When I was studying Media Arts in the middle of the 00s I had access to ftp servers with huge collection of newly ripped audio releases. While I could have downloaded and listened to the output from all the existing forms of electronic dance music, from hard trance to electro clash, I had peculiar ideas about what I wanted. Zurich based DJ, producer and party organizer robin mood (formerly opus day) at one time even accused me of only listening to Neil Landstrumm’s wonky techno tracks. There was a kernel of truth to it, but with so many stuff existing out there, and the sheer endless amount of releases coming out every day, I felt that one has to limit oneself to certain labels and artists. But with the advent of streaming services such as spotify, the scrobbling service last.fm and the handy record database discogs, exploration and discovery of genres and artists became easier than ever before. When I started to make DJ specials on the “best” electronic music from consecutive years starting at my birthyear in 1981, I got really excited about discovering old, but new to me, stuff. It sort of felt like doing the work of an archeologist, digging up work that has been long forgotten by all except maybe a few dedicated aficionados. I ventured off into styles and genres I formerly had ignored, like ritual ambient, new age or freestyle.
This brought me the idea to start a blog series dedicated to different styles and genres, (mostly) within the electronic music genre. The articles will feature a short overview of some of the defining players in the particular field, copy and paste description of what it’s all about and a highly subjective and incomplete selection of great tracks and albums. Every blog post will be the result of listening to highly time-consuming playlists in an inattentive manner as they will constitute the background sound to my main activity of reading landmark books in ethnography, linguistics and archeology. This means that for the time being, the portrayals will focus on genres with mostly instrumental music that does not detract too much from reading. Because I want to really listen to these different styles and gain at least somewhat of a cursory overview, new blog posts in this series will appear only every couple of weeks at best. This page will serve as a portal to the different entries of the series. The first, which will be published in a few days, will be about a subgenre of a subgenre: Spacesynth. Till then, you can jack to some good old wonky techno:
Style Reports: