Electronic music tasting menu
Right now I'm teaching music technology to a lot of classical musicians. I came up outside the classical pipeline, and am always surprised to be reminded how insulated these folks are from the rest of the culture. I was asked today for some electronic music recommendations by a guy who basically never listens to any of it, and I expect I'll be asked that many more times in this job. So I put together this playlist. It's not a complete, thorough, or representative sampling of anything; it mostly reflects my own tastes. In more or less chronological order:
Delia Derbyshire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyUkmxy5VMI
This lady did cooler stuff with tape recorders than most of us are doing with computers. See her in action. Here's a proto-techno beat she made in 1971.
Morton Subotnick
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EelvKqhu1M4
I don't enjoy Subotnick's music particularly, but I studied with him at NYU, and he's a remarkable gent.
The Beatles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xL1ffMlzKY
They were a techno band.
Donna Summer & Georgio Moroder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhKqs7dUMa8
Sound On Sound has a good article on this track's production and broader significance.
David Byrne & Brian Eno
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lww3LftQaw
Both of these guys are great, but they did their best work in combination.
Herbie Hancock
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHhD4PD75zY
It's a rare jazz musician who's willing to engage with hip-hop, and it's a vanishingly rare one who helped to shape it.
Run-DMC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo5-74dWGS0
They were my favorite rappers when I was twelve, and they're still up there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHixChYgGRI
If I had to pick one piece of music to represent what was good about the nineties, this would be it.
Aphex Twin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i524g6JMkwI
My friend Marc loves this album so much that he wrote a book about it.
J Dilla
http://youtu.be/5nO7IA1DeeI
The siren that Dilla samples all the time comes from a Mantronix track, which itself is comprised entirely of samples of other tracks, which are themselves built from samples of yet other tracks.