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
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
I don’t enjoy Subotnick’s music particularly, but I studied with him at NYU, and he’s a remarkable gent.
The Beatles
They were a techno band.
Donna Summer & Georgio Moroder
Sound On Sound has a good article on this track’s production and broader significance.
David Byrne & Brian Eno
Both of these guys are great, but they did their best work in combination.
Herbie Hancock
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
They were my favorite rappers when I was twelve, and they’re still up there.
If I had to pick one piece of music to represent what was good about the nineties, this would be it.
Aphex Twin
My friend Marc loves this album so much that he wrote a book about it.
J Dilla
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.
Derbyshire is, of course, iconic for doing the realization of Ron Grainer’s score for the original Doctor Who theme.
“Switched-on Bach”, the first and the greatest!