where can I find an overview of all subgenres of electronic music with examples?

[crazyfiltertweaker]

Im searching for an overview of all subgenres of electronic music with examples to develope my own style.

There are so many subgenres,that I have lost the overview and I learn with every track a new subgenre...

So is there any overview with audio examples to get a better view to electronic music?

[.jon]

Make music you love, not something that's intended to fit into some subgenre. Someone else will categorize it for you, or invent a new subgenre name for it.

[cron]

Don't bother. Other than cash cows like EDM and the fundamental building blocks like techno, house, hip-hop etc, we mostly live in a post-genre world where electronic music is concerned. Electronic music publications mostly talk about music descriptively with reference to those fundamental building blocks rather than in endlessly splintered umbrella terms these days. Find publications that write about electronic music and/or club culture instead. Fact and Resident Advisor might be good places to start.

[thecontrolcentre]

Music magazines ... http://www.thewire.co.uk/ for example.

[xoxos]

i think the shortest way of illustrating the deficit of this aspiration is to say,

history is told by the victors.



again and again and again, my life mission at kvr is to help you, just you, understand, human culture is not an authority on life. referential memetic encourage people to believe anything they can conceive of can be presented in a tidy flowchart. you've taken too much lsd, or not enough.

if you trust the power of authority to present information to you, you miss out on a lot of stuff. good stuff, real stuff, that referentialism simply isn't able to accredit. the scope of referential conception is limited, by definition.



life

[foosnark]

There are lots of guides, but most of them are outdated, misleading, confusing, or some such.

Look for "Ishkur's Guide" for one, or "everynoise.com" for another (that includes non-electronic genres as well). And then, don't trust anything you find there.

[foosnark]

For instance, Every Noise pointed me to a genre called "Mandible" -- the only other reference I could find was a musician who had discovered their own work categorized as such, asking what the hell Mandible was. I spent a few days listening to lots of different examples of what was supposed to be Mandible, and there was a lot of music I didn't like and some I did, and it had very little in common.

[cron]

Sign up to record shop mailing lists too. They try to sell you everything they have in stock rather than one specific sound. Boomkat and Bleep are solid ones to start with. Remember I was saying electronic music tends to be described descriptively rather than with genre names these days? Take this press release from this morning's Bleep mail out as an example:

Inaugurating Kuedo and Joe Shakespeare’s Knifes imprint with his Ecologies EP in 2015, Jacques Gaspard Biberkopf put himself amongst the forefront of an emerging cluster of producers conducting experiments in deconstructed club music. Ecologies II: Ecosystems Of Excess, the Lithuanian sound artist’s second release for the Berlin-based label, extends the concept of his debut EP.

Set in the Anthropocene – an epoch characterised by humans’ impact on Earth's geology and ecosystems – it follows a contemporary approach to Musique concrète. Biberkopf merges manipulated field recordings with advanced digital programming, creating a dystopian universe of sound composed of dark microecosystems. Within each of them, numerous transitional processes exist, from hard-hitting bass drums succumbing to an ‘Immersion into Noise’ to the ‘Eruption Of The Amorous’, a festival of warping drones. Many of them appear to conjure up voices of suffering: be it the wailing high frequency synths and flickering fragments of a minister’s pleading, accelerated by a frantic kick-drum on ‘Preacher’, or the sampled voices on ‘Dust’, seemingly trapped underneath the melancholic strings, in similarly distressed fashion.

Ecologies II’s complex, formless arrangements evoke a foreboding, all-encompassing atmosphere – J. G. Biberkopf couldn’t have conveyed his stance on our “excessive” changes to the natural world any more clearly.

Note the phrase 'deconstructed club music' in there. While it could mean just about anything taken at face value, in practice it's inevitably referring to a very specific genre sound without a name. I haven't heard a note of JG Biberkopf's music, but just from that descriptor I can tell you it's non-tonal, contains machine gun like staccato kicks over heavily processed field recordings, and probably has a garnishing of 909 hi-hats and samples of glass smashing. The rest of the description alludes to 'some' of those elements, but honestly 'deconstructed club music' told me everything I needed to know because everyone means exactly the same thing when they say that. Descriptors are the new genres.

[.jon]

"Ecologies II: Ecosystems Of Excess"

Listening now, pretty interesting music. Not sure where the "club" comes into this, just sound collage type of affair.

[Functional]

Don't bother. Other than cash cows like EDM and the fundamental building blocks like techno, house, hip-hop etc, we mostly live in a post-genre world where electronic music is concerned. Electronic music publications mostly talk about music descriptively with reference to those fundamental building blocks rather than in endlessly splintered umbrella terms these days. Find publications that write about electronic music and/or club culture instead. Fact and Resident Advisor might be good places to start.

While it's a good post, I'd still like to point out that a lot of genres actually have a lot to do with more than just the way the music sounds or comes about. Often there's a scene of some sort with characteristics that different artists share in one way or another.

[mhog]

http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/

[cron]

Don't bother. Other than cash cows like EDM and the fundamental building blocks like techno, house, hip-hop etc, we mostly live in a post-genre world where electronic music is concerned. Electronic music publications mostly talk about music descriptively with reference to those fundamental building blocks rather than in endlessly splintered umbrella terms these days. Find publications that write about electronic music and/or club culture instead. Fact and Resident Advisor might be good places to start.

While it's a good post, I'd still like to point out that a lot of genres actually have a lot to do with more than just the way the music sounds or comes about. Often there's a scene of some sort with characteristics that different artists share in one way or another.

That's a very interesting point. I often find that genre names don't so much refer to the sonics, but more the culture surrounding them. Take EDM for instance: while there are obvious sonic pointers like heavy side chaining compression and the like, it could just as easily be taken to mean 'dance music made for stadium sized playback gigs with a huge light show'.

The early days of dubstep gave us a similar thing, before the sonics became codified into what used to be derogatorily called 'brostep'. In the mid-00s, all you really knew you'd be getting with the dubstep tag was minimally adorned music which ran at 140bpm and had lashings of sub bass optimised for the extraordinary sound system at FWD (the club around which the scene originally revolved). After brostep became the new dubstep and the original sound had splintered into a million new sounds, the term 'bass music' appeared as a genre. Of course bass music didn't refer to a sound, it was simply code for 'what the dubstep scene did next'.

.jon - you're absolutely right in that the 'club' in ''deconstructed club music' is often nowhere to be seen - the rhythms when they appear tend to be either too arrhythmic or machine gun pummelling for the club - but I'd bet my life the record you just listened to contained at least some of the sonics I mentioned in that post

[sprnva]

Reminds me of this Derrick May segment in a documentary I watched recently.

[cron]

Reminds me of this Derrick May segment in a documentary I watched recently.

Haha, fantastic!

[dark water]

Im searching for an overview of all subgenres of electronic music with examples to develope my own style.

There are so many subgenres,that I have lost the overview and I learn with every track a new subgenre...

So is there any overview with audio examples to get a better view to electronic music?

Sorry to sound like I'm taking the piss (I'm not), but Google just gave me a fair set of sub-genres during the first search; wikipedia has it all covered.