I get a fair amount of questions from the students in my UEMP (Ultimate Electronic Music Production) course each year. Often these are questions about specific genres or production approaches or synths. This Fall, though, I got some bigger-picture ones, so why not share a couple of the answers here.

Q:  “Would it be possible to create another branch on the tree [of origins of electronic music] in our modern world of electronic music?”

A:  Technically and in theory everything is possible. Practically, quite difficult; it’s difficult to not be fundamentally influenced by what we already know. I believe a completely new, thick branch (directly growing out of the double-trunk of the Electronic Music Tree rooted in France and Germany) will / can only be grown by a non-musician artist, from another discipline, like painting, sculpture, dance or poetry. One could argue that Schaeffer, Stockhausen, etc. made significant progress thank to their not-purely-musical interests. The less someone is exposed to music, the more likely they won’t be influenced by the genres already out there (any existing “branches”), especially the 1950s-70s roots, and can think artistically but freely. The only time the origins of an entirely new direction in electronic music was not tied to the 70s and was a musical in its source (Jamaica), was Jungle (then Drum & Bass) in the early ’90s.  The unrelated components being in the right time and place and actually cross-influencing one another – such coincidental cultural collaborations are uncommon in today’s too-multinational world. Though, maybe we could still give a Model D and a zoom recorder to the indigenous tribes of the Amazon who live far away from modern civilizations, collaborate with them and see what comes out of it…

At the same time, a new smaller branch (a branch growing out of a large branch of the tree) might come from a musically-oriented (trained or not) person in a different musical environment (possibly not even electronic music). Again, the less they know about electronic music, the less likely they will be effected by what has existed before them, thus, the more likely they will create something uninfluenced by existing electronic music. Still, it’s likely that we will be able to trance the results back to one of the main trunks of the tree (i.e. GRM, BBC, JMJ, Kraftwek, Vangelis, Tomita, Eno, etc.).

Like I often say in the beginning of UEMP semesters: the technology to create something groundbreaking and original intentionally break has been in front of us, for many years. Powerful computers and more free plugins that one could explore in a lifetime are now in our pockets. Affordable technology to write the music of the future is reality, even for the average college student. But you have to fight the part of your DNA that always makes you create music similarly to the way you normally create and listen. Producing Musique concrète has the ability to take you very far from all that…  listen to your Musique concrète work a half year later and you might be surprised by what you had created. An inspiring point to start from.

Q: “If Kraftwerk hadn’t popped when they did, how does Julius believe things would have turned out, since he was exposed there?”
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Q: If Kraftwerk never existed, where do you think electronic music would be today? Would it be at a previous point on the electronic music timeline or would it have gone in a completely different direction?

A: Well, I’m not that old to have been there… I grew up in the 80s as a small kid when Kraftwerk was already around for a decade and well-known in Europe… so their influence on most everything-in-4/4 in electronic music was a done deal by then. But I’ll take a stab at hypothesizing about this super-interesting proposition.

It is truly very interesting to think about what would have happened to electronic music if Krafwerk’s Autobahn wouldn’t have received much attention, or hadn’t even been released… or if Ralf und Florian wouldn’t have met or even existed. Well, let’s break this down based on the components that Kraftwerk combined into a pioneering new direction in electronic music:

