Why is electronic dance music typically very simple?

[himalaya]

Yeah, but what if that 'simple' is arrived at through a lack of knowledge ?

makes absolutely NO difference in the end

(unless youre a theory wanker)

the result is always just an end point of a process

slainte rob

It may make a lot of difference. Since music for me is a language and if someone is using a language without having some sort of grounding in it, all we will hear is gibberish.

Or rather, if you don't understand the language then all you will hear is gibberish.

wqtxqts <-- that was suppose to be a word in Japanese. Since I don't know Japanese it's all gibberish. Is it not to you ?

[Reverse Engineer]

Yeah, but what if that 'simple' is arrived at through a lack of knowledge ?

makes absolutely NO difference in the end

(unless youre a theory wanker)

the result is always just an end point of a process

slainte rob

It may make a lot of difference. Since music for me is a language and if someone is using a language without having some sort of grounding in it, all we will hear is gibberish.

Or rather, if you don't understand the language then all you will hear is gibberish.

wqtxqts <-- that was suppose to be a word in JapanEse. Since I don't know JapanEse it's all gibberish. Is it not to you ?

That was a lousy example, here's a better one:

"Constantinople made my eyes hammery on a sunday of bucket monkeys and spanner biscuits when a cloudy peapod lumped my cavernous munchplate".

[shinken]

wqtxqts <-- that was suppose to be a word in Japanese. Since I don't know Japanese it's all gibberish. Is it not to you ?

I'm not trying to be facetious, but seriously I don't think that's gibberish, if you regard it as a musical phrase. There is repetition of qt denoting rhythmic structure (the repetition of ugliness equals beauty in the theories of Kodwo Eshun), and the w and x and s may comprise a tonic, dominant and subdominant respectively, if wqtxqts ever comes around a second time.

[Freeform]

Samples in electronic music have been used for a long time. Although you can consider vocals "organic and natural", and drum samples "acoustic", there are countless manipulations of organic instruments out there in techno tracks. To be horribly technical, one could even argue that everything is organic in nature, including digital. It's just been modified and manipulated more. If you sample an acoustic guitar and filter the hell out of it, it's not going to sound like an acoustic guitar obviously, and this can be considered "electronic" music. still. There are no boundaries....

[himalaya]

wqtxqts <-- that was suppose to be a word in Japanese. Since I don't know Japanese it's all gibberish. Is it not to you ?

I'm not trying to be facetious, but seriously I don't think that's gibberish, if you regard it as a musical phrase. There is repetition of qt denoting rhythmic structure (the repetition of ugliness equals beauty in the theories of Kodwo Eshun), and the w and x and s may comprise a tonic, dominant and subdominant respectively, if wqtxqts ever comes around a second time.

Very good.

[deaf dunderkwac]

being a simpleton, I prefer simplistic

[Scot Solida]

There's lots of electronic music that has some depth. Try Wendy Carlos' "Beauty in the Beast" or "Heaven and Hell".

[Lord Snarebottom]

"Constantinople made my eyes hammery on a sunday of bucket monkeys and spanner biscuits when a cloudy peapod lumped my cavernous munchplate".

The same exact thing happened to me last week!!! What a coincidence!

[foosnark]

There's a lot of simple music in the world and not all of it is electronic. There's also a lot of electronic music that is not simple at all. And a lot more where the ideas of melody/harmony that we inherited from Western classical music just don't even apply and the question becomes unanswerable.

[Topiness]

any piece of music comes to us as just a waveform. or, maybe two waveforms, since we have two ears.

How 'complex' a piece of music is is simply down to how you, PERSONALLY, analyse it. For example - what you hear as timbre, i may hear as harmony or even rhythm. Or even colour, for that matter.

It's even more of a jump to imply that complex somehow = good. As our ears are assaulted with more and more unwanted music, I'm another one looking more and more for elegance and space in music, not 1000 things going on at a time.

[Armadillo]

I'm still waiting for some names of complex electronic music. I'd love to hear something new (for me). Who's the John Williams et al of electronic music?

Aphex twin, BT and Shpongle all been mentioned but is that as good as it gets?
Yes, there's some complex IDM out there but it's rather chaotic for the most part, ie. more like throwing some samples through some FSU plugins and see what happens, rather than having a flowing continuity.

[himalaya]

Listening to Mikhail Chekalin's 'Equilibrium and Alarm' from the 'Night Pulsation' album (Erdenklang label) just now.

Have a listen to this album, Lunatique. Sounds fresh even after all these years ( produced in 1993).

[Lunatique]

There's lots of electronic music that has some depth. Try Wendy Carlos' "Beauty in the Beast" or "Heaven and Hell".

But doesn't that fall into one of the excluded categories I mentioned (big analog modular synths doing a pseudo symphony, or avant-garde/experimental)? I'm mostly asking about ways to incorporate complex harmonies and counterpoint into more beat-driven electronic music.

[Topiness]

I'm still waiting for some names of complex electronic music. I'd love to hear something new (for me). Who's the John Williams et al of electronic music?

A lot of Music by The Orb and FSOL was really complex, AND had a good flow to it. However, a lot of that complexity was created by skilful layering of samples, rather than built up note by note, which may bother you.

Massive Attack had some complex harmonies and counterpoint alongside their electronics, but they were often done with real strings.

[Freeform]

FSOL =