Raw Music Material

Book excerpt: Electronic music is seriously challenging the reign of pop and rock music, aging art forms that are dying at the hands of multi-national music-industry giants. Raw Music Material tells you why, presenting 44 of these new cultural figures in images, words, and sound. Arsene Saheurs, a Zurich-based photographer, has photographed the DJs at Rohstofflager, one of Zurich's hippest clubs, for the past five years, creating an archive of the international faces behind the electronic revolution in music. Statements in the DJs' own words on their lives and their music add up to a history of techno, drum'n'bass, and electronic music. Read the story of a musical paradigm shift, instigated by a couple of black middle-class boys in Detroit who listened to Kraftwerk and European electro music, and started to use computers and synthesizers to create tracks that were the minimalist, reduced essence of funk, soul, disco, and electronica. In the U.S., they remained an underground cult, but in post-cold war Europe they found a rapt audience, in particular in Germany and the Netherlands. Soon, techno gained an astonishing momentum in Europe; a dense network of labels, clubs, and artists evolved in the early 90s, breaking the hegemony of melody- and vocal-driven rock and pop music and their sentimental narratives. A new club culture evolved that was based neither on disco nor on new-wave blueprints. DJs became producers and vice versa, abandoning traditional notions of authorship and performance. The texts included herein illuminate this astonishing phenomenon, an eponymous convergence of African-American grooves and European will to experimentation. On the two enclosed CDs, listen to some of the DJsfavorite tracks -- after all, it's not enough to just read about groove and funk. Raw Music Material provides an indispensable and entertaining overview of electronic music today. It will stimulate both your brain and your ears.