1: on electronic music

Innovation is the heart of electronic music; excess its cultural fuel. Although all music is essentially immaterial, electronic music, unlike other forms of music, could not exist in a pre-industrial world. A surplus of physical and technological infrastructure is required for a bassline to thump out of bassbins, for a synthesizer to be manufactured or a sequencer programmed to array man-made sounds for an audience. Surpluses of electrical power, of architectural space, of human energy, of specialized technology and materials – must all be available for electronic music to exist, and are the prerequisites for any electronic music subculture. If our power grids went down, electronic music would cease to exist. Electronic music, therefore, unlike most instrumental music, inhabits a delicately fabricated, post-industrial world, and is neither natural nor self-sustaining in any way, as are many cultural folk musics. In a world without electricity, a musician could still play a guitar, a clarinet or a drum, and anyone could sing a tune to reproduce a melody, but electronic music would cease to be.

Unlike the music performed by an ensemble of musicians, the only tangible medium for electronic music is the digital recording. Because of its intangibility, its reliance upon electrical circuits and the interactions of magnetic fields, electronic music resides wholly in the world of high technology, and therefore in the future as much as in the present, in experiment more than in daily experience. Electronic music began as a figment of an electrical engineer’s imagination, rather than as a creative accident, or the molding of any organic substance or resonant cavity. As a cultural signifier, it is the sound of a virtual world, neither here nor there, and therefore represents a deviation from history’s musical continuum. Influential music is usually born of a historical moment or movement, just as art usually erupts from cultural upheaval. Because it inhabits a virtual world, electronic music is in a unique position relative to human history and stands outside politics, unlike the rock of the 1960s, or the jazz of the 1920s, which represented specific people, their politics and their passions. Electronic music represents nothing and no one, has no inherent message, and exists purely to celebrate its own acoustic chameleon tendencies. This liberation from, even disregard for reality, means that electronic music is not a foil to current events, a cultural indicator or the voice of a generation in any typical sense.

As a cultural movement, electronic music represents a denial of everything other than itself. It is an argument for existing in the now, only to celebrate the effects of pure audio manipulation in the present moment. Whatever electronic dance music ‘movement’ erupted from the allure of the regular, emphasized beat, thus embodied the siren’s call to the postmodern hedonist – because when amplified to larger-than-life proportions and volumes, electronic music truly becomes itself; dehumanized, scientific, technological, and therefore subversive, unapologetically excessive, and most crucially, a musical experience that is more visceral than corporeal.