Chapter 10 - Experimental electronica

Summary

Not all experimental electronic music artists are associated with a formalized art world or academia. This chapter explores rich musics that have grown through the enthusiasm and graft of practitioners on the fringes of popular music, or just simply exploring their own path in alternative and underground culture. It would hardly be accurate to call these exponents of experimental electronica popular musicians, since their audiences are certainly not the mass audiences of the pop charts, even though there are sometimes sufficient followers to support distinct niches of activity and a few chief exponents in full-time creation. Further, this chapter will bring together diverse sonic bedfellows that may sit rather uncomfortably alongside one another in their aesthetics, noise music being chief amongst the dissenters. Nonetheless, the historical overlap of the development of these forms often looks back to 1970s counterculture.

The term “electronica” itself was adopted in the US as a marketing umbrella in the late 1990s, particularly to cover electronic dance music acts, and the influence of this on popular music in general (such as Madonna's collaboration with William Orbit on Ray of Light (1998)). In Europe, the term has more generally alluded to electronic music in general (perhaps particularly some of the musics touched on in this chapter, post-1970) and in Latin-derived languages simply means electronic music. We title the chapter “Experimental electronica” to make it clear that the majority of artists considered herein are not exactly mainstream pop musicians, but new experimenters in electronic music. For example, rather than the Cabaret Voltaire of the 1980s, who became more commercially focused, we might prefer to consider the model of Cabaret Voltaire in 1970s Sheffield, primarily concerned with experiment in new sounds.