Electronic dance music moved from formal innovation to production refinement across the 2000s

Evidence

Mark mentions the idea of technical upgrades as the metric for a sense of progression in the last decade. This reminded me of a conversation I had with the Italian DJ and journalist Gabriele Sacchi. In the space of about fifteen minutes, Sacchi went from complaining that there had been no really significant formal advances in dance music since drum ‘n’ bass (he discounted dubstep, as I recall) to then commenting with approval of how advanced sounding records were now compared with ten years ago. What he meant is that they sounded better in terms of production quality: what’s available today in terms of technology, digital software, etc., to someone making, say, a house track, enables them to make much better-sounding records (in terms of drum sounds, the textures, the placement of sounds and layers in the mix). That sounded totally plausible to me and it may well be the defining quality of electronic dance music in the 2000s. You might say that the basic structural features of the various genres were established in the Nineties but what has improved is the level of detailing, refinement and a general kind of production sheen to the music. An analogy might be a shift from architectural innovation (the Nineties) to interior décor (the 2000s). … Coming out of street beats culture, without hardly any input from art schools and only the most vague, filtered-down notion of musical progress, it nonetheless constituted a kind of self-generated flashback to the modernist adventure of the early twentieth century. The hardcore continuum especially propelled itself forward thanks to an internal temporal scheme of continual rupturing: it kept breaking with itself, jettisoning earlier superseded stages. One small aside in A Singular Modernity struck me as both true and funny, when Jameson talks about the modernists being obsessed with measurement, “how do we determine what is really new?”. That struck me as the characteristic mindset of those who came up through the Nineties as critics. But the new generation of electronic music writers (and probably musicians too) don’t seem to respond to music in this way. It’s no longer about the lust for the unprecedented, about linear evolution and the rush into the unknown. It’s about tracking these endless involutionary pathways through the terra cognita of dance music history, the tinkering with inherited forms. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1257

Categorization

• XREF: The architectural-innovation-to-interior-decor shift parallels Fisher’s broader ‘hauntology’ and retro-mania theses about postmodern culture losing forward momentum. — connects to: Old electronic music no longer ages because the culture stopped progressing — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1237; UK dance music shifted from future-directed to intensive internal exploration — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1236; Electronic music labels lost their connection to any expected, lived future — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1238 (+5 more)
• SEED: A useful modern-vs-postmodern diagnostic: does the scene measure novelty by structural rupture or by refinement of inherited forms? Applicable beyond music to tech and culture.

Broader Connections

• Contemporary electronic music has decelerated from rave’s rate of innovation #corroborates (0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1228
• Artists who once innovated turned to re-creating past sounds by the 2010s #corroborates (0.82) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 389
• Mainstream music of the 2010s fixated on recreating past sounds rather than innovating #corroborates (0.75)