GLARC SYMPOSIUM 2026: Where next for DIY music infrastructure?
GLARC is a small DIY cassette label based in Glasgow that has been releasing music since 2016. To celebrate the label’s 10th anniversary GLARC are launching a new website - developed with ada fuge aka netgf aka bitrot – that will host the GLARC back catalogue as a free to access distributed / torrented archive. This is part of a growing network of DIY music initiatives aiming to step away from corporate platforms, and reimagine the internet in a way that connects with some of its original utopian premises: free or cheaply accessible content & tools, anti-censorship, celebrating free expression & creativity, decentralised, collaborative, using simple code that is geared towards easy replication and skill sharing (along with low server use), fun to use. Simultaneously, musicians, artists and event organisers continue to wrestle with how to practice and share a 'DIY' ethos, in a context where entrepreneurialism and grift dominate, pay is shit, and crises proliferate.
This afternoon symposium - organised in collaboration with Dr Henry Ivry and the Infrastructure Humanities Group at the University of Glasgow – invited short papers, films, performances and readings responding to the topic of DIY digital infrastructure for music and art. We got an amazing range of proposals and ideas, thanks to everyone who got in touch! Here's the programme for the day:
GLARC SYMPOSIUM TIMINGS - Thurs 26th March - ARC, University of Glasgow
1-5pm
1.10-1.20 -Overview / welcome – Joel/Gordon/Henry
1.20-1.40 - Opening presentation: Josie / Quinie
1.40-2.40 - Radio :
Independent Community Radio Network / ICRN: Tending Infrastructure Together - with Samantha Lippett, Jack Murray-Brown, Seàn Finnan, Suz Buena Vida
The Independent Community Radio Network (ICRN) presents a two-part presentation as simultaneous talk and online radio broadcast.
The first part provides an overview of the network (est. 2022) as a growing constellation of independent web radios, who each function as portals into hyperlocal, non-commercial music scenes and DIY cultures across Europe. Spanning several regions, ICRN connects stations embedded in local contexts, each supporting experimental music, grassroots artists, and self-organised cultural practices that operate outside commercial music economies. This section will reflect on the network’s development, modes of collaboration, and the role of community radio as a form of DIY infrastructure for non-commercial music circulation.
The second part will focus on ICRN’s current work around shared infrastructure. As the network grows, we are initiating a working group titled Tending Infrastructure Together, following in-person workshops in Tallinn and Iceland. The working group is exploring collective approaches to caring for archives, shared tools and infrastructure. This includes developing joint solutions for storing, maintaining, and sharing audio archives as forms of cultural preservation for DIY and non-commercial music cultures. Rather than treating infrastructure as neutral or invisible, the presentation frames it as an ongoing practice of care, stewardship, and collective responsibility.
Claire M. Holdsworth & Excel DJ - A strange deep place
Framed by research as part of the ongoing project ‘Archiving Community: Social Infrastructure and Small-Scale, Online Radio Stations’ at University of Glasgow, this 15 minute presentation adopts a creative sound-essay format, weaving quotes from different texts (essays on archiving, fiction, poetry, sound theory, creative essays, album artwork etc.) spoken over a soundscape developed collaboratively with artist Excel DJ (with slides/images). Using GLARC’s titling as a starting point, it will consider ‘institutional’ constructs and the imaginaries surrounding permanence, location and infrastructure in the mediums and communities surrounding music labels and libraries. Spanning texts on community archiving, writing around ‘Stone Tape theory’, the digital commons and considering changing ideas around participation, access and listening (particularly in the recent context of web3), it will bring together diverse and sometimes contradictory ideas on time, space and the archive, exploring how institutions are formed, and the peculiar feedback-loops involved with copying, collecting and circulation within iterative DIY ecosystems.
Excel DJ bio
just having fun with it: i've been doing a lot of thinking lately, and i've been wanting to label everything i touch "STRICTLY NOT A PRANK"; because ppl need to here this and i've been atomised and lengthened out to present a version of myself that could no longer be bodily to commit to the "online self". and with god in the wire i prayed that we could make sense of it all
this year of the fire horse, i'm not letting the ghosts haunt me and if it wasn't clear already: excel dj is an artist lol, primarily music but even sometimes all of the above
everyone was a poet and now they're a DJ lol , and i'm just vibing till i past to the next one mate and i'm committed
releases on glint music, my own bandcamp, subvert, nina; forthcoming loose trax, and lost domain probably and honestly haha
Seán Finnan - “Deep down we knew it wasn’t going to last”: DIY Online Radio, Affective Infrastructure, and Navigating Gentrification in Dublin
Seán is a researcher, writer, and radiomaker. He is one of the founders of Dublin Digital Radio (DDR), a radio station established in Dublin in 2016. He has worked as a producer on the electronic music festival Alternating Current and An Avant Garde Public Service Broadcaster, as a co-writer on the award winning short film A Few Can See and the radio work Can You Confirm Receipt of my Transmission?
He is a Government of Ireland scholar and is currently completing his PhD entitled Connective Machines: DIY Online Radio as a Tool for the Production of Independent Cultural Space in TU Dublin. He also works as a researcher and organiser with the Independent Community Radio Network. His work interrogates the possibilities of collective media making and organisational networking as forms of commoning and collaborative imagining in the precarious present. His presentation will be looking at how DDR has navigated the challenges of urban financialisation in Dublin.
2.40-3 Break!
