape. Rooted in collaborative research, the exhibition is the culmination of the Nexus Residency wherein photographer Larry Cook and ethnomusicologist Allie Martin worked in tandem to meld their practices, presenting a unified body of new works. Drawing on soundscape recordings created at the iconic corner of 7th Street and Florida Avenue NW, the film features a series of sonic vignettes that blur the lines between inside and outside, between varied publics. Utilizing traffic, club noise, go-go music, bird sounds, and other sonic elements, these vignettes bring background noise to the fore, creating the feeling of being suspended in a doorway where the club is the city, and the city is the club. As each vignette is built from multiple layers of sound, this accompanying essay peels back some of these layers, thinking through what sounds like the city and what sounds like the club, and the benefits to listening to both of these imagined spaces as if they were one. As Washington, DC, continues to gentrify, listening intersectionally in this way is imperative to understanding the intricacies of Black sound in the city.
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Summer 2024
Research Article|
June 01 2024
The City Is the Club Is the City: Sonic Vignettes of a Gentrifying City
Allie Martin
Allie Martin
Allie Martin is an ethnomusicologist and artist from Prince George’s County, Maryland. She is currently an assistant professor at Dartmouth College in the Music Department and the Cluster for Digital Humanities and Social Engagement. Her work is attuned to questions of race, sound, and power. Martin is the director of the Black Sound Lab at Dartmouth College, a research environment dedicated to amplifying Black life and decriminalizing Black sound through digital practice.
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Resonance (2024) 5 (2): 86–96.
Citation
Allie Martin; The City Is the Club Is the City: Sonic Vignettes of a Gentrifying City. Resonance 1 June 2024; 5 (2): 86–96. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/res.2024.5.2.86
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