Genre
Machines built for one thing, misused on purpose. The electronic music we care about almost always starts as an abuse of the manual.
8 articles
No articles with these tags
Genre Electronic
Alfredo Fiorito
Amnesia
The turntables at Amnesia had no pitch control, the DJ could not beatmatch, and the room was empty. Alfredo Fiorito moved the opening to dawn. What came out of it, England took home.
Selection Electronic
Detroit techno
Nine records
Nine records lined up by descent rather than by year: who taught whom, and who put out whom. Sorted that way they show something the dates hide, and one of the labels has it written into its catalogue prefix.
Selection Electronic
Musique concrète
Seven records
Seven French records from a single series, Philips's Prospective 21e Siècle, lined up by catalogue number. Read that way they give away what the sleeve dates hide: the works and the records are not the same age.
Selection Electronic
Trip hop
Ten albums
Ten British records from 1990 to 1998, arranged around one date. In June 1994 a London magazine coined the words trip hop to review an American twelve-inch. Three of these records were already in the shops.
Artist pick Electronic
Ryuichi Sakamoto
The Kajitsu playlist
He wrote to the chef that the food was as beautiful as Katsura Rikyu and the music was like Trump Tower. Then he offered to choose it himself, for free, and left every one of his own records out of it. Four tracks from that selection, and the rule holding them together.
Monograph Electronic
Mohamed Bourouissa
LILA
He spent twenty years posing the people of the Paris outskirts like figures in a history painting. His first record does the same thing with sound, and cuts every portrait down to two letters.
Song Electronic
Manuel Göttsching
E2-E4
One afternoon in 1981, an hour cut in a single take, and thirty years of dancefloors. The story of a piece made for a Walkman.
Genre Electronic
Japanese electronic
What sits under this heading is the branch we like most: not the dance floor as such, but the moment a new instrument reaches someone who does not yet know what to do with it. A sequencer bought to record demos, a delay that gets the timing wrong, a drum machine sold as accompaniment for guitarists that ended up defining two entire genres.
The dates matter. The Roland TR-808 arrived in 1980 and sold badly; the TB-303 came in 1981 to stand in for a bass player, was dropped from the catalogue within three years, then turned up cheap on the second hand market in the hands of the people inventing acid house. Most of what we call electronic music comes from there: commercial failures rescued by users who ignored the manual.