Posted by bookofjoe 3 days ago
The collection is clearly aimed at presenting music where electronic triggers and some synthesis is used in concert with acoustic instruments or spaces, and is super biased towards "Musique concrète", and concert-hall, classical compositions for what I can hear, ala Luc Ferrari.
You're not going to see an appearance of Kraftwerk, Suzanne Ciani, Wendy Carlos, or Model 500.
This is less a "history", and more an "eclectic subgenre list by date".
I am actually bummed to see ubuweb referenced on HN. Musical taste is a very emotional topic for those that haven't made a formal study of it. Publicizing this to an audience of armchair music historians who think this tame list is "eclectic" likely won't take the time to understand that it is the bedrock of research that created pop electronic music.
Edit - wow no Raymond Scott or Tomita either?
I don't know how accurate the YouTube list is but I never heard of anything prior to Jean Michelle Jarre's Oxygene (about 6 minutes in the list). If It were to compare the list with geological history, before 1976 it's weird Ediacaran biota. And afterwards, suddenly, it's like the Cambrian explosion :)
"Electronic Music" is a bit of a misnomer. I think most people would think of Electronic Music as genres like rave, acid, techno, house, trance, jungle, drum and bass, dubstep, and so on. For that, you want Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music (https://music.ishkur.com/) and its branching history for how all these genres influenced and evolved from eaxh other
But this collection is just the avant-garde parts - the roots of Ishkur's tree. It's the musique concrete and theremins and radiophonic workshop type music. Those early genres only get a brief look in Ishkur, but here they are in detail.
Most of it is pre-synth, with early experiments with tape, and sometimes analog synthesis and computer DSP.
It's ended up in a strange space culturally - lurking in modern music's attic like an ageing mad uncle whom everyone agrees was a genius, but hardly anyone still listens to. (Outside of academia, which is its own world.)
See this great compilation (with a lovely booklet that’s more of a mini book) for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohm:_The_Early_Gurus_of_Electr...
I got lots of late-night listening pleasure out of that one, except for the first theremin track; I just found that one unbearable…
They had a great collection of early synths. Can’t remember the name.
This was before the invention of the synthesizer a few years later: Louis created so-called "cybernetic circuits", which apparently had a life-cycle similar to living organisms, while Bebe arranged the resulting sounds into music.
And, to this day, no one knows exactly how they created their music... (Almost no one, that is - it's my PhD topic ;-)
In reality, the music was carefully crafted and performed - with an emphasis on performance, rather than random events and sounds. (The genre of "Krell music" went off at a completely wrong tangent in this regard...)
It's unfortunate that Bebe Barron downplayed her own compositional technique and creative input in order to bolster this mythology.
The research is focused on the nature of the Barrons' cybernetic circuits. Using digital equivalents of these circuits, the aim is to recreate the title track, using only the techniques that were available to the Barrons in the 1950s.
Let's list some of the outside.
Maryanne Amacher, Pauline Oliveros, Éliane Radigue, Clarence Barlow, Bebe and Louis Barron... I'm brain-farting so many, keep going!
Laurie Spiegel
It's a bit fuzzy in where the boundaries are for the category represented by the list.
Awesome shout-out.
Missing: Cabaret Voltaire, Art of Noise, Yes ..
> Hear below Stockhausen’s “Kontact,” Henry’s “Astrologie,” and Bayle’s spare “Theatre d’Ombres” further down.
That seems unlikely to contain 476 tracks ... and nowhere do I see any actual list of tracks (other than the mention of 3 that you quoted).
Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music
Previously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44470331
> Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26212706 - Feb 2021 (9 comments)
> Iskhur's Guide to Electronic Music - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083516 - Nov 2020 (1 comment)
> Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20744571 - Aug 2019 (71 comments)
via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37920641 h/t dang