Friday Night Market Research

NASHVILLE, TN --

Friday night in Nashville, Kraak and Smaak came to town visiting the US from the Netherlands for SXSW in Austin. They stopped through Nashville as so many do and graced us with a DJ set. Thanks to Steve 2004 for the referral via Nate and Stew ... thats the way the system works, right? I was planning to write a show review, but the video below is sufficient.



They ran through a set of electronic tracks of all varieties and seamless linked them all into one. As I was moving my feet and drinking my salutory Heinkens, I was actually deep in thought about the depth and variety of the different layers of 'electronica.' I got to thinking ...

- First of all, what is 'electronica?'
- Where did it come from?
- Is it music that is produced electronically?
- Does there need to be an artificially produced beat produced from an electronic machine for it be electronica?
- Does it need to make you dance?

I could find conflicting arguments to all of the questions I could come up with, so I gave up. I consulted the definition on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronica), but that wasn't any help either. After creating trying to find answers about 'electronica', I just came up with more questions about the genre. How would you define 'electronica?'

Further investigation upon my return home led me to a convenient guide to one person's interpretation: http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/
This is a good way to waste a couple hours learning about the development of 'electronic music' over the course of time. Check out the 'Neurofunk' and 'Ibiza' cells for two of my favorites as well as a preview of future posts. Review different segments of the electronic music world, can you really lump House, Trance, Garage, Jungle, Breakbeat, and Downtempo all into one 'electronica' classification? With the variety of electronic styles, I think it would be unwise to use the term 'electronica' to classify any type of music. I will personally declare 'electronica' dead to me as of this moment ... you won't hear that classification from me in any future posts!

Scary enough to note as well, check out the roots of the entire galaxy of electronic music: Disco! House music basically developed from disco because people finally realized they couldn't take it anymore. Like a phoenix from the ashes, here comes Chicago House music to rescue us! Hilariously, disco died on one summer night in Chicago, as you can see in the following video. Riots, explosions, and arrests ... what a day it was!




More articles will certainly follow in future posts about electronic music, but you can be certain that I won't be using the 'electronica' terminology. With music I feel that it is important to consider the end result more than the label it is given. How does the music make you feel? What does it make you do? Lose the label and just make sure you feel it, baby!