Electronic music

The first electronic music was not made in a club, but in the studio of a radio broadcaster. In Cologne, Paris and London, composers and technicians worked in the 1950s and 1960s with oscillators, recording tape and scissors. Seventy years later, tens of thousands of people stand in a stadium waiting for a DJ who plays a set on a laptop. This chapter follows the road in between.

That road is not a straight line. Electronic music is a collection of currents that keep meeting each other again. A German band influences hip hop in New York. A failed Japanese drum machine becomes the sound of Detroit and Chicago. An English law against parties in fields only makes the music bigger. The same question keeps coming back, and it is the central question of this chapter: when does a machine become a musical instrument, and who actually plays it then?

In 1951 the West German broadcaster NWDR, later WDR, set up a studio for electronic music in Cologne. It contained no instruments, but measuring equipment: oscillators that produce a pure tone, noise generators, filters and tape recorders. The composers who worked there wanted to make music that was completely under control. Every tone could be made to the exact vibration, and nobody had to play it.

The best known of those composers was Karlheinz Stockhausen. He worked in the Cologne studio from 1953. Whoever composed there worked with scissors and sticky tape. A piece of tape with a tone on it was cut off, sped up, slowed down, played backwards and stuck to other pieces. Composing became editing. In Gesang der Jünglinge (1956) Stockhausen let a boy's voice merge with electronic sounds. Sometimes you clearly hear a child singing, then the voice sounds like a machine, and at other moments you can no longer tell. The piece was also spread over several loudspeakers around the audience: the sound came from all sides.

At the same time Pierre Schaeffer, a technician at French radio, was working in Paris. He took the opposite road. Instead of generating tones he recorded existing sounds: trains, doors, voices, a piano. He worked those sounds on tape into music. He called it musique concrète, music from concrete, real sounds. His Étude aux chemins de fer (1948) consists entirely of recordings of trains.

The Netherlands played its part too. In the physics laboratory of Philips in Eindhoven, Dick Raaijmakers and Tom Dissevelt made electronic music in the late 1950s that was meant to show the public what the new technology could do. For the Philips Pavilion at the World's Fair in Brussels (1958), Edgard Varèse wrote his Poème électronique, played over hundreds of loudspeakers.

These experiments did not stay in the concert hall. The tape techniques from Cologne and Paris ended up in pop music ten years later. On Tomorrow Never Knows (1966) the Beatles use tape loops and backwards sounds, and in 1967 Stockhausen is among the faces on the cover of Sgt. Pepper.

From 1958 the BBC had its own department for electronic sound: the Radiophonic Workshop. It made sound effects and music for radio and television: the sound of a spaceship, a haunted house or a time journey. The staff were technicians and composers at the same time, and their names were not in the credits.

Delia Derbyshire joined the Workshop in 1962. She had studied mathematics and music. A year later she was given the job of realising the theme tune of a new science fiction series: Doctor Who. The composer Ron Grainer had put the melody on paper, with directions such as 'wind' and 'clouds'. Derbyshire built the piece note by note from oscillators, noise and tape loops. Every tone was recorded separately, cut to the right length and stuck to the next. For the bass line she cut one plucked string again and again at a different pitch.

When Grainer heard the result, he asked whether he had really written that. He wanted Derbyshire to be named as co-composer, but the BBC refused: the Workshop worked anonymously. So the first piece of electronic music that sounded in millions of living rooms every week was made by someone whose name almost nobody knew. Only after her death in 2001 did Derbyshire receive wide recognition as one of the pioneers of electronic music. We come back to her in Mixtape 10 (Women in pop music).

Until the mid-1960s, electronic music was something for studios with a lot of money and technicians. That changed thanks to the American engineer Robert Moog. From 1964 he built synthesizers that a musician could play personally, with an ordinary piano keyboard. A synthesizer generates sound with oscillators and then shapes it with filters and amplifiers. Moog's systems were modular: separate cabinets that you linked together with cables.

The general public got to know the Moog through Switched-On Bach (1968), an album on which Wendy Carlos played music by Bach on the synthesizer. The album sold better than almost any classical record of the time. Suddenly every studio wanted a Moog. In 1970 the Minimoog came out, a small version that you could take along to a gig.

Gershon Kingsley wrote Popcorn in 1969, a short instrumental track on the Moog. In 1972 the American group Hot Butter recorded their own version of it, and it became a worldwide hit. If you listen closely, you hear how the synthesizer was used at the time. It plays only the melody, one tone at a time: the first synthesizers were monophonic. Drums, bass and guitar come from an ordinary band. The synthesizer was a funny sound on top of pop music that otherwise sounded as it always had. That would only change when bands appeared that no longer used ordinary instruments at all.

