Electronica

a mostly media-made term for encomp-ssing all forms of electronic music, as individual forms of electronic music aren’t popular enough for record stores to devote full sections to. generally, it will be found next to an equally small “dance” section that carries the more danceable stuff, while electronica section carries more listening music.
house, trance, techno, idm, jungle, anything-core, trip-hop, acid/electronic jazz, whatever-bient, and thousands of other obscure genres are generally stuffed into “electronica”
electronica, commonly called techno, is more or less a form of electronic/computer based dance music that is popular with younger crowds. it comes in many forms including trance, acid jazz, jungle, trip-hop, drum and b-ss, house, and countless other sub genres. it is more or less an evolution of 70s disco, but can arguably be traced all the way to the early 1900s. its not known who exactly started electronica, but several djs and artists from detriot, germany, france, and the uk have helped evolve the music form since the late 60s and early 70s when it first appeared to larger amounts of listeners.
“electronica uses catchy beats to get people interested”
in the uk and europe the word electronica usually refers to a specific sub genre of electronic music
(like the word techno which is often mistaken to mean all electronic music). electronica is normally considered more intelligent than dance music. the music is about using technology to create unusual sounds, melodies and heavily processed drums (often in patterns where the same bar is never repeated requiring painstaking programming) these elements are crafted into an intricate and some times emotive piece of music. the results are usually closer ambient or experimental music than they are to dance music.

electronica is often elitist and the scene can come with some pretence. but there are some great electronica tracks out there.
check out beatports electronica section
contrary to the ignorant public that only likes the godawful top 40 and rap-pop stuff, electronica is not synonamous with electronic music. there are multiple genres of electronic music (like there are genres of rock) such as trance, house, techno, jungle, hardcore etc. electronica is a genre of electronic music that encomp-sses “listenable” subgenres like downtempo and idm.
maushawn the wigger: dude, chingy is better ‘den electronica!

electronic fan: oh yeah? well frankie knuckles is coming to your house and is going to do a drive-by on your -ss.
a word the media came up with to refer to all forms of electronic music. electronica is not a music genre. for more information, see ishkur’s guide to electronic music. google it.
neo: there is no electronica.
a word used by the media to describe the revival of electronic music in popularity in the mid to late 1990’s. specifically, it referred to electronic music with a sound influenced by rock (with live drums instead of electronically produced percussion) and a little bit of hip-hop (mainly breaks/samples). this style, while called electronica by the m-ss media, became known as big beat (which i will use to describe “electronica” from now on in the definition) by many others, and it included subgenres such as chemical breaks and funky breaks, too. big beat eventually fell out of fashion, mainly its focus on breaks made it unoriginal; there were only a few dozen breaks that producers used, so it became repet-tive.

however, some of the people making big beat back during it’s heyday are still producing this type of music, most notably the chemical brothers, who won the grammy award for best electronic/dance alb-m in 2006 (for the alb-m “push the b-tton”).
person a: did you listen to that new fatboy slim alb-m? that was some great electronica!

person b: it’s big beat, not electronica. (person b walks away from person a and sighs.) stupid media.

examples of big beat groups: fatboy slim, the chemical brothers, the crystal method, the prodigy (starting in 1997)
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 p-ss-poor attempt at appropriating trance music as something she invented (ray of light). she used that word all the d-mn time in interviews. g-d i hate her. so yeah: there is no such thing as electronica. -ishkur
“i don’t listen to electronica. i do listen to edm, though.”

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