Electronic

In October 1920, in a physics laboratory in Petrograd, Lev Termen noticed that a radio circuit he had built for measuring gases changed pitch when he moved his hand near it. He built a cabinet with two antennas and played it without touching anything. He demonstrated the theremin to Lenin in 1922, toured Europe, and arrived in New York in December 1927 to play Carnegie Hall. RCA licensed it for mass production in 1929. It is the first electronic instrument anyone had heard of, and its wail runs from 1950s science fiction to "Good Vibrations."

In Paris in April 1928, Maurice Martenot, a cellist and wartime radio operator, presented the ondes Martenot: a keyboard, a ring on a wire, and a tone you could bend like a voice. Messiaen and later Radiohead wrote for it. Electrical recording, radio and these first instruments all arrive in the same five years because they are the same technology, the vacuum tube, pointed at music from different sides. The synthesizer is forty years off, but the door is open.

The most important instrument invented in the 1940s was not a guitar. It was the tape recorder. German engineers at AEG had perfected the Magnetophon during the war; in 1945 an American signals officer named Jack Mullin found two of them at a radio station near Frankfurt, shipped them home in pieces, and in 1947 demonstrated them to Bing Crosby. Crosby's Philco radio show went out from tape that October, the first network program to do so. In April 1948 the first Ampex Model 200 machines, built with Crosby's money, were delivered. Within five years every studio in the country would record on tape, and the ability to cut, splice and layer sound would change what a record was.

Les Paul got there first with discs. In his Hollywood garage in 1947 he recorded a guitar part onto an acetate, then played along with it while cutting a second acetate, then a third, until "Lover" had eight guitars on it, some of them recorded at half speed so they played back an octave high. Capitol released it in 1948 and the trade papers did not know what they were hearing. It is the first multitrack pop record, and with tape and his wife Mary Ford he would turn it into a string of hits in the 1950s. Patti Page did the same trick with her own voice on "Confess" in 1948.

In Paris, meanwhile, a radio engineer named Pierre Schaeffer asked what would happen if the recording itself were the instrument. On 5 October 1948 French radio broadcast his "Concert de bruits", including an "Étude aux chemins de fer" built from the recorded sounds of locomotives, looped, cut and reversed. He called it musique concrète. Sampling, hip-hop production and every record built on a loop are its grandchildren.

Electronic music in the 1950s was made in radio stations, universities and one married couple’s Greenwich Village apartment. In Paris, Pierre Schaeffer had already cut and looped recordings of trains into "musique concrète." In Cologne, the West German radio studio went the other way, building sounds from pure electronic tones, and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s "Gesang der Jünglinge" (1956) fused the two, splicing a boy soprano into a sine-wave landscape spread across five loudspeakers. It is the first electronic piece most people would still call beautiful.

In New York, Louis and Bebe Barron built circuits designed to overload and burn out, recorded their death throes to tape and assembled them into the score for MGM’s "Forbidden Planet" (1956): the first all-electronic film score, credited as "electronic tonalities" because the musicians’ union would not call it music. Uptown, RCA engineers Harry Olson and Herbert Belar built the Mark II Sound Synthesizer, a room-sized machine programmed with punched paper tape, and installed it at Columbia University in 1957, where it became the centerpiece of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.

None of this was pop. But Les Paul was already using tape to stack guitars in 1951, Raymond Scott was building sequencers to write commercials, and Sam Phillips was making slapback echo a lead instrument. The idea that a record could be a thing built in a studio rather than a performance captured in one starts here, and it leads through the Beatles and Kraftwerk to every beat made on a laptop.

Electronic music in 1960 lived in university studios and radio workshops, and it was mostly unlistenable on purpose. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop changed that by accident. In 1963 Delia Derbyshire realized Ron Grainer's theme for a new children's science fiction show called "Doctor Who" by cutting and splicing tape of oscillators and a single plucked string, note by note, and it became the first electronic signature tune on television. Millions of British children heard the future every Saturday and did not know it.

