grains

Electronic music subgenres

Music history is subjective and genre classification is hard. There are niche genres, and it's ok to disagree about them, as well as to have no idea about their existence. Let's just agree that not all of the music is techno.

Below is how I educate myself about electronic music genres.

Broad strokes #

A screenshot from Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music: Hardcore, Drum n Bass, Breakbeat

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music is a website where every genre's typical sound is put on a branching out timeline. This is a great way to learn more about electronic music, as it strikes the balance between being too generic and diving too deep into micro-niches. Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated past 2019. The FAQ section describes Ishkur's curation process quite well:

Q: You forgot about the genre that I produce! Please add it.

A: You need to prove to me that it exists.

By that I mean physical evidence that a vibrant scene and community spends (or has spent) time and money on its existence -- playing it in live settings, wearing swag and speaking lingo, making physical copies and selling it, and patronizing businesses (everything from record labels to retail outlets) that promote the music as part of a subculture. Show me festivals, raves and clubnights caning it every weekend in front of 5-digit audiences.

A dozen amateurs with hacked copies of NI Reaktor sharing Fruitytune samples in a Reddit forum is not a scene nor does the music they're making constitute a genre (or worse yet a YouTube prank). Music communities can not exist solely on the Internet. Throw a party, start a label, get boots on the ground, ticket sales in hands, DJs playing tracks on vinyl, and I might consider it. It's not enough that your music sounds different and unique. Anyone can do that. Demonstrate that there is a community willing to cultivate that unique sound into a scene.

I want to add that I am not against adding new genres. This guide is infinitely scalable. You can name your new sound whatever unique genre you want. What really matters is whether you can get other people to give a shit.

Another interesting resource is Every Noise at Once.

Every Noise at Once is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 6,291 genre-shaped distinctions by Spotify as of 2023-11-19. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.

Every Noise offers a few education tools. Clicking on the scatterplot will get you to a genre's page, i.e. UKG Revival, from which you can either access artists, or Spotify playlists: The Sound Of, Intro,Pulse, Edge, 2023.

It's possible to do the reverse, of course. Entering the artist into the searchbar spits out a list of genres and a link to the artist's page on the platform:

Every Noise suggests that Surgeon mainly belongs to the following genres: modular techno, detroit techno, techno, minimal techno, minimal dub, intelligent dance music

deep cuts:

Tim Cant:

Drum and bass, jungle #

The following video helped me dig deeper into DnB. Please, share any good videos in a similar format about other umbrella genres, i.e. techno.

Random notes for myself:

I particularly love the Playstation and Dreamcast game soundtrack aesthetics. Those games were full of ambient and liquid DnB:

Pizza Hotline's LEVEL SELECT is an ultimate capture of that nostalgic feeling. I wish I had this album on a physical CD or cassette 🎁

More:

UK Garage, 2-step, dubstep, grime #

Wider/weirder bass subgenres #

House #