About two years ago, a review in Wired magazine and the
subsequent purchase of Aphex Twin's _SAW II_ started to make
me aware of a burgeoning area of music that was to become very
interesting to me. I came to this new stuff after many years
of listening to a lot of music that was "different": ambient
(the Eno variety), space rock, minimalism, contemporary
classical, avant-garde and experimental, and I found a lot of
linkage between those types of music and this new type: a
thing called "ambient" or "ambient-techno".
I did a little searching around, bought some more music,
lurked on some Usenet newgroups and gradually learned a little
more about this genre and other kinds of music that it seemed
connected to. I joined the Ambient mailing list and asked for
suggestions for other things to buy, and got, along with a few
snide comments, a lot of interesting pointers, which lead me
to other groups and more music: Orbital, The Orb, FSOL, Loop
Guru, Muslimgauze, Global Communications, The Grid, Banco de
Gaia, Higher Intelligence Agency, Underworld, Autechre, Woob
and many other artists, along with a lot of compilations.
Now all this stuff seems very connected to me, despite the
obvious differences between, say, The Grid and Muslimgauze.
It is all what we might call, for the sake of discussion,
"popular electronic music", and for my convenience I
kept the CDs clustered together in my collection (much as I
cluster my largish collection of African LPs).
As I listened to more music, and read more reviews and
comments, I began to realize the people used a lot of
different names for this music and I, in my newbie-ness, asked
for an explanation in a couple of places. Unfortunately, this
only made the problem more obscure, because different people
defined the same genre in different ways and the same groups
(sometimes even the same *albums*) were named as exemplars
of different musical styles. I did get some technical answers
about rhythmic structure, beats-per-minute and typical
instrumentation, but these were *so* precise in their
delineations as to be almost unfathomable except to those
complete immersed in their particular musical sub-culture.
So, lacking a clear explanation, I began to collect the names
of these micro-genres as I came across them on alt.rave,
alt.music.techno, rec.music.ambient, the IDM, Ambient, Space
and Trance mailing lists, and in the occasional magazine
article or book. The list grew and grew, to quite ridiculous
lengths, until it seemed to me that every increase in tempo,
every variation in kick drum pattern and every choice of
sampling material seemed to generate a new description
which was to be afforded status as a bona fide "genre".
It was this list (slightly edited) which I posted to the
Ambient, IDM and Space lists, in the guise of a request from
a newbie "friend" for information. I had hoped to make the
point that I had made earlier, when I posted a quote from
Douglas Coupland about "Musical Hairsplitting" - that the
attempt to divide music that was so similar in many ways
into a multitude of micro-genres was, well, just a bit silly.
It is, after all, the music itself that counts, and not what it
is called. (Athough the idea of musical genre as sub-cultural
identifier makes some sense, at least sociologically, if not
musically.)
Now I admit that cross-posting to three lists was perhaps not
the best decision (and the space list was probably the least
appropriate of the three) but I still believe that there's so
much overlap between space and ambient, and ambient and idm,
and idm and trance, and so on and so on that it's really
counter-productive to try to hold to extremely specific
definitions - especially if doing so has the effect of cutting
off interesting conversation, or of limiting the musical
experience. I do see the value of attempting to keep discussions
relatively on-topic, so as to guard against topic-drift, but
that really shouldn't prevent some discussion of related
subjects.
To those who were irked by my list, or by the discussion
provoked by it, I apologize. It was not my aim to piss anyone
off - I merely hoped both to make a small point about how
music gets divided up, and to gather some more impressions
about this particular genre from people more informed than I.
Ed Fitzgerald
P.S. To the friendly fellow on the space list who cheerfully
backhanded me because I post from an AOL account: on behalf of
all of us here (how many? thousands? millions?), quite a few
of us *not* idiots, I thank you. Can you say "prejudice"? I
knew you could!