Terry Riley's "In C", premiered in San Francisco in November 1964 with Steve Reich in the band, was written for acoustic instruments but thought like a machine: fifty-three short patterns, a pulse, and players who move through them at their own speed. It is the founding document of minimalism and the reason a lot of electronic music since has been built on loops. The Beatles, meanwhile, made "Tomorrow Never Knows" in April 1966 from tape loops running on five machines at once, with the engineers holding pencils to keep them taut.

Robert Moog showed his modular synthesizer at an audio engineering convention in 1964. Wendy Carlos, who had met him there, built a studio in a Manhattan apartment and in late 1968 released "Switched-On Bach" on Columbia Masterworks: Bach played one line at a time on a monophonic Moog and stacked on an eight-track. It sold over a million copies and made the synthesizer a real instrument. Silver Apples, a New York duo with a home-built stack of oscillators, put out one of the first electronic rock records the same year. The Monkees, Simon and Garfunkel and the Byrds all bought Moogs. The 1970s were going to be loud in a new way.

In 1970 a synthesizer was a wall of modules in a university. By 1979 it was in every pop record. The Minimoog started it: portable, affordable, with a pitch wheel so a keyboard player could bend a note like a guitarist. Then the ARP 2600 and Odyssey, the string machines, and at the very end of the decade the first samplers, Australia's Fairlight CMI (1979), which let a musician record a sound and play it on a keyboard. Each of these instruments arrived first in prog and jazz and disco, then everywhere.

The people who made the machines the whole point were in West Germany. Kraftwerk, from Düsseldorf, spent three albums as an experimental rock group and then, in November 1974, released "Autobahn": a twenty-two-minute drive down the motorway made of synthesizers, a vocoder and a rhythm box, and it went to number five on the American album chart. "Trans-Europe Express" (1977) was steel wheels on rails as music; Afrika Bambaataa would build "Planet Rock" on it five years later. "The Man-Machine" (1978) drew the robot pop that would fill the eighties. Around them, what the British press called Krautrock: Can's grooves, Neu!'s motorik beat that never changes, Tangerine Dream's long synthesizer suites, Cluster and Harmonia. Brian Eno went to Germany to work with them and came back with "Ambient 1: Music for Airports" (1978), whose sleeve notes named a new genre: music as ignorable as it is interesting.

Disco made the machines dance. Giorgio Moroder, an Italian in Munich, borrowed a Moog modular and sequenced a bass line that never stops under Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" in the summer of 1977; Eno ran into David Bowie's Berlin studio with the single saying he had heard the future. Cerrone in Paris and Jean-Michel Jarre, whose "Oxygène" (1976) sold twelve million copies with no words at all, made France a synthesizer country. In New York, Suicide, two men with a Farfisa organ and a cheap rhythm box, played CBGB and Max's and put out their debut in December 1977, and it was punk without a guitar. The line from all of this runs to house, techno and every bedroom producer of the next fifty years.

Between 1977 and 1982 Frankie Knuckles played to a Black, largely gay crowd at the Warehouse, a three-storey building at 206 South Jefferson Street in Chicago. He re-edited disco records on reel-to-reel tape, stretched the breaks and added a drum machine underneath. Record shops on the South Side started stocking a bin marked "Warehouse music", then "house music". By 1983 Knuckles had left for his own club, the Power Plant, and Ron Hardy was playing harder and stranger at the Music Box.

Jesse Saunders' "On and On" (1984) is generally called the first house record on vinyl. Knuckles and Jamie Principle's "Your Love", Marshall Jefferson's "Move Your Body" (1986) and Larry Heard's "Can You Feel It" followed on Trax and DJ International. In 1987 Phuture twisted the knobs on a Roland TB-303 bass machine until it squealed, and "Acid Tracks" gave the music a new sub-genre and a name for a British summer.

Forty minutes from Detroit, in Belleville, three high-school friends, Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, were listening to Kraftwerk, Parliament and Italian disco on the Electrifying Mojo's radio show. Atkins' Cybotron and Model 500 ("No UFOs", 1985) built the template; May's "Strings of Life" (1987) gave it strings and grandeur; Saunderson's Inner City ("Good Life", 1988) gave it a chorus. A 1988 British compilation gave it a name: techno.

