Music genres > Electronic / Dance music

Electronic / Dance

Electronic Music and Dance Music are not necessarily the same thing. In fact, it is widely accepted to attribute the moment they first joined forces to the meeting of an American soul singer, Donna Summer and a German music producer, Giorgio Moroder. The track Love To Love You Baby, and later, I Feel Love, were the first perfect marriages of machine driven music and dance music.

Electronic music evolved during the 20th century, hand in hand with technological advances in sound. Classical composers, namely Karlheinz Stockhausen & Pierre Schaeffer, used synthesizers and tape manipulations to explore new possibilities, and their ideas trickled down to the world of pop music slowly through the late 1960's, and even more so in the 1970's as musicians such as Pink Floyd, Herbie Hancock, Keith Emerson, Tangerine Dream and many others where fascinated by the new sounds.

In the 1980's studio technologies and cultural changes brought electronically produced dance music even further to the fore, and a group of pioneering musicians in Detroit and Chicago coined the terms Techno & House music, to this day the leading genres of exclusively electronic dance music.

At the same time, Hip Hop became a worldwide phenomenon, utilizing the newly invented digital sampler as it's core musical weapon, transforming the entire history of recorded music into raw material that can be sampled, manipulated and re-contextualized as new music.

Hip Hop, although evolving separately from House & Techno, had a huge influence on their evolution, and was equally influenced by them in return.

Although conceived in the US, Techno and House exploded in the UK circa 1988, and later Europe, giving birth to countless sub genres of electronic music – Trance, Breakbeat, Rave, Jungle, Drum'n'bass, UK Garage, 2-Step, Acid House, Progressive Trance, Goa Trance, Minimal Techno, Dubstep and much more.