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.
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…
SOPHIE often talked about synthesis in physical terms. Rather than asking how to imitate a conventional instrument, the producer thought about materials: bubbles, latex, metal, liquid, plastic. Sounds could behave as though they possessed weight, elasticity, friction or surface. That approach is part of why tracks such as “BIPP,” “LEMONADE” and “HARD” still sound so…
When Radiohead moved away from guitar-centred rock on Kid A, Jonny Greenwood became fascinated by the Ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument invented by Maurice Martenot at the end of the 1920s. Its eerie continuous tones are usually associated with early electronic composition and composers such as Olivier Messiaen. Radiohead placed that sound inside a completely…
Bülent Arel was one of the composers working at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center during the formative years of American electronic music. Columbia University’s archive still contains tapes, work materials and fragments connected with his electronic compositions, including material associated with Stereo Electronic Music No. 1 and other experiments from the 1960s. Arel is exactly…
Laurie Spiegel created Music Mouse in the mid-1980s when personal computers were only beginning to enter ordinary homes. Instead of treating the mouse as a device for selecting menus, she turned its movement into musical control. Moving across the screen could generate melodies, harmonies and arpeggios in real time. In 2026 Eventide released a modern…
