RESEARCH AND WRITING

My research is concerned with understanding how DIY, experimental, avant-garde, fringe, outsider or otherwise marginal artistic practices are able to operate.

I recently completed my PhD at Northumbria University with a research project titled The No-Audience Underground: Navigating Degrees of Autonomy in an Experimental Music Scene. This research is concerned with understanding how the collective action of individuals can maintain the conditions of possibility necessary to sustain the translocal music scene known as the no-audience underground amidst shifting social, technological, spatial and economic contexts.

The research combined ethnographic, autoethnographic and practice-led methodologies to provide an embodied, critical understanding of how the practices of those active in the no-audience underground could be considered a framework musicking – a way of navigating the trajectory of the future.

Elements of this worked have been presented at conferences both nationally and internationally and is in the processes of being developed further into a publication.

Publications

Johnson, C.S. (2026) The No-Audience Underground: Navigating Degrees of Autonomy in an Experimental Music Scene. PhD. Northumbria University. | PDF

Johnson, C. S. (2026) Neo-Luddite Attitudes and Digital Infrastructures. Glasgow: Communal Leisure.


Conferences

Upcoming | Johnson, C. S. (2026) ‘We’re Not Using the PA: Tactical performance techniques of the No-Audience Underground’, KISMIF: DIY Cultures, Global Uncertainty and Critical Imagination, Porto, July

Upcoming | Johnson, C. S. (2026) ‘Space of the No-Audience Underground’, IASPM – Music at the Edges: Peripherality in the Practices of Popular Music, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, 30 June.

Upcoming | Johnson, C. S. (2026) ‘Mobilising Resource – A Practice Led Approach to Researching a DIY, Experimental Music Scene’, Popular Music Methodologies. Middlesex University, London, 19 June.

Johnson, C. S. (2025) ‘The Affordances of Bandcamp in the No-Audience Underground’, Music and Online Cultures in a Changing Platform Ecosystem. NOVA University, Lisbon, 20 June.

Johnson, C. S. (2024) ‘Rearranging Hundred Years Gallery’, London Conference of Critical Thought. Greenwich University, London, 28 June.


Reviews

Johnson, C.S. (2026) ‘For Solidarity x Document H.E.T. Alternative Publishing and Community Undercurrents’, Corridor8 | Link

Johnson, C. (2025) ‘Deep Listening Through Sites of Resistance: Resounding Diasporic Sonic Worlds at the New Bridge Project’, Visual Culture in Britain, pp. 1–4. | Link