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Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
— John Cage

If there is one purpose above all others that the critic must serve, it is to narrate art from a position rooted in experience, passion, and willful reflection, as a participant, not a spectator. When it comes to Dance Music or Electronic Music or whatever you want to call it, there is a desperate need for this type of critic. It's difficult to talk about music, but it's even more difficult to hear the music you're passionate about, talked about badly. Recorded music is, arguably, the dominant art form of the 20th century, and electronic music is one of its major genres. There are great critics writing about electronic music today. Simon Reynolds & Dave Stelfox best illustrate this small cadre. Yet still the narration needs to come from the marketplace from both rock critics and ordinary dance music devotees. Electronic music is under represented in the music media.

Ignorance on the part of music critics can be partly blamed on the fact that some mistakenly see dance music as an obtuse subject, while others may have a neo-Luddite prejudice or a rockist perspective. However, I think the main reason it has been underserved critically is because of the difficulty which major music houses have had attempting to turn a maximal profit from its bounty. It seems there are innumerable reasons for this. From the fact that artists are not easily cast into the star system, that technology has allowed the artist to opt out of costly production and engineering sessions usually paid for by major labels, that as a form it does not always lend well to conventional live performances, but most importantly, there is a hugely successful (& self replicating) system of independent labels and distributors that rely on the DIY nature of the internet for their viability. In addition to the specificity and intimacy between the label, listener and artist, labels, in and of themselves, take on the role of providing a polis of identification just as much as artists do.

In fact, it's a musical form with more genres than total Billboard appearances, stateside at least. A music that, in its bas(s)est form, is autonomous of much of the machinery of mass consumer music production and consumption. Nevertheless, most laymen's experience of it is as a soundtrack to the machinery of mass production. From the background music of television ads, to the beats GAP bought for you to shop with, dance music is at once, everywhere and nowhere.

Before we go on, it is necessary to reflect on the language we use in describing this music. To most within electronic music, "electronica" is a pejorative term, from its inception, a term brought in from the outside, applied by the mass media to describe the new bins at Virgin Megastores with Daft Punk and the Chemical Brothers in them. The label Dance Music, although a more appropriate moniker, recalls corporate uber-clubs and frat nights out in the big city; furthermore, it infers a utilitarian character to the music, a wholly restrictive raison d'être. The myriad genre breakdowns: garage, techno, ambient, house, drum n' bass, idm, gabber, big beat, grime, and etc, are too specific or too exclusive in their design. So it is more often than not that I find a vague comfort in the term 'electronic music', even though in today's studio, all music is on some level, electronic. But that term confers something deeper, broader and more appropriate. It covers the ambient, avant-garde, and beat centered forms, who all reciprocate in the digital mulch bin of electronic music.

When you've spent 12 years trying to unravel electronic music, running to keep up with the proliferating phyla of labels and scenes, and the groupings of artists & disciples that drive them, it becomes a great challenge to find the right words to service some better understanding for the layperson. Conceivably, the first step is to situate electronic music into a quantifiable milieu of artists. In rough chronology -- Balinese gamelans, African drummers, and Luigi Russolo, to Pierre Schaeffer, Steve Reich, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Pierre Boulez, to Kraftwerk, Giorgio Moroder, Christian Marclay, Juan Atkins, David Mancuso, Kevin Saunderson, Steve Hurley, DJ Pierre, and Derrick May, to Larry Levan, Todd Terry, and Frankie Knuckles to Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, and the Orb, to Jeff Mills, Richie Hawtin, and Carl Craig, to LTJ Bukem, Goldie, and Dead Dread, to Omni Trio, 4-Hero, and Alec Empire, to Autechere, Black Dog, and Squarepusher, to Wolfgang Voigt, Kenny Dixon Jr., Matthew Herbert, and Farben, to Fennesz, Theo Parrish, and Michael Mayer. This is my summary of electronic music's long and extremely distinguished musical legacy.

All this seriousness and abject intellectualizing on semantics and discourse shouldn't confuse this music with stuffy mores and discriminatory thinking. This music, on so many levels, is a celebration, a release, and an ascent into hedonism, a community in rebellion and rejection, both writhing physical presence, and floating, stateless dreaming. There is no getting past its physicality, the way it speaks in an undulating, pulsating, throbbing now. It's at once revolutionary and, at the same moment, utterly frivolous. With so many varied expressions, so many divergent forms, it really is a challenge to wrap it all together. Even so, the common bonds between them, when viewed from a prejudiced exterior, make it all the easier for it to be either written off or defended on its universal merits. In all its divergent forms, electronic music is fundamentally about the sonics and the physical investment made into the expansiveness of the sonics. "Police mentalities will always strive to impose correct readings, to align intentions with outcomes, and couple imaginary causes with putative but we always have a choice" -- Dave Hickey

Whatever electronic music's particular expression, in a 4/4 beat or break beat, its meaning has never been captured by rockist interpretations of individual musings or implied social experience. Lyrical content, besides the mantra like phrasing of a house diva or drill 'n' bass MC, is muted in service of escalating sonic mutations and shifting tonalities. These tonal topographies, and beat arrangements, serve as the emotional geography of the music. As language drops away, and with it the exclusions it enables, a community is formed, not around the shared identification of linguistic narrative and chorus/refrain, but by communal sonic experience. Sonic rushes rising and descending hold court over the body, not by meaning inferred from adopted narratives but by actual experience rooted in present tense physicality. That bass in your face, as you hug the stacks of speakers, billowing dense rhythms and chattering snares, fermenting in your communion.

Perhaps that was always part of the 'futurity' of electronic music: that it wasn't just the technology, but the present tense creating of experience. As in all forms of music, there is the use of referential nostalgia, the flecks and shards of tracks you knew, tracks you experienced before at the sound system, mixed amongst the dub plates and unheard present mutations, to create once again, anew. It's anew to you and the first timer next to you; because the mutation wasn't like this the last time, and it surely won't be like this the next time. The exponential variations and mutations applied upon the recognized and unrecognized beats leads to a wellspring of expressions. It's no wonder that many of the most prolific scenes are ripe with dub plates, pulling together disparate individuals into the communal now with the sonic new.