Britain took all of it and added ecstasy, Ibiza and a smiley face. Danny Rampling's Shoom opened in London in late 1987; the Haçienda, open in Manchester since 1982 and losing money ever since, finally filled. The summer of 1988 became the Second Summer of Love, then the warehouse parties, then the tabloid panic. A Guy Called Gerald's "Voodoo Ray" was the homegrown answer, and 808 State's "Pacific State" followed a year later. Kraftwerk's "Computer World" (1981) had predicted the whole thing, and hip-hop, house and techno all sampled it.

Britain spent 1990 to 1992 in a field. Acid house had become rave, and rave meant twenty thousand people at an illegal free party like Castlemorton Common in May 1992, which is the one that made the government act. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 gave police power to shut down gatherings playing music "characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats". The scene went indoors and split into a dozen sounds. The Prodigy, who had been a rave act, made "The Fat of the Land" and went to number one in America. The Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim and the big beat clubs in Brighton and London put rock drums and hip-hop breaks under acid lines. Underworld's "Born Slippy .NUXX" became the anthem after "Trainspotting" used it. Orbital played Glastonbury in 1994 and made dance music a festival headliner.

Jungle came out of London's Black and mixed-race clubs: breakbeats sped to 160 beats per minute, dub bass, ragga vocals. Goldie's "Timeless" in 1995 made it an album form, and Roni Size and Reprazent's "New Forms" won the 1997 Mercury Prize over "OK Computer". UK garage followed at the end of the decade, the sound that would give the 2000s Craig David, So Solid Crew and, eventually, dubstep and grime. Meanwhile Warp Records in Sheffield released "Artificial Intelligence" in 1992 and a label sampler accidentally named a genre: Aphex Twin, Autechre, Boards of Canada. Aphex Twin's "Selected Ambient Works 85–92" was the sound of a teenager in Cornwall building his own synthesizers, and it is still the record people mean when they say "IDM".

On the continent, techno had gone home to Berlin. Tresor opened in a bank vault in 1991. Basic Channel stripped techno to a pulse and an echo. The Love Parade grew from a few hundred people in 1989 to over a million in the late 1990s. Detroit's second wave, Carl Craig, Jeff Mills and Underground Resistance, Richie Hawtin across the river in Windsor, played Berlin as often as home. Trance, from Frankfurt, was the melodic, hands-in-the-air version that would fill superclubs by 1999. And in Paris two kids in robot helmets released "Homework" in 1997; Daft Punk, Air, Cassius and Étienne de Crécy were "French touch", disco filtered through a sampler, and it made the world want to dance to France.

America came last and came through Moby. "Play", released in May 1999, put Alan Lomax's 1959 field recordings of Southern gospel and blues singers over house beats and licensed every track to an advert or a film. It sold ten million copies to people who had never been to a club. Björk's "Homogenic", with Mark Bell of LFO on beats and an Icelandic string octet, showed what electronic pop could be when a singer treated the machines as an orchestra. Between them they pointed at the 2000s, when the laptop would be the instrument.

Daft Punk's Discovery, in March 2001, turned French house into a candy-colored pop record and gave the decade One More Time. Their pyramid show at Coachella on 29 April 2006, two robots in a glowing triangle running the hits together, is the moment American festival culture decided it wanted dance music on the main stage; Alive 2007 is the recording. Ed Banger Records, run by their manager Pedro Winter, made Justice's Cross the sound of blog house in 2007. Basement Jaxx's Rooty, the Chemical Brothers, Röyksopp, Gorillaz's cartoon pop and Kylie's Can't Get You Out of My Head kept British dance-pop on the radio. The Avalanches' Since I Left You, in November 2000, was made of thousands of samples and sounded like a party heard through a wall. Boards of Canada's Geogaddi, Aphex Twin's Drukqs, Four Tet, Squarepusher, Venetian Snares and Amon Tobin held down the headphone end.

