The emergence of electronic dance music was so, so, so experimental. It’s almost laughably primitive if it weren’t also the creepiest sounding shit ever made.
They didn’t even call it electronic music yet, it had weird names like “industrial” and “noise”. The most self-defining names for any music genre.
Taxonomy aside, when you deep dive into the origins, it sounds less like music and more like meth heads playing tag in abandoned factories. Throbbing Gristle.
Or aliens from Jupiter coming down to suck our brains out. Milton Babbitt.
Or the seventh circle of hell, recorded and replayed for our ears. La Monte Young.
Just strange, new noises. Conducted by people who think that if you can make the right sounds, you could brainwash them into ousting themselves as communist spies.
RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
What I mean is, most inventions of new technology between WW1 and the Cold War were initially and exclusively military applications. The best example is the jet engine, and the least known example is freeze-drying.
But how do you think they learned they could use the jet engine for flight?
First it took building it, and then the testing phase. Many, many explosions, seared eyebrows, and at least one World War later, we got jet powered planes.
At first it seemed as if Prometheus just delivered unto us fire and yet we didn’t know what cooking was. We had to monkey around until we figured it out.
When you listen to the emergence of electric music, it’s pretty much the same byproduct of giving apes a bunch of radios.
Considering modern EDM production, we still haven’t strayed far from the concept.
Forest
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