Talk:Electronica

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Rewind: Electronica was once (is) a genre.

Anyone who is old enough to remember knows when electronica emerged and what it was; in terms of it being everything electronic dance music was not, at that time.

This is the earliest supporting doc I can find online but it serves to make the point:

"In 1995, Electronica has become a nanotechnology, refrying the atoms of other musics into strange new hybrids. In the process, a lattice of invisible, interconnected networks has emerged to link disparate but like-minded musicians, labels and festivals. Rob Young maps the co-ordinates of the new urban music" WIRE

Only later (US music industry) did the word electronica start to be used as an umbrella term for all forms of so called "vernacular" electronic music (non-academic) including many styles of electronic dance music. In this sense I agree that it is incorrect to use the word electronica to refer to a collection of musics which can clearly be seen as specific genres in their own right. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 143.117.78.169 (talk) 21:16, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

• I second this. The U.S. definition is all wrong. In Europe, if you mention Electronica, you mean a genre similar to IDM, basically most of the tunes you find on Warp Records. It is less wild than some of Aphex Twin's tracks - for example Autechre, Boards of Canada and Mouse on Mars are considered Electronica. It is not an umbrella term for electronic music. The umbrella term that includes any kind of subgenres is simply called "electronic music" (and not even "EDM"). Drum & Bass, EBM, Dubstep, Ambient, IDM, Eurodance, House, Minimal... they're not Electronica. They're "siblings". So this Wikipedia article is completely wrong and should be deleted or rewritten. 85.4.231.155 (talk) 08:26, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree as well —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.49.140.159 (talk) 21:51, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

history info is waaayy incorrect

This article talks about how electronica started in the 1990s and blah blah blah. That may or may not be when the word electronica may have originally been coined, but it's hardly the beginning of the genre of electronica music. Any discussion of electronica's origins is completely inaccurate without lots of info on the ground breaking and highly influential work of groups like kraftwerk, synergy and others in the 70's and 80's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraftwerk

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synergy_%28music%29 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.3.198.58 (talk) 10:43, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

I utterly and totally agree with the statement that you can't talk about Electronica and not mention Kraftwerk who had been doing Electronica from the mid-1970s. What about Tangerine Dream? Or even Vangelis or Jean Michel Jarre for that matter? 01:53, 14 October 2014 (UTC)~Valizan — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.249.10.105 (talk)

Where this term was born and where it's used?

In the mid-1990s, electronica began to be used by MTV and major record labels to describe mainstream electronic dance music made by such artists as..

I take the article refers to MTV USA and record labels in USA. So why this information is missing from the article? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.195.121.45 (talk) 20:24, 23 March 2008

Thoughts...

Isn't it kind of strange how every artist mentioned in this article is NOT "electronica" according to their own wikipedia pages. This inconsistency will surely confuse a lot of readers. As I see it now, this genre is like an utterly superfluous genre that is like a layer above other styles of electronic music.

So instead of merging this article with electronic music, wouldn't it be better to make it clear that this "genre" is a label used by mainstream media to market some of the more commercial electronic music artists. Because after all electronica is "real" since it's actually used by a lot of people. It's just not a genre used to document music. As it is now, this article makes no sense to anyone unfamiliar with electronic music.

I might be worth mentioning that Discogs categorizes everything as first a "genre", which would be "electronic" for all electronic music, and then a "style", which can be trance, house or drum n bass for example. And electronica has no place there at all. It's basically how allmusic categorize it but they call it electronica instead of electronic music. However, according to this article electronica is a style of electronic music, although all the artists claimed to be electronica in fact produces other styles of electronic music.

The point is that this article is inconsistent with other wikipedia articles and should be changed to say it's basically a "tag" for some artists, but I don't think it should be merged since it's not really used synonymously with electronic music in any way. At the moment this article is kind of a mess I think, isolated from other electronic music articles since people keeps removing electronica as a genre on artist pages anyway. Bootini (talk) 14:01, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

That's seems to be a personal opinion and remains OR unless it can be sourced. --neon white talk 20:17, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

I fully agree with the above comment. Thank you, Bootini. Doktor Who (talk) 00:30, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Yup, truly second this. Electronica was never meant to be a genre and was only used for a brief period of time among snobs to refer to IDM-alike (which is one doubtful genre as well but at least it's widely used and accepted to mostly label offbeat techno and electro). However the biggest nonsense is putting the glitch under it and then putting microhouse under glitch.. --Z99 (talk) 16:20, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

From my experience Allmusic don't really know what they're talking about with genres half the time, and this is even worse with mainstream music magazines like Q and so on. I know Wikipedia likes sourcing from "official media" like these but this makes Wikipedia pretty confused when it comes to anything music-related. Allmusic et al probably just use Electronica when they mean some subgenre of techno or whatever but don't know any better. Harshmustard (talk) 12:37, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

