A genre characterized by the use of electronic instruments, synthesizers, and digital production techniques to create innovative sounds and rhythms, spanning styles like techno, house, dubstep, and ambient.
In Daphne Oram’s Oramics system, electronic sound began as marks on transparent film. Waveforms and control shapes were drawn across 35mm strips, then read by photoelectric cells inside a machine that occupied much of a room. Ten strips could run at once, turning lines into instructions for pitch, rhythm, timbre and volume. The fascinating part…
Solari, arriving on 25 September 2026, is the first release under the Courant Zéro name by Montréal sound and video artist Maxime Corbeil-Perron. His background in electroacoustic composition remains audible, but the album moves between ambient passages, rhythmic electronic music and dense digital structures rather than presenting itself as academic electroacoustics. It was recorded and…
Bruce Haack spent much of his career building electronic instruments rather than waiting for manufacturers to invent the ones he wanted. One of the strangest was the Dermatron, an instrument that used the electrical conductivity of human skin as part of its control system. Haack demonstrated versions of it on American television during the 1960s,…
“Born Slippy .NUXX” became enormous through Trainspotting, but the track’s rhythmic foundation is surprisingly straightforward. Rick Smith has explained that the kick is a Roland TR-909 pushed hard through a mixing console. The familiar chords came from a Juno-106. Karl Hyde’s vocal was based on fragments he had written after nights spent drinking in London,…
The history of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop tends to settle quickly around a few famous names. Maddalena Fagandini is one of the people who can disappear between them. She joined the Workshop in 1959, after beginning her BBC career in the Italian Section of the World Service, and worked there until 1963. Her electronic output…
Else Marie Pade became one of Denmark’s earliest major electronic composers during the 1950s and 1960s. Yet parts of her electronic catalogue came surprisingly close to disappearing. Dacapo Records’ recent reconstruction of her Complete Electronic Works 1955–2012 includes newly digitised pieces, previously unavailable material and works that remained overlooked for decades. The archive survived partly…
The Fairlight CMI helped change recorded sound from something musicians played back into something they could play. Developed in Australia by Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie and released at the end of the 1970s, the system became one of the first commercially influential digital sampling instruments. The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia describes…
New Order’s “Blue Monday” now sounds like a piece of electronic music whose machines must have known exactly what they were doing. They did not. The group had a sequencer and a drum machine that could not communicate properly with each other. Bernard Sumner has recalled taking the equipment to Martin Usher, who designed an…
Explore the official releases of FDR-Sound, an independent electronic music project by Frank De Rop from Antwerp, Belgium.Each release can take a different direction in sound, mood and structure, ranging from atmospheric and experimental electronic music to more rhythmic and melodic productions.This page brings together FDR-Sound EPs, singles and selected tracks, with links to the…
Jon Hassell transformed trumpet playing by combining techniques influenced by Indian classical singing with electronic processing. On Vernal Equinox, first released in 1977, the trumpet can become difficult to locate inside the music. It bends between pitches, passes through effects and sits among percussion, synthesizer drones, environmental recordings and other textures. Hassell later developed the…
