Mediatization in Popular Music Recorded Artifacts

Book excerpt: In Mediatization in Popular Music Recorded Artifacts: Performance on Record and on Screen, the relationship between performance, technological mediation, and the sense of live presence is investigated through a series of case studies related to popular music products. Alessandro Bratus explores technological mediation as a process of authentication that involves a chain of interconnected instances that have their roots in the cultural context in which the media products are designed to be marketed, and that also shape its recording technique and post-production. The book analyzes posthumous records, a peculiar case of the organization of recorded tracks made in absentia of their original performers that puts forward the possibility of an “otherworldly” collaboration between the living and the dead. Bratus also argues that the crucial significance of live performance for the construction of a personal, intimate relationship between performers and audiences reverberates in the audiovisual construction of the filmed concert, in which the spectator is put in the position of a witness rather than an active participant.