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This article explores aspects of separation from “post-traditional” religiosity characteristic of certain late/post-modern affiliations. To do so, I analyze in-depth interviews with 44 individuals who formerly identified with straightedge – a clean-living youth-oriented scene tightly bound with hardcore music that is centered on abstinence from intoxicants – about their experiences transitioning through associated music assembly rituals. While features of hardcore music assemblies – e.g. moshing, slamdancing, sing-a-longs – have long been treated as symbolic connections that potentially conjure the religious as conceptualized in Émile Durkheim's “effervescence” and the liminality of Victor Turner's “communitas,” data on transitions from these features of ritual remain scant. Ex-straightedgers generally believed the sorts of deep connections they professed to experience in hardcore rituals as youths were not necessarily currently accessible to them, nor were they replicable elsewhere. Findings then ultimately suggest some post-traditional religious experiences might now be profitably considered in terms of the life course, which has itself transformed alongside the proliferation of newer late/post-modern affiliations and communities.

The concept of the music scene has served sociologists well in providing a template for studying the organization of various musical styles and the people who work together to create the musical experiences. Writers including Howard Becker, Richard Peterson, Andy Bennett, David Grazian, and Joseph Kotarba have explored music scenes ranging from jazz, blues and rock to country and Latino styles. Although there is no one consensual definition of music scene, the notion of place, in a physical, empirical, and geo-local sense, seems to be a universal concern in the literature. In this chapter, we will outline a more inclusive, interactionist-oriented, and updated concept of the music scene that is at once interactionist in tone and perspective, while sensitive to dramatic changes occurring both in the world of politics and in the world of digital media. Perhaps most importantly, the concept of music scene can provide insight into the historical fact that, in spite of technological advancements, the live music experience is still at the heart of musical experiences across communities and cultures.

The term Canterbury Sound emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s to refer to a signature style within psychedelic and progressive rock developed by bands such as Caravan and Soft Machine as well as key artists including Robert Wyatt and Kevin Ayers. This chapter explores Canterbury as a metaphor and reality, a symbolic space of music inspiration which has produced its distinctive ‘sound’.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, particularly observations and interviews with music artists and cultural intermediates (Bourdieu, 1993), we suggest that the notion of the Canterbury Sound – with its affinity for experimentation, distinctive chord progressions and jazz allusions in a rock music format – is perceived as a continuing artistic and aesthetic influence. We interpret the genealogy of the Canterbury Sound alternativity through discussions focused on the position of the ‘Sound’ within contemporary heritage discourses, the metaphorical and geographical implications of place in relation to popular music, and cultural longevity of the phenomenon.