Distribution Ambiances Magnétiques Etcetera and Constellation Records: DIY record labels and the Montreal experimental music scene
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the role of small record labels in the Montreal experimental music scene. Drawing and expanding on Will Straw’s conception of scene, I argue that independent record labels are crucial vectors of production and distribution that are energizers and adapters of the activities inherent to cultural scenes. Developing the notion that cultural scenes are, in one sense, matrixes of networks and infrastructures, I also examine how record labels interact with other scenic actors – such as music venues and musical instruments – that at times offer continuation of and unexpected bridges between the activities of labels. This dissertation is articulated around the cases of two record labels: Distribution Ambiances Magnétiques Etcetera (DAME), a small company that focuses primarily on the Musique actuelle musical movement, and Constellation Records, a label that has long promoted experimental popular music stemming out of the city’s Anglophone communities. Each case considers the labels’ relationship to the cultural identity of Montreal, and leads into analyses of the Casa del Popolo concert venue and of specific practices of the saxophone as ‘bridges’ between the labels’ aesthetics and activities. I argue that, in the digital era, the function of small independent labels like the ones examined in this dissertation is challenged by the rise a new set of practices and technological tools, but that these structures must be considered as important generators of knowledge about the urban cultural scenes they participate in. Through this knowledge, labels such as DAME and Constellation Records have contributed to the construction of Montreal’s contemporary cultural identity and to the city’s representation locally and internationally.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".