Daft Punk, Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Crystal Method, Bjork, Roni Size and more released masterworks music was also basking in the afterglow of recent debuts by Fatboy Slim and MTV’s AMP. Twenty years ago we witnessed one of the high-water marks of the collective form. Within it, the birth and blossoming of sounds with vital legacies: the frenetic jazz extensions of drum ’n’ bass, the enveloping textures of ambient and trance, industrial’s carny and distorted madness, the populist stomp of big beat, and so much more. So goes “electronica,” an umbrella term for all manner of beats and beeps with clubland roots but expectations reaching toward even the highfalutin. But it was also expanding into ever more fractional subgenres as months and even weeks passed more importantly, with these musics lifted to public consciousness alongside the Nirvanas and Becks of the world, critics, programmers and listeners were obviously paying attention. It was co-opted by stadium-filling megastars such as U2, Madonna and David Bowie. It was embraced by hip-hop, which sought new ways to prop up its rappers as sampling clearances became financial drags on production. It was hitting the charts through slick and shallow club trash and boy-band/girl-group pop. The rise of alternative music in the 1990s brought with it concomitant exposure of more and more digitized and rhythmic music to wider audiences. Those movements enjoyed moments in the spotlight into the 1980s, but spent a lot more time being fertilized and cultivated in the dark, rich soil of specific DJ scenes like Detroit, Manchester and Berlin, distributed by independent labels, and embraced by college and pirate radio. In the next decade, party-time rhythms and artistic atmospherics were adopted by the R&B and soul genres to create disco, and also by punk to then splinter off into post-punk and synth-pop and God knows what else. Psychedelic and progressive rock began incorporating those sounds in the mainstream in the 1960s. Playing electronic instruments and equipment started with experimental and avant garde music in the first half of the 20th century. Furthermore, presenting and performing them in settings friendly to modern technology-with turntable, crossfader and sampler as instruments, with the secretive nature of the modern club and the warehouse party, with talent compressed into standalone files or streams of data-emboldens debate on if we’ve been democratizing music or dehumanizing it. There’s something rebellious about stepping away from the organic nature of the string, drum and breath to generate artificial and modified sounds. Electronically-generated music and dance music beyond the black-and-white days of jukebox 45s had always been more or less underground.
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