Computer Love

For the past few weeks I've been tinkering with an electro dance piece. EDM is pretty much the opposite of my stated musical aim which, of course, is why I'm working on it. I want to explore the way modern dance music exemplifies the machine as the dominant symbol of our lives. The machine haunts modernity, which both fears and worships it as a paradigm of reason and purity, but also of brutality and sterility. And it really does dominate – not just via cars, iPhones and the million other gadgets which surround us, but through the machine-like processes that structure our lives at every turn: applying for a job, booking a doctor's appointment, the school timetable, taking out a loan, and so on. Such ubiquity can hardly help but bleed into our psyches; it colours the way we see ourselves and the way we represent our world through art.

From the point of view of electronic pop, I keep coming back to two classic tracks. First of all, Kraftwerk's Computer Love. 

This fascinatingly enigmatic piece of music manages to celebrate and mock the emerging technological age without ever picking a side. It is both banal and haunting, innocent and sordid, soaked through with loneliness, and yet curiously buoyant and moving; the music shimmers – not like light glinting off the ripples of a stream, but with the chilly purity of city lights reflected on the windscreen of a luxury car. And despite the supple pulse of its rhythm, there is a terrible stasis, a frigidity, at the song's heart. It presents us with a word where everything happens but nothing is done.

The second track is Donna Summer's I Feel Love. 

At first blush this seems to take a very different approach. It's all about love, isn't it? Passion, emotion, and so on. What could be more human than that? But actually the song's fundamental appeal lies in the disconcerting clash of Summer's soulful wailing against the mechanised throb of Giorgio Moroder's backing track. And if that juxtaposition seems perfectly ordinary to us forty years later it's mainly because the song set the template for vast amounts of subsequent pop: a woman coos platitudes about love while computers grind relentlessly through their programs. The lasting impression is one of helplessness. Summer's voice is a ghost in the machine, ecstatic, yearning, but totally ineffectual. It's a musical version of Epiphenomenalism: the philosophical theory that consciousness is a mere by-product of physical processes. The mind fancies itself to be in control of things but that is an illusion. Really it's just a helpless spectator. Indeed, since the 70s electronic music has taken things a step further. Digital methods of manipulating vocals (pitch-shifting, auto-tuning, stutter-editing, etc) constantly remind us that what sounds like a human voice is really just a heap of bytes in a computer file. The ghost itself is an illusion; it is merely another part of the machine.

From this point of view, EDM is a thoroughly alienated music. It can be knowingly alienated, as in the case of Kraftwerk, or unconsciously alienated, as with I Feel Love. But either way its underlying function is to normalise a reductive, materialist conception of life. As such, it helps reinforce the dominant world-view of our society: neo-liberalism. The same forces that drag people into work each morning drag them onto the dance floor at the weekend. EDM is ideology.

That, at least, is the angle I'm interested in exploring. (There are other ways of looking at it – for example, as an attempt to create an ecstatic spirituality out of the very conditions that are supposed to crush such things). It's meant listening to a fair bit of electronic pop, looking for ideas to parody (or, more accurately, rip off). Overwhelmingly what I've heard is the triumph of musical production over musical ideas. The music itself is usually painfully basic, but it is produced to within an inch of its life to keep things interesting. And, to be fair the amount of effort that goes into this is pretty impressive. Even a run of the mill track generally utilises a whole arsenal of filters, delays and effects to hold the listener's attention. I'm struggling to match it, given the equipment at my disposal – as you can plainly hear in this nowhere near finished excerpt of my efforts so far. But I'll keep chipping away and see what I end up with.

Finally, here are a couple of tracks I've stumbled across in my “research” that I think are pretty good.

Hmm. I wanted to link to Caint Use My Phone by Erykah Badu, but the Licensing Police seem to have kept it off YouTube. It's on Spotify, if you have that. Instead, here's Hana by Asa-Chang & Junray. It's not really EDM, but so what?