The Null Device

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music, a Flash applet giving a chart of the different genres and subgenres of electronic music, past and present, each with loops from several examples.

<ANORAK> The guide has a few curious anomalies; for example, it includes gothic rock at its most rockist in the "trance" category (presumably because trancy music gets played at today's goth clubs), whilst omitting much of the rest of non-electronic music of the time (the Cocteau Twins, for example, are classified as "darkwave" (or "industrial goth"!)), and while "French pop", "musique concrete" and "minimalism" get mentions, Krautrock is lumped into "psychedelia" along with The Beatles; meanwhile, Milli Vanilli are classified as "new jack swing" (an American movement they had nothing to do with), Laid Back's White Horse is classified as electro-funk rather than punk-funk (given that Laid Back were European and got played mostly in predominantly white mutant-disco sets alongside the likes of The Clash, Ian Dury and The Normal, placing them alongside George Clinton and Roger Troutman may not be the most accurate categorisation; then again, perhaps looking at it from the direction of goth, IDM and post-rave techno (towards which there seems to be a bias), you might not pick up these distinctions), and DFA/LCD Soundsystem-style punk house doesn't seem to appear (except perhaps as a footnote to electroclash, which the author has redubbed as "synthtron", arguably the only possible name dafter than "electroclash"). And there's the matter of a genre of hard dance being named "stupid". </ANORAK>

Nonetheless, it is quite comprehensive, and quite useful if you wanted to know what various genres (such as, say, abstract hip hop, liquid funk, JPop, casiocore, Rio funk, power electronics and buttrock goa), sound like, or are looking for starting points for MP3 downloading CD purchases.

(Incidentally, "buttrock goa" is goa trance with heavy-metal guitar riffs. Heavy metal does seem to have a bit of an anal fixation, doesn't it?)

There are 2 comments on "Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music":

Posted by: Graham http://grudnuk.com/ Mon Jul 11 02:23:56 2005

That old thing? I think there's a quite a few "genres" that's just been made up to fill a gap...

Posted by: doop http:// Wed Jul 13 08:33:15 2005

I rather thought that, like dogs walking on hind legs, women preaching etc, it was quite impressive that such a taxonomy had been done at all. I'm also pretty sure that in a previous version, the "Stupid" tag was applied to what he now calls "Dutch Trance" (the intensely annoying sort of trance that consists almost entirely of wave-hands-in-air breakdown), so I'd not be surprised to see it be applied to whatever else irks him in a few months' time.