Tracing the Analogue Promise of 21st Century Electronic Dance Music: An Uneasy Reconciliation of Tradition and Technology (original) (raw)

Mention electronic dance music and perhaps one of the first thoughts that springs to mind is a DJ performing with vinyl records or a musician playing a synthesizer. Although these might be somewhat anachronistic, stereotypical tropes by modern standards, they are nerveless still considered iconic concepts and practices amongst many fans and practitioners of electronic dance music alike, stubbornly persisting even in the face of significant advances in music technology. Vinyl records remain prized, scarce resources that seamlessly accrue financial and subcultural value, while certain items of music production hardware are lionised: their sonic output considered desirable and the distinct creative practices they facilitate deemed traditional and thus authentic. This paper asserts that while such ideas are often reliant upon the rhetoric of tradition and ritual, they are also facilitated by digital, internet-based communications platforms, and so ironically could not exist and flourish in their current form without much of the technology they position themselves against. Furthermore, discourse surrounding these concepts and practices is not without issue, and over the previous decade has contributed to increasing fractures within the larger, underground electronic dance music community. By combining textual analysis, virtual and traditional ethnography, the following paper attempts to trace the roots of this phenomenon which, for the sake of discussion, is here referred to as the analogue promise: an emergent and problematic strand of discourse exhibited by certain electronic dance music practitioners wherein nostalgia is employed as a forge for notions of subcultural identity, authenticity and exclusivity.

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