THE FUNDAMENTALS OF EDM
DECONSTRUCTING THE CORE ELEMENTS
The rapid rise of electronic dance music over the past 10 to 15 years has changed the production playing field so much that it has even altered the way that pop music writers and producers think, shedding the established structural norms and embracing the sound and techniques of EDM. So much so that here in 2020, it is hard to differentiate between a Billboard Top 40 track and one by a SoundCloud producer.
Electronic dance music as a whole has a long history, arguably dating back to the late-1970s, stemming from both New York disco and 1980s Detroit techno. But over the course of the 40 years since – and particularly since the adoption of computer-based music-making – the term has diversified, spawning myriad sub-genres, subcultures and production processes. Now the acronym EDM is more of an umbrella term, sheltering hundreds of genres beneath it. Yet there are some core structural ideas that stretch across dubstep, grime, bass music, d’n’b, glitch-hop, trap and the rest. In this feature we’re going to shed a little more light on what these are.
SKRILL SET
One of the clearest examples of this mainstream absorption happened during the 2010s, with the rise of dubstep and its resulting influence on the charts. Despite originating in South London, when it comes to the global dubstep explosion we need to turn our attention to one artist’s brand of the sound in particular. To that end, we have established a dating system based on the release of Skrillex’s , which we consider the ground zero for dubstep: BSM (Before ) and).