Kraftwerk was founded in Düsseldorf in 1970 by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider. They belonged to a generation of German musicians who did not want to imitate American or British rock. Bands such as Can and Neu! were looking in those years for a German sound of their own, with long, tight rhythms. Kraftwerk went further than the others: the band left the guitar and the drum kit behind and played only synthesizers, electronic drums and the vocoder, a device that puts the timbre of a voice onto a synthesizer.

The album Autobahn (1974) opens with a title track of 22 minutes about a drive on the German motorway. You hear a car starting, the rhythm of the road and cars rushing past. A shortened version became a hit in Europe and even in the United States. On Trans-Europe Express (1977) the journey goes by train: the rhythm sounds like wheels over the rails, tight and without swing.

Kraftwerk worked in a studio of its own, Kling Klang, and presented itself less and less as a band and more and more as a machine. The 1978 album was called Die Mensch-Maschine. On stage the members stood still behind their equipment, later replaced by robot dummies. That lack of emotion was a choice: after the war these musicians wanted to make a modern, European music, built on technology instead of on American rock 'n' roll.

The influence of Kraftwerk is hard to overstate. Their melodies were taken over in New York by hip hop pioneers, and in Detroit they sounded in the bedrooms of the boys who would later invent techno. Both stories return on side B.

Not everyone wanted to sound like a machine. Another group of musicians used the synthesizer precisely to build big, warm soundscapes, like an orchestra played by one person.

The Frenchman Jean-Michel Jarre had worked with Pierre Schaeffer, the inventor of musique concrète, in the late 1960s. In 1976 he recorded the album Oxygène in a home studio in Paris. The rhythm comes from a cheap Korg rhythm box, the melodies are simple and stick in your head. Oxygène became one of the best-selling French albums ever. Jarre became known after that for enormous open-air concerts with lasers and fireworks: in Paris (1979) and Houston (1986) an estimated million or more people were watching.

The Greek Vangelis worked from a studio in London. In 1982 he won an Oscar for the music of the film Chariots of Fire, in which synthesizer and piano sound like a film orchestra. In the same year he made the music for Blade Runner. The heavy, echoing sounds of his Yamaha CS-80 still determine today how the future sounds in science fiction films.

In Japan, Kitaro wrote the music for Silk Road (1980), a documentary series by the broadcaster NHK about the old trade route between China and Europe. His music has no beat, but it has space: long, floating sounds that evoke a landscape. In doing so he laid the foundation for ambient and new age, as did the German Klaus Schulze and the band Tangerine Dream.

Disco was the most popular dance music in the world in the mid-1970s. The sound came from big orchestras: strings, brass, a bass guitar and a drummer who played a bass drum on every beat. The Italian producer Giorgio Moroder, who worked in Munich, showed in 1977 that it could be done differently.

Together with Pete Bellotte and the singer Donna Summer he made the album I Remember Yesterday. Every track referred to a different era of pop music. The last track had to let you hear the future. For I Feel Love Moroder used no band; only the bass drum was played by a drummer. The bass line comes from a Moog synthesizer driven by a sequencer: a device that repeats a series of notes endlessly and exactly in time. Over it Donna Summer sings, high and sustained.

The effect was huge. According to David Bowie, Brian Eno came running into the studio at that time with the record and said that this was the sound of the future. Eno was right: I Feel Love stands at the beginning of hi-NRG, Italo disco and, later, house.

In the Bronx, a poor neighbourhood in New York, hip hop emerged in the 1970s. DJs played at street parties, the block parties, and looked for records with a good beat. One of those DJs was Afrika Bambaataa. He played everything you could dance to, including European electronic music. Kraftwerk became a regular at his parties.

In 1982 Bambaataa recorded Planet Rock with the producer Arthur Baker and the keyboard player John Robie. The melody comes from Kraftwerk's Trans-Europe Express, the rhythm from the Roland TR-808. That drum machine had come on the market in 1980 and was a flop: musicians thought it sounded fake. After a few years Roland stopped making it. Second-hand, the device therefore became cheap, and so it ended up with young producers without a budget. It was precisely the artificial sound of the 808 that became loved: a short, dry snare, a ticking hi-hat and a deep bass drum that rings out for a long time.

The style that arose in this way is called electro: cold European synthesizers with an American breakbeat. The 808 sound never went away again. It is in the hip hop of the 1980s, in Miami bass and in today's trap. In Mixtape 9 (The instrument) we look further at this machine.

Detroit was the city of the American car industry. In the 1970s and 1980s factories closed there and people left the city. The centre emptied out. In Belleville, a suburb, three school friends grew up who would make the first techno together: Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, later called the Belleville Three.

