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.
Raymond Scott is remembered by many people without them knowing his name. His earlier compositions were adapted extensively for Warner Bros. cartoons, but another side of his work took place inside a private electronic laboratory. During the 1950s and 1960s Scott built machines with names such as the Circle Machine, Rhythm Modulator, Bass-Line Generator, Clavivox…
Jean-Michel Jarre recorded Oxygène in 1976 in the kitchen of his Paris apartment. He has described the setup as a modest home studio built around only a handful of instruments, including an ARP 2600, Farfisa organ and Korg Minipops 7 drum machine. That matters because Oxygène now sounds like one of those records that must…
When Switched-On Bach appeared in 1968, the Moog synthesizer was still far from the convenient polyphonic instrument we now associate with keyboards. Wendy Carlos worked closely with Robert Moog and used multitrack recording to construct Bach’s polyphonic music from an electronic instrument that could produce only limited musical information at once. Carlos even built her…
Daphne Oram imagined something remarkably close to visual music sequencing decades before a modern DAW existed. Her Oramics system allowed a composer to draw information onto strips of 35mm film. Optical sensors translated those markings into control signals governing properties such as pitch, dynamics and timbre. Waveforms could also be drawn and scanned. Instead of…
Fred again..’s Actual Life records are built partly from material that normally disappears into the endless flow of phones and social media: voice notes, FaceTime conversations, videos and fragments of everyday speech. On “Marea (We’ve Lost Dancing),” for example, words from The Blessed Madonna originated in a FaceTime conversation about the disappearance of communal dancing…
Fifty years after Autobahn, Kraftwerk returned not to a software session but to the original 16-track analogue tapes. For the album’s 50th anniversary, Ralf Hütter reconstructed a Dolby Atmos version at Kling Klang Studio from those tapes. It is a curious meeting between two completely different eras of recording technology: a work made when multitrack…
Selected Ambient Works Volume II has become one of Aphex Twin’s most recognisable records, yet parts of its history are surprisingly ordinary. The album appeared in 1994, long before ambient music became a permanent streaming category. In notes accompanying the later expanded edition, Richard D. James recalls recording “Blue Calx” in his bedroom studio at…
Nihiloxica’s first recordings brought musicians from Uganda’s Nilotika Cultural Ensemble together with electronic musicians Peter Jones and Jacob Maskell-Key. Their 2017 EP was recorded live at Boutiq Studios in Kampala, with each piece captured in a single take. Traditional drums, shakers and long drums sit beside synthesizers and a conventional drum kit. The single-take detail…
Suzanne Ciani’s relationship with the Buchla synthesizer goes beyond generating unusual electronic tones. In her quadraphonic performances, space itself becomes part of the instrument. Four-channel output allows sounds to move around the audience rather than simply sit between a left and right speaker. Ciani has described spatial placement and movement as integral parts of the…
Nicola Cruz’s Prender el Alma was built through a process his label describes almost literally as layer by layer, instrument by instrument and drum by drum. The Ecuador-based producer connected electronic production with Andean and Afro-influenced musical ideas, acoustic guitar, percussion and voices. The resulting approach has sometimes been described as “Andes Step.” The phrase…
