![]() ![]() ![]() But if talented young producers give their best ideas to the whales, instead of investing time into their own sound… will this ultimately cause greater homogeneity in electronic music?” “It’s a win-win for the labels, who no longer have to invest in the risky business of developing pop talent who might only have one big hit, and can rather invest in a producer who can showcase whichever new artist has emerged from streaming or social media platforms, on a case-by-case basis. “There’s this culture of big EDM artists signing major label deals and running their own de-facto songwriting camps,” she says. Once EDM became a major label concern, ghost-producing manifested itself in what producer/DJ Anna Lunoe describes as a pyramid model akin to the top-down hierarchy and total bloat of modern pop-music songwriting and production. A live setting allowed EDM to really channel the scale and thrill of an amusement-park attraction. ![]() In the 2010s, we saw awe-inspiring live production seemingly everywhere we looked: legends like the Chemical Brothers augmented their powerful live show with mechanical robots, while electronica duo Odesza deployed drones to form geometric shapes in the sky during their own landmark Coachella set. LED panels have only grown exponentially cheaper since the pyramid shows, opening up opportunities for daring artists to develop live “experiences” powered by perfectly-synced audio-visual drops. (As the story goes, Skrillex was inspired to pursue his own production career after witnessing the duo deliver pure elation to tens of thousands of people at Coachella in 2006.) Daft Punk’s tour was enabled by technological advancements in computer processing and lighting design, which finally made it feasible to take such a production on the road. Captured in full on their Alive 2007 album, Daft Punk’s career-spanning show not only established the gold standard for EDM concert production, but broke new ground in how electronic acts could mash up and re-contextualize their catalogs in a live setting. Ridha isn’t the only one to reference the robots’ Alive 2006/2007 tour as a turning point. Their pyramid show made people look around like, ‘Okay, now’s the time, we’re going to do this.’” I think Daft Punk really changed things for U.S. “When I came up, I was always billed with bands like Foreign Islands, the Rapture, LCD Soundsystem. “Before 2010, whenever I played in the United States, I played all these rock venues because clubs didn’t really exist for my music,” says Alexander Ridha, better known as the DJ/producer Boys Noize. The realization of a viable national audience, combined with advances in technology, made the modern EDM live spectacle possible just a handful of years before they became ubiquitous. In the years following the 1990s rave boom, politicians like then-Senator Joe Biden were particularly resistant to dance-music events that were perceived as havens for illicit drug use, going so far as sponsoring anti-Ecstasy legislation (and cheekily calling it the RAVE Act). Of course, America hadn’t always embraced live electronic music. Tastes change, but teenage rage is forever. Where Nirvana nicked the quiet-loud-quiet dynamic of the Pixies, the late Avicii took after progressive house forerunners like Eric Prydz, perfecting the build-up and drop. The rock bands handed down to me by my older cousins suddenly felt like relics from a bygone era, even if they held parallels in their dynamic principles. Fueled by subbass (and, yeah, sometimes substances), it was a pure break from the harsh realities of life. But for an entire generation of young millennials, EDM was the first music that felt like it belonged solely to them-to us. Dance-music purists mostly held their noses while older generations raised on guitar music wrote it off as wub-wub nonsense for ecstasy-addled kids. These various styles all quickly coalesced under a broader umbrella term: EDM.Īs EDM began to spread across America, the time-honored tradition of adults sneering at young people’s music resurfaced like clockwork. His rise-and the rise of “brostep”-came about just as new breeds of euphoric house music were beginning to make waves in the States. Skrillex ended up bringing a new breed of aggressive electronic music to teeming masses that may not have been exposed to it otherwise. His style of dubstep was initially framed as an aggro counterpart to the subby club music of the South London scene-numerous dullards across the internet would crudely compare it to “two Transformers going at it”-but teenagers in middle America didn’t know anything about UK pioneers like Skream or Benga, so they had nothing to compare it to. ![]() Listening to Skrillex’s first big record now, it feels like a microcosm of his career as an electronic producer and former frontman of a post-hardcore band: Both are bombastic tours de force with moments of genuine beauty interspersed. ![]()
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