The technology, aesthetics and cultural politics of a collaborative, transnational music recording project : Veiga Veiga and the itinerant overdubs

New media innovations and the popularity of 'world music' have facilitated crosscultural and transnational recording projects in the past few decades. New media technology makes collaboration at a distance feasible and a market for the very eclectic genre(s) of 'world music' makes projects potentially economically viable. Beginning approximately in the mid-1980s with the popularity, and contentiousness, of Paul Simon's Graceland project (Meintjes 1990) and other 'world music' projects such as Deep Forest (Feld 2000), academic researchers have explored the nature, legality and cultural dynamics of such recordings (e.g. Mills 1996; Zemp 1996).