book – Actar – ISBN 8495951134
In its double role as ‘genre’ and ‘tool’, electronic music has pervaded the music culture for the last fifteen years. Fulfilling the ambitions to work ‘directly’ on the sound material, it has introduced the concept of personal productions, thanks also to personal computers, whichbrought the act of composing music out of professional studios. This book, a catalogue of the homonymous traveling exhibition, sums up macro- and microphenomena that characterized the digital creation of sounds, such as the sharing of informations on mailing lists, the birth of small labels directed by the artists themselves, the central role of the listener, freed from the commercial supply chain thanks to network file sharing. As Elie During states in his essay, “it’s the music of the machines whose echoes are scattered throughout the digital network”. Widely debated subjects such as the death of authorship in the practice of sampling, or the role of the artist, walking a finer and finer line between technical ability and expressiveness, go hand in hand with the doubts (expresses, in this case, by David Toop) on the use of laptops as instruments of productive and deterritorialized freedom versus as instruments of homologation. The historical and personal reconstruction of the birth of techno music in Detroit and the social context it grew out of, as well as the innovations in the semantic of music, described by Simon Reynolds, become another pretext to define the contemporary process of sound production, which is radically different from the one that was popular in the Eighties, and is schizophrenically projected towards thousands of innovative streams that create a liquid matrix of constantly evolving research paths.