3-4.15 - 'Space' :
bud bowyer - listen
listen is a short film about Listen Gallery, an 'experimental sound arts gallery and communal listen space' run by Riah Naief (from listengallery's instagram bio). Through discussion, visual documentation and hand-drawn animation, the film will celebrate how Riah has created and nourished a safe environment for DIY events to flourish within Glasgow. As the security of DIY spaces becomes increasingly precarious due to restrictive colonial structures, questions surrounding the future of creative ecosystems become vital. How can we work together to build a future that supports community-centred, free spaces such as Listen Gallery? Directed by bud bowyer.
_VOID / Andrey Chugunov - _VOID Nomadic Gallery
_VOID Nomadic Gallery stands at the intersection of art and technology. We’re a non-profit, nomadic initiative dedicated to showcasing media, sound, and technological arts across Scotland and beyond, sparking dialogue, building connections, and pushing boundaries.
_VOID Nomadic Gallery cultivates temporary, flexible, and community-rooted environments - curated experiences through exhibitions, screenings, sound events, lectures, workshops, and discussions among artists, technologists, and curious minds who come together to explore the impact of technology through critical, poetic, and experimental lenses.
During the presentation, we will discuss how the values of nomadism, resource redistribution, participation, and cooperation led to the formation of our approach.
Cat Hawthorne, Steven Myles - AC Sound Exchange
AC Sound Exchange imagines a shared pool of diy/t(ogether)-made, donated, and salvaged audio/PA equipment—everything required to spec a modest gig—free to borrow and collectively maintained. Through workshops, skill shares, and resource distro, we’ll teach ourselves and others how to build and manage sound tech as a communal resource, always working towards greater autonomy and widening access. We see ACSX as both social and communications infrastructure—supporting not just esoteric art shit, but celebration, gathering, and resistance.
Madge Bray, Jamie Livingstone, David Hanson - The Drone as Post‑Digital Infrastructure
What if music infrastructures were grounded not in scalability or platform logics but in place, ritual, and embodied energetic exchange? Using the drone as sonic and physical ground, we ask what musical infrastructures are necessary to facilitate trauma resolution in communities and individuals.
This performance teases a form of musical production which eschews the predominant focus on individuality and performance, prioritising instead locality, presence, and communal sounding. It is informed by Scotland’s indigenous musical and wellbeing traditions of keening and pibroch, which have long been obscured by specific martial and theological infrastructures. We proffer an approach which develops these relational, resonance-based traditions as specific cosmotechnical alternatives to musical commercialisation and extraction in support of community sustainability and healing.
Cognisant of the ubiquity of the digital in the every day, our practice responds to the energetic and material inputs required to sustain sonic spaces and construct traditional futures rooted in land, lineage, and collective care.
Madge Bray is a trauma therapist, storyteller and singer working on imagining pathways for traditional futures.
Jamie Livingstone works in prisons, psychiatric units and children’s homes teaching writing and music workshops.
David Hanson is an urban planner, researcher and piper exploring the intersection of energy and place.
Han - Events Research Programme
4.15-5 Online:
Hamish Leeson - Reclaiming music streaming as Commons - building a DIY music streaming platform in the age of Spotify.
Yabbyville is a small, self-hosted, community-governed, music streaming platform. It is intrinsically small scale, with minimal costs and power consumption.The music streaming experience is as good as any major platform, and utilises open source protocols. Beyond streaming, Yabbyville includes an asynchronous social layer designed to support slow, non-algorithmic forms of interaction that are largely absent from contemporary social media platforms.
This was built out of necessity, to fulfil musical and social needs that are considered unviable or unprofitable for major platforms like Spotify & Instagram - not to mention the ethical objections to the extractive, centralised, and profit-driven motives that drive these platforms.
It reclaims music streaming as a commons, in which both media and infrastructure are collectively owned, maintained, and governed by its users, rather than investment firms and venture capital. It is built upon a DIY and independent foundation for sharing, recommending, interacting, and archiving.
This presentation will cover the ethos and decisions behind Yabbyville, discussing the fundamental reasons for its existence and the approach taken to solve the problems presented by modern streaming platforms. It will also go over the tools and structure, in an accessible manner that encourages replication and imitation. It aims to break down the technical and knowledge barriers obscuring the viability of self-hosted streaming infrastructure, and will distribute documentation to aid this process.
Paul Rekret, "Aesthetic Autonomy, Broadcasting, Streaming"
This presentation uses early twentieth century debates between Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and others around emergent media technologies as a lens for examining the problem of aesthetic and cultural autonomy under platform capitalism, bringing these debates into dialogue with later theorisations of freedom, subjectivity, and the simulacral.
Ada Fuge - "Our own internet: A medium-term vision for a completely autonomous Glaswegian meshnet"
Ada Fuge is a Scottish artist and programmer disillusioned with the current state of the internet, and how we use and interact with it. Through her bitrot project, she explores how alternative digital practices new and old can best serve the communities she cares about. Ways this has manifested include a grassroots archive and antiplatform called braid, and a small cluster of personal sites run by various community members known as the bitrot webring. In this talk Ada will be asking: Learning from the likes of freifunk in Germany, what would it take to create a fully decoupled alternative digital infrastructure, what would the benefits be, and is there an appetite for it?
Closing / thanks!
Then all welcome at the final GLARCIVERSARY event,
collab gig with ERP at Old Hairdressers featuring Propan, Luki, David Debarra & Laurie Pitt!
