Samantha Bennett is Associate Professor of Music at the Australian National University. She is the author of Siouxsie and the Banshees' Peepshow (2018), part of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series, and co-editor of Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound (2018) and Popular Music, Stars and Stardom (2018). Her journal articles are published in Popular Music, Popular Music and Society, The Journal of Popular Music Studies and IASPM@journal.
In this deeply researched study of commercial popular music production in the 1980s and `90s, Samantha Bennett turns the digital vs. analog debate on its head, revealing the hybrid maverick methods recordists developed as they blended technologies and practices from both analog and digital domains in a rapidly changing studio environment. Rich in technical detail and musical analysis, the book nevertheless underscores the human element of record-making as recordists' choices and attitudes influenced the sound of the modern records they produced. * Susan Schmidt Horning, Associate Professor of History, St. John's University, USA, and author of Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture, and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP (2013). * In Modern Records, Maverick Methods, Sam Bennett not only provides a hugely detailed study of the linking technologies and methods that characterise the two decades between the `golden age' of rock recording in the 1960s/70s and the current world of the DAW, she also provides a fascinating analysis of the tortured and complex process through which attitudes to recording technologies both developed and changed. This is an important and welcome addition to the literature. * Simon Zagorski-Thomas, Professor of Music, London College of Music, UK, and author of The Musicology of Record Production (2014) *