Not done with the thing itself, of course. Just the “electronic” qualification. It has become not so much incorrect, but redundant and awkward. And has been for some time.Dan Deacon made this point yesterday afternoon on NPR (his new LP America is just out) in response to a question I didn’t actually hear but seemed to be implying a by-definition rift between Deacon’s two style leanings: modern classical composition and electronic music, e.g. the congested, hyperkinetic synth-based pop workouts that made Deacon famous. Ignoring the obvious modern classical music embraced electronic music decades ago and even helped create it, it was a good answer: “I think it’s insane that people still call electronic music, ‘electronic music.’”It’s not just the matter of electronic music being a whole lot of different genres of music, many of which have nothing at all to do with each other (new dubstep has more to do with nu-metal than Brian Eno), but that, by and large, the sounds we as humans currently consume and experience are synthesized anyhow, or at least they’re digitally modified in some way. The point is that we’re surrounded by electronic sounds from ringtones to subway station squawks.Here’s the quote:I think most people who are interested in new music and new sounds are open to any sound source. We’re constantly swimming in this sea of sounds — of sirens and cellphone beeps and pre-recorded music outside of gas stations. It just permeates our system; there’s always sound coming in, and nine times out of 10, it’s synthetic. We live in this weaving of music that we don’t even realize. You think of [John] Cage sitting there listening to his environmental sounds and how different that is now 50 or 60 years later and how much more chaos there is that surrounds us.Background chaos aside, we’re also surrounded by electronic music. We just don’t usually call it electronic music. Go listen to your modern country station right now and you will most likely hear some significant electronic element, which was in turn probably borrowed from pop music. And bred-for-radio pop music at this point is even more electronic than a whole lot of what Deacon is up to.
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