DIY House Shows and Music Venues in the US is an interdisciplinary study of house concerts and other DIY ('do-it-yourself') music venues in the US, such as warehouses, all-ages clubs and guerrilla shows, with its primary focus on West Coast American DIY locales.
It approaches the subject not through a cultural analysis of sound and discourse, as it is common in popular music studies, but primarily through an ethnographic examination of place and space. Focusing on DIY houses, music venues, social spaces, and local and translocal cultural geographies, the author examines how American DIY communities constitute themselves in relation to their social and spatial environment. The ethnographic approach shows the inner-workings of American DIY culture, and how the particular people within particular places strive to achieve a social ideal of an "intimate" community. This research contributes to the limited selection of Western popular music studies (especially regarding rock and punk) that approach their subject matter through a participatory ethnographic research.