Electronic music - it is "not real"

[JonG]

I often find myself explaining electronic music to people. I recently told Ed why I love the new Four Tet album, but I think I was also talking about all electronic (dance) music. This column from popmatters.com does an excellent job putting electronic music in context. I hope it helps. Please share your thoughts.

from Electronic Music: The Invader and Infiltrator on Popmatters.com:

...Electronic music has always been seen as an underbelly. Say that it’s the type of music that you like the most and faces whinge and grimace. This is because electronic music has historically been unhome music, other place music. Despite this, it is recognized everywhere. Electronic music (from its advent in noise and concrète) has been around for nearly as long as sound has been recorded, but it’s somehow still stigmatized and thought of as a fringe phenomenon...

...Music made with electronics constitutes perhaps the broadest sonic category, because it is a genre delineated by instrumentation alone rather than style. Furthermore, the nature of the music’s instrumentation allows for the representation, simulation, or manipulation of any other sound. By unnaturally inhabiting the whole of music history, electronic music can widen its scope to include just about anything.

Yet it is still thought of as a singular phenomenon, albeit one that is either too simple or too complex, too arcane or too direct, too puerile or too cerebral, too course or too academic from most audiences. Electronic sounds thus exist on at least two planes. On one level, they are common and saturate our most quotidian of listening environments. On another level, they are unwelcome because they do not fit comfortably into the Promethean rockist/poptimist narrative. Electronic music is laterally integrated, but differentially excluded.

Electronic music’s disconnection from folk (root word “people”) art poses an ontological conundrum. If recorded audio was supposed to be a capture of history, the trapping of live time long after it was dead, what is manipulated sound? What to make of sound that seems to be occurring at several different times at once? If Edison conceived of the Phonograph as a kind of time machine, what kind of device is one that lays time on its side and distorts a presence so much that it creates something entirely new, something that never existed before? ...