Not Just Rare but UBER RARE! Biography, Music, and Personhood in Yaraandoo

Abstract

This chapter discusses a case study which focuses on musician Rob Thomsett’s Australian progressive psych recording Yaraandoo. Yaraandoo is a rare album worth considerable cultural and monetary capital. This chapter will illustrate the key concepts, which will be further developed throughout the following chapters. Importantly Yaraandoo will act as an introduction to material culture studies, earlier discussed in the book, and I apply its core theories to understand how the human and the nonhuman interact to both define and place value on the other “thing” and oneself. Yaraandoo exhibits an agency through its ability to help define those people who value it, and in its influence on their evaluation of both other people and sound objects dependent on the relational context.