Worlds of accidental experimentalism: radical queer utopian impulses in Outsider Music

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This research project will consider the collection of Outsider Music as an alternative archive of radical creative practice. Outsider music is broadly understood as self-taught or naive musicians working outside of normative institutional frameworks, or conversely non-normative bodies attempting (and often failing) to work within these frameworks. Outsider music's recorded archive consists of a collection of ephemeral sonic objects, often once deemed insignificant, without 'use' or 'value' which nonetheless contain incredible resources for alternative conceptions of creative practice. This PhD project aims to search for a genuinely radical creative practice unrestricted by normative (meaning capitalist, white supremacist, hetero-patriarchal) notions of quality, rigour, productivity, and individualism. Through an intimate affective engagement with Outsider Music I hope to uncover an alternative archive of experimentalism. Outsider Music provides a model of 'accidental experimentalism:' the sonic enactment of the radical potential found in the social life of nonnormative people. I want to identify these as 'World-Making' projects, finding in them generative potentials for future experimental creative practises. In doing so, the 'accidental experimentalism' of Outsider Music might hint at a genuinely radical and accessible form of art-making; one which rejects the assumption of perfection or genius in favour of affective pleasure in collaborative and improvisatory music-making.