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Originating Location: Detroit, Michigan, USA

Originating Era: primarily the early 1990s/mid-to-late 1980s

Key Artists[]

  • Aphex Twin
  • Coldcut
  • The Chemical Brothers
  • The Prodigy
  • Fatboy Slim
  • The Crystal Method
  • Orbital
  • Underworld

Key Albums[]

  • Orbital - In Sides
  • Mouse on Mars - Audiotacker
  • Autechre - Tri Repetae++

Genre Description[]

Like many of the major genres, the musical style known as electronica began as a description of a specific type of electronically created music, but is now a blanket term encompassing dozens of sub-genres. Today the word is used in an extremely vague sense, almost always used to describe any type of music that is created with electronic instruments/tools (synthesizers, drum machines, computers, homemade concoctions). Originally the term was used to describe a type of electronic dance music that took the style and moved it from dance floor sound systems to headphones and audio set-ups at home. Basically, it was an attempt to progress the music from being simple and cold rhythms to intelligent, provoking song-based entities. The original setting for this experimentation was Detroit, Michigan (though a lot of European artists were on the same track), where techno originated as well. In fact, the timeline for electronica stems directly from Detroit techno and came into being soon after the latter's explosion in the 80s and early 90s. With the heavy use of computers and electronic equipment today, the term electronica is thrown around very leniantly and is usually used to describe any act that uses any type of electronic sound devices in their work. Popular styles of today include IDM, electropop, trip-hop, house, downtempo and minimal techno.

Many electronic artists, unhappy with the term for its generalization of all electronically created music and the fact that it was created by reviewers instead of the artists or listeners, avoid using term term in favor of 'electronic music', which is not so much a genre but an attribute.

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