Following a recent post at Analog Industries and a recent thread at KVR, it seems I and a lot of other folk are wondering where to take electronic music next. Is there a trend or style under development that’ll be the big trend in electronic music for the next ten years?
So far, it looks like I and a lot of other folk haven’t a clue. The most credible answer, maybe, that I’ve seen is Dubstep. But there are, to my mind, problems with that answer. First, we need to answer what was the last big thing. There have been many House/Techno/Acid strains of music come and go over the past 20 years, and you could say that House/Techno/Acid was the last big thing. Which is true, but glosses over the minutiae that music nerds love so much.
A little easier might be to say that the whole Jungle/Breakbeat thing that emerged around ’93-94 was it. From there, you get the manic IDM breaks of AFX, Squarepusher, Luke Vibert; the glitchy hybrid that stems from stuff like Autechre; the noisier breakcore stuff; and you get DnB and the whole Garage, 2Step, Grime thing. Which is a problem with Dubstep, it sounds remarkably like a remnant thread of stuff that has been done over the last ten years, and for the most part, all of that UK club music from that time didn’t really have any legs (because, you know, we’re all still listening to those classic Garage tracks) nor did it create much of a fertile base for lots of different kinds of music in the same way that Jungle did. A lot of it sounds like the same base form just with added elements from other styles of music (what if we do it like Hip Hop this time, and now what about Dub…)
I think a case could be made that if you took what Squarepusher did seven years ago, removed all the edits/jump cuts and added a bit of dubby echo, you’d have much of what gets called Dubstep. And if you go looking, no one has done a very good job of isolating what comprises the Dubstep form. Most descriptions talk about it only in concert with other styles like Grime, which could be seen as just DnB absent the focus on breakbeats and moved toward a Hip Hop setting.
The Bug’s Pressure sounded to me like an exciting way to take things, essentially Jamaican Dancehall set to an off-kilter bed of machines that go bloop (which doesn’t really make it sound all that excited, I admit), but that thread of music didn’t seem to bear a lot of fruit in the past four years. Maybe that’s where Dubstep comes in, and perhaps the problem is that Dubstep hasn’t yet found its Picasso in the same way that IDM found Aphex Twin.
Most electronic stuff I listen to and make is less about the electronics and more about noise, drones, reductive structures, looped patterns and sampling, which isn’t really anything new, and so likely won’t set the world on fire any more than it already has. So, if anyone reading has a credible argument to make for the next big thing, I’m all ears. It’d be good to hear something that’s trying for a new direction.
