Electronica

Electronica is a term that covers a wide range of electronic or electronic-influenced music. The term has been defined by some to mean modern electronic music that is not necessarily designed for the dance floor, but rather for home listening. more...

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The origins of the term are murky, although it appears to have been coined by British music paper Melody Maker in the mid-1990s, originally to describe the electronic rock band Republica. The term subsequently gained a life of its own, and became popular in the United States as a means of referring to the then-novel mainstream success of post-rave global electronic dance music. Prior to the adoption of "electronica" as a blanket term for more experimental dance music, terms such as electronic listening music, braindance and intelligent dance music (IDM) were common.

In the mid-1990s electronica began to be used by MTV and major record labels to describe mainstream electronic dance music made by such artists as The Chemical Brothers (who had previously been described as big beat or chemical breaks) and The Prodigy, although even at this stage it was not a particularly incisive term. It is currently used to describe a wide variety of musical acts and styles, linked by a penchant for overtly electronic production; a range which includes more popular acts such as Björk, Goldfrapp and glitchy experimental artists such as Autechre, Aphex Twin, and Boards of Canada to dub-oriented downtempo, downbeat, and trip-hop. Madonna and Björk are said to be responsible for electronica's thrust into mainstream culture, with their albums Ray of Light (Madonna), Post and Homogenic (Björk) respectively. Many popular artists today use some aspects of electronica in mainstream music.

History

With the explosive growth of sequencing, sampling and synthesis technology in the late 1980s, it became possible for a wider number of musicians to produce electronic music. With the advent of computer sequencers, relatively cheap computer-based recording systems and software synthesis in the late 1990s, it became possible for any home computer user to become a musician, and hence the rise in the number of "bedroom techno" acts, often consisting of a single person. A classic example of the one man electronic composer is Bill Holt's Dreamies (an early analog pioneer of electronic pop) cited by the All Music Guide as one of the finest examples of experimental pop from the era. Despite the mainstream popularity of the word "Electronica" today, it is often shunned or met with disgust by electronic musicians or former ravers. Many of the people who were actually part of the electronic and rave movements firmly believe that the word was invented by the music industry, and is just a press-word for electronic music. This is understandable, because a major part of the rave and electronic movement was an outcry against the "media machine", and many ravers and musicians did not wish for the music industry to have a large part in their lives. This part of the electronic movement has similarities to the punk movement, in that it was not meant to be mainstream.

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