The growth of music software and Virtual Studio Technology in the early 2000s, it will be argued, represents a major transformation in music production.

The second part of the article examines the role of software in activating the laptop’s capabilities. The laptop mediates mobility and by doing so not only serves macro-processes of social and economic change, but also opens up creative possibilities for the musician beyond the studio and the home.

The first part of the paper explores the laptop as the archetypal nomadic machine of the digital age, inserted into mobile networks, hubs and flows. Implicit in the paper is the claim that the laptop is a neglected device, but that close attention to its position in cultural networks and everyday settings is one way of examining some possible ways into the complex entanglements and layerings of mobile space. The aim is to explore the laptop’s increasing presence in the sites of music, from cyberspace to live venues, as well as the relationship between music and mobile computerized space. In this paper I address some images, categories and open-ended trajectories of the laptop in music production. Keywords: cultural production, digital culture, mediations, hypermodern, popular music, software This moves music onto terrains that threaten, stretch and play with boundaries between human and machine, as well as real and simulated, although not always in expected ways. I want to suggest that an examination of recent production techniques and technologies labelled ‘digital’ can tell us significant things about contemporary musical cultures, including how they are meeting broader tendencies towards flexibility and de-materialisation in social practices at large, but that this meeting takes place in an extended moment of cultural acceleration and intensity – a hypermodern moment. The basic argument is that we can learn a lot about where we are in the history of popular music by looking at conditions of cultural production, not merely at single styles, techniques or devices such as the sampler. In this article I examine music’s technological mediations, linking this to recent attempts to theorise the shifting nature of contemporary popular music.

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