Locating the ‘Bristol sound’: archiving music as everyday life

This chapter addresses questions relating to how to study a city's musical culture through the example of the city of Bristol. It argues for a broad analysis of the musical culture of a city that attends to the everyday experience of music making, performance and engagement with musical performances. We address themes such as the question of liveness, how a ‘live’ music scene is facilitated by certain kinds of music venues, the ways in which musical communities and scenes coexist in the same spaces, and issues involved in attempting to archive and document this kind of diverse and everyday (or every night) music culture. Finally we argue for research methods that allow us to understand the past in ways that are unfixed, and constantly changing, to avoid the deadening effect that a settled past can have on the understanding of a live—and alive—musical culture.