Entangled between Hardware and Software Infrastructure: Assamese Popular Music Making in Studios in Guwahati, Assam

Recording studio is the rite to passage in popular music production from its inception. Be it for voice dubbing or live instruments recording or for mixing and mastering ‘recording studio’ is incessantly ‘in between’ after a composition is made and its release as a popular song to the listeners. Situating ‘recording studio’ as an infrastructure of making of popular music, this paper will take a journey into popular music production scene of Assam. Based on fourteen months ethnography in Guwahati, Assam, India, this paper will meticulously elaborate the making of Assamese popular music inside studios. This paper argues primarily how recording studio is assemblage of musicians, audio engineers and technologies which proliferates popular music scene. That echoes what Brian Larkin in Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria refers “Infrastructure to the totality of both technical and cultural systems that create institutionalized structures whereby goods of all sorts circulate, connecting and binding people into collectivities.” (Larkin 2008,6). But this paper along with it, from the vantage point of making music which always has been profoundly and primitively collective, further follows Tim Ingold’s thesis of “making is a correspondence between maker and material in case of art” (Ingold, 2013, xi) in Making Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture inversely argues it is the collectiveness of musicians that enduing recording studios (read infrastructure here) and recording studios as audio infrustructure rendering Assamese popular music making.