• The 4/4 time signature would have become popular in electronic music in some fashion anyway, since it was the middle ages’ 2/4 folk dance rhythms then the ’60s disco’s straightforward patterns that evolved into 4/4 dance-able rhythms – the point being dance-able – in other genres as well.
• Sequenced, quantized basslines and arps would have been sooner or later migrated from Jarre’s and Schultze’s kitchen to other, more rhythm-based genres. Kraftwerk was inspired by the persistent, “quantized” action of mechanical machines, but certainly not the only one who got inspiration from heavy industries.
• Vocoders were in use even before Kraftwerk, although without the band and its influence on others (e.g. YMO, G. Moroder), vocoders might have actually disappeared earlier.
• Minimalism in itself was around in painting, sculpture, architecture, film-making, etc. before the 1970s (let alone the concept of wabi-sabi from centuries before). Terry Riley was already active before Kraftwerk and other musical creators of the ’70s were also making very different type of music on minimalist principles (e.g. Brian Eno’s ambient).
• The idea of “robots” making music…  now this was a big one. It was big because this concept was able to connect the minimal aesthetic with most people, who were curious about the future. And when I say people, I mean nearly everyone – just think about all the major sci-fi movie franchises that originated in the 70s. Shortly after the Moon landing and with portable computers starting to appear, it was the perfect timing for everyone to entertain the idea “The Future is Now”.  Thank to people’s curiosity about robots and robot-like musicians, unlike “untouchable” high-artists and abstract minimalists, Kraftwerk was able to bring minimalism into the mainstream. This is the aspect without which I’m not sure if the band’s music would have had the enormous influence on popular music. And without that, the genres that later evolved (and still evolve) from Kraftwerk’s aesthetic (first and foremost techno) might exist only as minor, underground sub-genres these days.

Yellow Magic Orchestra was, self-admittedly, the Japanese version of the German robots. What if these gentle “robots” infused in jazz chords would have broken into the mainstream before Kraftwerk, and Dusseldorf would have only remained a national treasure?

I believe that without Kraftwerk, the precision and angular German-ness might be present only at a smaller proportion in electronic music. Four-on-the-floor wouldn’t automatically mean that it’s quantized kicks on downbeats, sequenced basslines wouldn’t be necessarily repeated as 1/8th or 1/16th notes or as octave-alternating straightforward sequences, bass lines wouldn’t predominantly have short decay and very short-release VCA envelopes – as they usually do today. In other words, a higher proportion of electronic music would be less “tight”, and maybe more… …French.  Maybe softer, likely more textural, probably groovy and rhythmically varied yet easily dance-able genres would be the default “EDM”. That is, at least until 1990 and DnB in the U.K. and later in 2010 Skrillex bringing rhythm-based electronic music into the U.S. mainstream. (But wait, would DnB have been the same without the counter-culture role it had in Eurodance times? And, would Skrillex have made the same debut album in 2010 Kraftwerk’s then techno’s infuence on baby Sonny during the 1990s?  This is the paradox of synthception…  noone knows…  but likely, he’d be shredding metal today.)

In any case, while Germany’s influence was successfully pushed back in other areas during the 20th Century, they might have unknowingly won the long-term cultural influence on electronic music. Their sharp character has influenced other areas as well; just think about cars. The passionate and adventurous Italians’ slogans are “Only those who dare, truly live – We are the Competition.” (Ferrari), and “Expect the Unexpected” (Lamborghini). Meanwhile, BMW’s slogan since WW2 has been “The Ultimate Driving Machine” (despite of this being a enormous lie). The automotive world could have been as graceful without the past 30 years’ German cars as the world of modern Japanese robots is without German robots in it.

I truly love the music of Kraftwerk and I’m glad that it got popular. Though looking at their influence today, maybe too popular?

An even more interesting conundrum is the role of counter-culture. Let’s say, if without Kraftwerk, electronic music would have evolved to be less quantized and less “raw” during the past 5 decades, would have various types of non-electronic music tried to counteract it less? With Disco Demolition Night never taking place, Afrika Bambaataa not having anything to steal, the Pet Shop Boys playing bass on bass guitar, and DJs having to know at least a tiny bit about harmonies, electronic music skeptics haters would have had to look for different targets… or just chill and make even more rock and pop. If a softer, more romantic form of electronic music had been the norm throughout the 1980s and ’90s, would have a different set of genres become more minimal, tight, quantized, aggressive by now? Or would we have reached the current aesthetic of block-y, rigid on/off notes in electronic music anyway, given the black-or-white binarity that’s already woven into so many areas of our overly-practical life today? This is as big of a philosophical question as you can expect to face when you hypothetically re-write the history of electronic music…  so I’d rather look for the answers from Nietzsche Descartes…