The Cain Guide to Electronic Dance Music: 80's - 00's version .001.666
Introduction:
Electronic Dance Music (EDM) is a subset of the larger Electronic Music Genre, and it encompasses a broad set of musical genres that were influnced by 1970s disco music and, the experimental pop music of Kraftwerk, eventually becomming popular via regional nightclub scenes in the 1980s.
Primarily EDM songs use electronic instruments such as synthesizers, drum machines, sequencers, and computers with emphasis on the unique sounds of the electronic instruments, such as the Roland TB-808, and even when mimicking traditional acoustic instrumentation, such as the sounds produced by the eMu sampler.
EDM is categorized in an ever-evolving plethora of genres, styles and sub-styles. Some of the genres, such as EBM, techno, house, trance, electro, breakbeat, drum and bass, and Eurobeat are primarily dance music. While others, such as industrial, IDM, glitch and trip-hop, downtempo and ambient are more experimental and tend to be associated more with listening than dancing.
History:
In the late 1970s and early 1980s there was a great deal of innovation around the development of electronic music instruments. With the biggest break through being that unreliable analogue synthesisers largely gave way to their more reliable digital brethren, and new insturments, that had never exsisted appeard, such as the now ubiqutious sampler.
The natural ability for music machines to make stochastic, non-harmonic, staticky noises led to a genre of music known as industrial music led by pioneering groups such as Throbbing Gristle (1975), Wavestar and Cabaret Voltaire. Some artists, like Nine Inch Nails, KMFDM, and Severed Heads, took some of the adventurous innovations of musique concrète and applied them to mechanical dance beats and, later on, metal guitars. Others, such as Test Department, Einstürzende Neubauten, took this new sound at face value and created hellish electronic compositions. Other artists (Robert Rich, :zoviet*france:, rapoon) took these harsh sounds and melded them into evocative soundscapes. And, still others (Front 242, Skinny Puppy) combined this harshness with the earlier, more pop, or rather dance-oriented sounds, forming electronic body music (EBM).
With the pioneering use of electronic sounds in New Wave pop music by bands such as Ultravox, The Normal, The Human League, and Cabaret Voltaire this opend up electronic music to a wider audience, and 80's New Wave & EBM become the new dance music, replacing 70's disco. And, artists like: Gary Numan, The Human League, Landscape, Visage, Daniel Miller, Pete Shelley, Heaven 17, Eurythmics, Severed Heads, John Foxx, Thomas Dolby, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Norman Iceberg, Yazoo, The Art of Noise, Depeche Mode and New Order all contributed new ways of making pop and dance music, by electronic means.
This helped to set the stage for the acceptance of Juan Atkins techno sound from Detroit, Michigan and Derrick May's house music in Chicago, Illinois which woulld "update" 70's disco for the 1980s machine age. Latter in the 80s and early 90s, the UK-based acid house movement of the would fuel the general acceptance of electronic music into the mainstream, such that now electronic dance music has become synonymous with nightclubbing.
The Guide:
Late 70's
Early 80's
Late 80's
Early 90's
late 90's
Early 00's
Special Sections:
Labels
Until the 1978 and the formation of Mute Records, no record label had ever dealt exclusively in electronic music. Because of this, many early techno pioneers started their own such as: Juan Atkins Metroplex Records in Detroit, and Richie Hawtin's influential Plus 8 imprint.
Industrial
Manchaster Scene
Detroit Techno
Chicago House
Trance
Trip-Hop
D&B / Jungle
BreakBeat / BigBeat
Ambient / Downtempo