The decade's most important new sound came from South London. UK garage had crossed over with Craig David and So Solid Crew at the turn of the decade; its darker children were grime, with Wiley's Eskimo, Dizzee Rascal's Boy in da Corner and Lethal Bizzle's Pow!, and dubstep, built in Croydon by Skream, Benga, Digital Mystikz and the DMZ nights, with Burial's Untrue in November 2007 as its masterpiece and Rusko and Caspa as the bridge to the American version Skrillex would sell in 2010. Electroclash, with Fischerspooner, Peaches and Ladytron, was the decade's first revival. Berlin's minimal techno, with Ricardo Villalobos, Richie Hawtin and the club Berghain, which opened in 2004, was its longest-running one.

By 2009 the next thing was visible. Trance had peaked with Tiësto playing the opening ceremony of the 2004 Olympics and Paul van Dyk and Armin van Buuren topping the DJ polls. Deadmau5's Ghosts 'n' Stuff, Swedish House Mafia forming in Stockholm, and David Guetta's When Love Takes Over with Kelly Rowland, in 2009, pointed at the EDM boom. Girl Talk and Danger Mouse's Grey Album made the mashup a form. Ableton Live made a laptop a band. And in Los Angeles, Flying Lotus's Los Angeles, his Brainfeeder label and the Low End Theory club night built a beat scene out of J Dilla's ghost.

For about four years, dance music was the biggest business in American pop. Skrillex won three Grammys in February 2012 for a sound built out of digital screeching. Avicii's Levels in 2011 and Wake Me Up in 2013 put folk melodies over four-to-the-floor kicks and sold everywhere. Swedish House Mafia, Calvin Harris, Zedd, Martin Garrix and Marshmello filled Las Vegas residencies and festival fields. Major Lazer's Lean On in 2015 was streamed more than almost anything ever had been.

It burned out fast, as booms do, and what remained was better. Disclosure's Settle in 2013 brought UK garage back into pop. Jamie xx made In Colour, a record about the memory of raving. Flume, Kaytranada, Four Tet, Floating Points, Jon Hopkins, Caribou and Bicep built dance music you could sit down to. James Blake turned dubstep's low end into chamber music for a cracked voice.

Underneath that, techno got its history back. Berlin's clubs became cultural institutions, formally recognised when a German court ruled in 2016 that Berghain counted as a place of culture rather than entertainment. A new generation of DJs made the scene's queer and Black roots visible again: Honey Dijon, the Black Madonna, Peggy Gou, Nina Kraviz, Charlotte de Witte. Chicago footwork went global with DJ Rashad's Double Cup in 2013, and his death the next year left a hole.

At the experimental end, Aphex Twin returned with Syro in 2014 and won a Grammy. Arca, Oneohtrix Point Never, Holly Herndon and SOPHIE built the deconstructed-club sound: music that sounds like a machine having feelings. Flying Lotus, Thundercat and Kaytranada tied electronic music back to jazz and funk. And in 2013 Daft Punk did the opposite of all of it, hiring session players from the seventies to make Random Access Memories, which won Album of the Year.

Electronic music spent 2020 and 2021 mourning the dancefloor and 2022 onward celebrating getting it back. Fred again.. built a career out of exactly that: field recordings of voices from the internet, chopped into house tracks on his "Actual Life" records, one of which is literally called "Marea (We've Lost Dancing)". His Boiler Room set in London in 2022 spread far outside dance music, and by 2023 he was closing Coachella with Skrillex and Four Tet.

Britain went back to its own history. UK garage, jungle and drum and bass came back through PinkPantheress, whose songs are ninety seconds long and built from Y2K breakbeats, through Nia Archives, and through Eliza Rose's "B.O.T.A.", a bassline house record that went to number one in the UK in 2022. Jamie xx, Overmono, Bicep and Barry Can't Swim made records for actual rooms with actual sound systems.

The centre of gravity moved south, though. Amapiano, built in the townships of Gauteng out of deep house, kwaito and a rubbery log-drum bassline, went from South African taxis to the entire world. Kabza De Small and DJ Maphorisa built the sound and Uncle Waffles made it a spectacle. Tyla, from Johannesburg, took "Water" into the American top ten and won the first Grammy ever awarded for Best African Music Performance.

And in February 2021 Daft Punk, who had shaped forty years of this, posted an eight-minute video in which one robot blew the other up, and quit.