User Bootini is completely right. Electronica is just the word an uneducated part of the american media used to refer to electronic music, or some of its subgenres, back in the '80s. Electronic music as a genre is way older than that. Please make this voice a redirect to Electronic music. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.61.239.119 (talk) 21:33, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

There is no such thing as Electronica

As a long time electronic music fan I totally agree with this opinion:

Electronica does not exist. Not as a genre or a description. It was coined by the North American music press to refer to the second wave of electronic music's explosion in the late 90s, and exists purely as a marketing buzzword, not any actual quantifiable branch of music (the first wave of electronic music, incidentally, they called 'techno', and, having driven the word into the ground beyond all sense of meaning, they couldn't keep using it if they wished to re-market the music). Daft Punk, Fatboy Slim, Prodigy's 'Fat of the Land', Chemical Brothers and other big-time stars of that period were all called "electronica" at one point or another, but the person who really popularized it in the public consciousness was Madonna and her shallow, William Orbit-produced piss-poor attempt at appropriating trance music as something she invented (Ray of Light). She used that word all the damn time in interviews. God I hate her. So yeah: There is no such thing as electronica. I want each and every one of you to stop calling it that, because it makes you sound like a god damn retard. If you want to talk about the music as a whole, simply call it what it is: "electronic music" (or EDM--Electronic Dance Music--for the club/rave stuff). This is a PSA from the Official Electronic Music Genre Standards and Classifications Consortium.

Source: ishkur's guide to electronic music

Electronica carries a wide variety of genres - regardless of which, and most not necessarily made for dance - however, it is not a single genre.

Malmsimp (talk) 08:22, 17 October 2020 (UTC)

Terminology

I agree with everyone that's said "Electronica" is just a marketing term for a wide range of largely unrelated electronic music genres. There is no evidence to support any creative innovations or cultural movements unique strictly to an "Electronica" genre. Please make this redirect to Electronic music and include the relevant information from this page there instead. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.67.16.190 (talk) 09:44, 10 July 2015 (UTC)

I second this. There's no reason for this article to exist, it's misleading and simply perpetuates a non-descriptive and non-informative label. ShadowLeopardBeetleweightGuy (talk) 21:24, 22 January 2023 (UTC)

@ShadowLeopardBeetleweightGuy, it's strange that you agree with the comment from 2015, when the article has been revised several times since then. 2015 version was really quite bad and inconsistent. The current article is much better. It does not perpetuate the term, it collects information about it as being already perpetuated. The term has been in use for decades on beatport or allmusic. The article is actually written and sourced on how the term described in the allmusic's printed in 2004 electronic music genres guide. It's a pretty narrow thing and genre if you don't treat it in US-definitions and so the article that writes about it is informative and not misleading. Solidest (talk) 04:27, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

From Ishkur's guide to electronic music genres (open the dropdown menu, go to the search bar and type in "electronica"):

"Electronica does not exist. Not as a genre or a description. It was coined by the North American music press to refer to the second wave of electronic music's explosion in the late 90s, and exists purely as a marketing buzzword, not any actual quantifiable branch of music (the first wave of electronic music, incidentally, they called 'techno', and, having driven the word into the ground beyond all sense of meaning, they couldn't keep using it if they wished to re-market the music). Daft Punk, Fatboy Slim, Prodigy's 'Fat of the Land', Chemical Brothers and other big-time stars of that period were all called "electronica" at one point or another, but the person who really popularized it in the public consciousness was Madonna and her shallow, William Orbit-produced piss-poor attempt at appropriating trance music as something she invented (Ray of Light). She used that word all the damn time in interviews. God I hate her. So yeah: There is no such thing as electronica. I want each and every one of you to stop calling it that, because it makes you sound like a god damn retard. If you want to talk about the music as a whole, simply call it what it is: "electronic music" (or EDM--Electronic Dance Music--for the club/rave stuff). This is a PSA from the Official Electronic Music Genre Standards and Classifications Consortium."

Its continued use has always been as a catch-all for ease of marketing, so that they don't have to have dozens upon dozens of individual categories for each genre.

I have never heard of it being used as the name for a specific genre. You're going to have to link to an example. ShadowLeopardBeetleweightGuy (talk) 06:08, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

Ishkur is just a passionate amateur who has compiled his guide and described the genres in an often mocking way, while coming up with a number of self-invented genres and then giving up on some of them between 2.0, 2.5, 3.0 versions of his guide. His weight for wikipedia is hardly of any significance. I've already given you two links with the above examples. The article itself, which I updated 2 years ago, also has sources with examples. The AMG guide explicitly cites a dozen albums in the style and devotes several pages to describing this concrete scene and style. You can also check out the European music magazines of the 90s (on archive.org) - the term is widely used there in exactly this sense. Beatport and Allmusic capture and continue this tradition. And if you're saying you've never faced the genre, I'm guessing you probably haven't dealt with 90s electronic or "non-EDM" club/dance music at all. Solidest (talk) 06:45, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

Desmond Williams (musician)

Can somebody please fix this start article? Bearian (talk) 21:50, 11 January 2021 (UTC)