Tuesday, 27 October 2009

  • Know Your Electronica


    (From friend of Mancouch, William Gibb. Check out his Flickr page)

    People, people! Why the heck do people, including Eminem, call Electronica techno? There is more music than just the mmm-tiss-mmm-tiss-mmm-tiss   beat at a club. Electronica is simply music that can't be made with instruments that aren't a keyboard or a computer. I know some of you won't care a lick about this, but me being an enjoyer of the genre, I do.

    Electronica, as I have told you, is music made from predominantly electronic instruments...or music that sounds too natural to have been made with regular music. And it has so many other names to give. One of them IS techno, put just so most of you won't make this "glitch" again, I'll name some of them for you.

    Ambient: Ambient is the genre that wafts in the breeze like a ballerina's dress when she dances, much like the air that wasps and twirls in the breeze. The music just comes and goes on its own without any trouble at all. It's the sister of chill-out music.
    Patron Musicians: Amiina, Ensemble, Sigur Ros

    Chillout: Music to just chill in the rain with, and or daydream to.
    Patron musicians: Barbara Morgenstern, Zero 7, Air, Royksopp, Kyoto JazzMassive

    Chiptune or 8-bit: Music from your video games to your headphones. Made mostly with 8-bit keyboards, or with a Game Boy or Atari console. (I prefer my toy keyboards.)
    Patron musicians: Nullsleep, Bit Shifter, Animal Style, Robot Goes Here, Dan Deacon

    Classical Electronica: This is a type of genre that some would listen to, if they didn't know they liked classical music. Making it with electronic instruments.
    Patron musicians: Max Richter, Johann Johannsson (?)

    Collage Music: Take some found sounds from anywhere you are. Heck take it from the TV, your favorite records or whatever, and try to make music or art the same way we like to rip pictures out of magazines and make pictures from them.
    Patron artists: Steinski, The Avalanches, Matmos, early DJ Shadow

    Dance: Er...self-explanatory. Music made to make you dance.
    Patron musicians: Chemical Brothers, Von Sudenfed, Kinky

    Digital Hardcore: Take everything you know about hardcore punk music, now try and rebuilt it with nuts and bolts. Invented by German punk/digital hardcore veteran Alec Empire
    Patron Musicians: Atari Teenage Riot, Alec Empire, Crystal Castles, early Prodigy

    Turntablism: Pretty self-explanatory
    Patron musicians: Kid Koala, The X-Ecutioners, Coldcut

    Downtempo: The soul of Soul music or pop with the help of mostly keyboards and beatmakers.
    Patron musicians: Lemon Jelly, Weekend Players, Ulrich Schnauss, Morcheeba

    Drum and Bass: Self explanatory but one of the genres with a name that leaves no imagination :-\
    Patron musicians: Crystal Method

    Dubstep: 2-step electronica, with the soul of reggae or dancehall. Mostly ambient melodies
    Patron musicians: The Bug, Kid606, Four Tet

    House: Funky electronique originated in France. Play the music, and you'd hardly believe either that music had sampled, or that it was made with electronics at all.
    Patron musicians: Fatboy Slim, Daft Punk, Etienne DeCrecy

    IDM: This music is called Intelligent Dance Music, but originally named Braindance because while you are listening to the music, it feels like your mind is dancing to speedy, skittery drums. Rather, it's a futuristic take on dance music.
    Patron musicians: Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher

    Industrial: Metal with some electronica injected into the veins.
    Patron musicians: Kill Memory Crash, KMFDM, Hunchback Esquire

    Maximal: A lot, of ideas, or melody, piles into one song, enough to dub the music impossible to really label properly.
    Patron Musicians: Francisco Lopez, Plastikman

    New Age: Music simply made to put you at peace, spiritually and perhaps, emotionally. And so a little better than your sounds of the Ocean album.
    Patron musicians: Delerium, Bedrock

    New Wave: Music that mixes alternative, and/or punk with electronic tendencies, mostly keyboards
    Patron musicians: Polysics, Maximo Park, Stereolab, Hadouken!, Freezepop, Hella, The Locust, White Mice

    Techno: AH, here we go! Music that is energetic, and has enough energy to try and made you dance around. It's the father of genres like Nu Rave.
    Patron Musicians: Moby, Zombie Nation, Fluke

    Trance: Trance make hypnotizing music. The difference between this and ambient is that the music takes its time to fully hypnotize you with a certain rhythm melody or anything. One of the genres accused of being repetitive.
    Patron musicians: Boards of Canada, The Field

    Trip-Hop: Calm, sultry, usually their version of soul music.
    Patron musicians: (late) Massive Attack, Portishead, Tricky, UNKLE

    After this, no one should be able to call electronica "techno" again. Unless, by chance you are talking about Moby. His music can be best described as techno.

    No mention of Shpongle makes Mancouch a sad panda.

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Comments (41)

  • wikipediot@xanga

    Where's Ratatat?
  • HisKeiki@xanga

    xD
  • mynameisblueskye@xanga

    @wikipediot@xanga - What subgenre would you put ratatat under?
  • ChOcOChObO@xanga

    nice list, it's very educational. however there might be some confusion between the descriptions of dance and techno (they almost sound the same).


    I'm not a specialist, but here's my take on a possible category (or maybe it might belong in a subcata if I'm wrong)


    Eurobeat. Often classified as Pop songs with a healthy dose of jazzy, snazzy synthesizers, they usually involve the following topics: love, fire, racing, fire, blood, and fire. Made in Europe, distributed in Japan and sung in English. Mostly heard in the anime Initial D.
  • mynameisblueskye@xanga

    OOPS! Looks like I made a few glitches myself. Here are the corrections.