They listened to the radio show of The Electrifying Mojo, a DJ who played funk by Parliament next to Kraftwerk and European synth pop. Juan Atkins started the duo Cybotron with Rick Davis in 1981. With his own label Metroplex he released No UFO's in 1985 under the name Model 500. Atkins had read the book The Third Wave (1980) by the futurologist Alvin Toffler, in which the term 'techno rebels' appears. That is how the music got its name.

Derrick May summed up techno as George Clinton and Kraftwerk together in a lift: funk and machine at the same time. His Strings of Life (1987) shows that techno can also be melancholy. Strings and piano come from a sampler, and in the intro the bass drum is missing. Kevin Saunderson scored hits in England with Inner City in 1988. In that same year the compilation Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit came out in England, and the genre had its name in Europe as well.

Put techno from Detroit next to Kraftwerk and you hear the difference. The machines and the tight rhythms are the same, but the feeling is different: more funk, more soul. Techno was made by young Black people in a city in decline, who imagined a future with the equipment they could afford.

At about the same time, a different current arose about four hundred kilometres away. In Chicago, Frankie Knuckles played from 1977 at The Warehouse, a club with mostly Black and gay visitors. He mixed disco, soul and European synth pop and reworked records himself with a tape recorder and later a drum machine, so that they ran longer and harder. Record shops put out crates marked 'house music': the music as it was played at The Warehouse.

From 1984 young producers in Chicago made such tracks themselves. They needed little: a drum machine, a synthesizer and a tape recorder. At its core, house is disco with a machine: a bass drum on every beat, the four-on-the-floor, at around 120 beats per minute. Small labels such as Trax and DJ International pressed the records on vinyl and sold them directly to DJs.

One of the most important records came from the group Phuture. On Acid Tracks (1987) they turn the knobs of a Roland TB-303 while playing. That device was meant to give guitarists a fake bass guitar and, like the 808, had flopped. By turning the filter open and closed, the bass line squeaks, crackles and wails. That sound became acid house, and it crossed the ocean.

In 1987 a few English DJs came back from a holiday on Ibiza, where in clubs they had heard a mix of house and pop music. At home they started clubs with acid house from Chicago. Within a year it was a mass youth culture. The summers of 1988 and 1989 were given the name Second Summer of Love, after the hippie summer of 1967.

The parties moved from clubs to warehouses and fields, often illegal and with thousands of visitors. The British government stepped in. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 gave the police the right to end open-air parties where music was played that, in the words of the law, was "wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats". It is one of the few laws that describe a style of music.

The music itself kept growing. New styles came out of rave: jungle and drum-and-bass with fast, broken rhythms, big beat with rock influences, and IDM, electronic music to listen to instead of dance to. Aphex Twin, the pseudonym of Richard D. James, became the face of that last current. The Prodigy brought rave to the rock audience with Firestarter (1996).

In the early 1990s the Netherlands developed a style of its own. In Rotterdam gabber arose: hardcore of 160 to more than 200 beats per minute, with a distorted bass drum that sounds like a hammer. The Thunderdome parties of the organiser ID&T drew thousands of visitors from 1992, and gabbers were recognisable by tracksuits, sneakers and shaved heads. Happy hardcore made the sound lighter, with cheerful melodies and high little voices, and scored hits in the Top 40.

Around 2000 trance became a Dutch export product. DJs such as Tiësto, Armin van Buuren and Ferry Corsten played all over the world. In 2004 Tiësto played at the opening of the Olympic Games in Athens, while the athletes walked into the stadium. ID&T organised Sensation in the Amsterdam ArenA, with a dress code in white. The Amsterdam Dance Event, begun in 1996, grew into the biggest conference for electronic music in the world.

The youngest generation no longer needed a studio. Martin Garrix was seventeen when he scored a worldwide hit in 2013 with Animals, made on a laptop in his bedroom.

In France the duo Daft Punk made French house in the late 1990s: house tracks with filters and samples from old disco and funk. On Around the World (1997) a single phrase is repeated again and again, while the accompaniment changes around the voice.

Around 2010 electronic dance music became the big new genre in the United States, under the name EDM: electronic dance music. Festivals drew hundreds of thousands of visitors, and the DJ became a pop star with a light show of his own. The Swede Avicii built Levels (2011) on a vocal sample by Etta James from 1962: soul in an EDM track. Skrillex made dubstep hard and loud, with a distorted 'wobble bass' that becomes the melody itself.

The story ends where it grew to from a broadcast studio: in a stadium. Tim Bergling, the man behind Avicii, died in 2018. In 2021 the Globen in Stockholm, one of the largest arenas in Sweden, was renamed Avicii Arena. In seventy years electronic music went from a room full of measuring equipment in Cologne to an arena named after a DJ. The question this chapter began with is not resolved by that: is the DJ in that stadium a musician, and is the machine an instrument?