Collegicum Musicologicum - Gastvortrag, Eliot Bates (The Graduate Center, City University of New York)
A Fetish for Synthesizers: Inside Modular's Gear Cultures

„A Fetish for Synthesizers: Inside Modular's Gear Cultures“

For decades, research into contemporary popular and electronic music assumes that sociality around music represents either a scene, subculture, or tribe. However, much electronic music performance happens today at trade-show festivals, neighborhood technology user groups, and underground DIY venues where the focus is not on music, musicians, and their fandoms, but on gear—highly fetishized technical objects. Gear cultures, those novel social formations around gear, emerged during the first widespread internet sociality around niche, collectible, single-purpose technologies, but are not only online phenomena. As I will show, gear, and gear cultures, pose salient questions around agency, value, heritigization, and fetishization, and pose challenges to how we conduct ethnographic research. I will primarily discuss modular synthesizer gear cultures, touching upon one case study concerning the Superbooth trade-show festival, which has been held as a standalone event in Berlin every year since 2016.

Eliot Bates, Director of the Ethnomusicology program at The CUNY Graduate Center, is an ethnographer who researches the interface between people and sound/music technologies—including their design, materiality, instrumentality, and cultural milieus. Trained in ethnomusicology, from 2004-16 they researched these within Istanbul's recording studios, instrument-building factories and music industries. Since 2013, their work has broadened to consider European and North American gear cultures. Eliot and Samantha Bennett co-authored Gear: Cultures of Music and Audio Technologies (2025, MIT Press), and Eliot's latest book, A Fetish for Synthesizers: Inside Modular's Gear Cultures will be published in 2027 by Duke University Press.. Eliot is active in studio-based creative work, whether collaborative recordings featuring the oud, or makam-based electronic music in the solo project Makamqore and noise duo Manifestoon Platoon. They have contributed, as either performer, composer, or recordist, to more than 90 albums produced in the US, UK, Turkey and Italy.