    1. Maximal is supposed to have Max Tundra underneath as a patron musician, and Plastikman and Francisco Lopez both go under "minimal", which is a genre doing more with less, if you will.


    2. Hunchback Esq, and Dabrye, which are mixed up and ill-placed, both go under hip-hop beats.


    3. Four Tet, because he keeps doing something new every album, doesn't really have a steady genre. But we will put him under the genre "glitch". 


    4. Moby indeed makes techno music (as well as chillout and house), but a better example of that would be his early albums, like Everything is Wrong.


     I should have been a little more thorough with the post. Apologies, everybody. Looks like I have to fix this, if it appears on Hardest Level, too. 
  • raiderjester@xanga

    Solid.
  • complicatedlight@xanga

    nice run down. i saved it for reference. i'll have to check out a few of the names i don't recognize.
  • xDark_horizonx@xanga

    easy bruv
  • dolcecorazon@dollarish
    Well done! :)

    @mynameisblueskye@xanga EXCELLENT POST! I get so happy when people know their Electronic Dance Music. I am a house head haha.

    But I absolutely respect your post! I hate when people call everything "techno" it gets under my skin!

  • anonymous

    The ENTIRE article is incorrect and false. I could spend my whole night describing whats wrong but I won´t waste my time.
    For one.. Electronica ITSELF is a genre and to put ANY of these into the Electronica branch - makes no sense at all. and more one. HOUSE was made in CHICAGO in a club called WAREHOUSE.... hense the name..
    You my friend need do to some reading AND LISTENING
  • BranmacFeabhail@xanga

    @raiderjester@xanga - yes indeed
  • mynameisblueskye@xanga

    @Mike -If you want to post a replacement on Mancouch about its history, andwhere it all was conceived, be my guest. Mancouch accepts outside blogs, as well as inside blogs from those at xanga or its divisions. I'm not trying to be precise and detail-heavy about any of this. I'm just sick of people calling electronica techno, so I wrote what I knew and found out about it. 


    I could read all my life on the genre of electornica and how internet stores managed to get all of those genres, rather than just calling the whole thing electornica, but I can't say I have the time, and Mancouch has the space. I do have the ears for it all, and already typed out what I called the significant  "glitches" of the article. None of this is going to result in a book or a documentary.


    So, since you have the information mapped out better than I do, you can submit an outside post about electronica, and fix what I have broken. Looking forward to searching for your contribution.
  • Icecold4u@xanga

    House is probably the most popular without people even knowing what it is. My long time favorite is turntablist..have to love the X-ecutioners. I love all forms of electronica though, it will never get old.
  • youaintjam@xanga

    I like the list, but why did you bother putting "Dance" as a category? I mean half these genres can be crammed into dance. And dance has other categories like breakbeat and jungle. And someone mentioned Europop too.
    But other than "Dance" this is a pretty cool list. It's not perfect in my eyes, but respectable enough that I can agree to disagree. There are some things I was not aware of too.

  • PeriwinkleAdonis@xanga

    I think I'll just stick to "music I only listen to while getting drunk and wanting to dance." Seems much easier. Hip hop, rap, whatever people call that stuff falls into that same category for me.
  • Lulabell_88@xanga

    Gotta be honest, I don't like any of the above mentioned genres.
  • dubyavu@xanga

    VERY good list and explanations. Ambient, Chillout, New Wave...enjoy them. People like Robert Rich, Steven Roach, Darshan Ambient,,, Cruxshadows (the new Quicksilver is phenom!).
  • Organic_Machine@xanga

    Awesome but one thing is wrong, Crystal Method is Big Beat. Prodigy kinda falls under this category too. Drum and bass is...  drum and bass... only. hahaha. Definately not one of my favorites.
  • i_laugh_at_random_things@xanga

    Shpongle is amazing, although they're what some call pysambient or psytrance.


    for anyone curious of their sound imagine combining the natural sounds of nature, classical instuments, and electronica.
    The album "Tales of the Inexpressible" is one of my favorites and he has a new album to be released 11/28/09, just one month away!
  • Salivarysatisfaction@datingish

    I find it more important for people to know their

    erotica

    .
  • methodElevated@xanga

    I'm happy to at least see UNKLE, DJ Shadow, Crystal Method, Massive Attack and Boards of Canada in your lists.

    Other great electronic artists are Underworld, Faithless, Hybrid, Burial, Bonobo, Trentemoller, Venetian Snares, Madlib, Chicane, Amon Tobin, Telepopmusik, Apparat, Atlas Plug, Broadway Project, BT, The Chemical Brothers, DJ Icey, DJ Krush, DJ Rap, Juno Reactor, Mux Mool, Oh No, Paul Van Dyke, Paul Oakenfold, Sasha, Way Out West, Above & Beyond.

    I'm honestly very surprised you left out some of those.
  • runformymoney@xanga

    Yayy electronic music mmm :]
  • Peridot21@xanga

    nice
  • theacematt2@xanga
    I could toss names at you, but i'll refrain.

    Well done. Still haven't gotten to searching for that last one you suggested to me--but I will when I can/get to it. X_X;

    A very well-rounded explanation of a few sub-genre's that fall under techno/electronica. Took a few days in high school and read up on them myself (via wikipedia), and have been a fan since.

    Vocal Trance (well... melodic trance w/female vocals) .... and Psytrance (Astrix) ftw.

    IDM+Dnb, too.
  • tigerdauphin@xanga

    @Lulabell_88@xanga - me too

    I can get into only in certain moods, with certain ppl around me, and only for so long (an hour or two) but that's it.

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