An instrument you play without touching it
Electronic music is older than computers. In 1920 a Russian physicist, Léon Theremin, built an instrument played by moving your hands in the air beside two metal aerials — one hand sets the pitch, the other the volume, and the player never makes contact with it at all. It sounds like a ghost singing, and film-makers put it in science-fiction soundtracks for decades.
Some of the best early electronic music was made with no synthesiser at all. Delia Derbyshire created the Doctor Who theme at the BBC in 1963 out of test oscillators and recorded sounds, every note cut from tape with a razor blade and spliced back together by hand, in an era before anyone could simply play the part.
The machines kept coming. By the 1960s a SYNTH could build a note out of electrical waves instead of a vibrating string, and by the early 1980s you could buy one that sat on a table.
The drum machine nobody wanted
Roland's TR-808 drum machine arrived in 1980, was criticised for sounding nothing like a real kit, sold poorly and was discontinued after about three years. Then it started turning up cheap in second-hand shops, and producers in Detroit, Chicago and New York bought them precisely because they sounded artificial. That booming, endless bass drum and sharp handclap became the backbone of hip-hop and dance music.
Its cousin the TB-303 failed even harder. Sold as a bass machine for guitarists to practise along with, it was fiddly to program and was dropped within a couple of years. Producers in Chicago picked one up, twisted its FILTER knobs and built acid house out of the squelching noise it made.
Three cities, three beats
Dance music grew up in particular places. HOUSE takes its name from the Warehouse, a Chicago club where the DJ kept a steady four-beats-a-bar pulse going for dancers in the early 1980s. TECHNO came from three school friends in Belleville, near Detroit, who set out to make music for a city of machines. In Britain, the RAVE scene of the late 1980s moved all of it into fields and empty warehouses, sometimes with thousands of people and a convoy of cars hunting for the address.
Styles are still told apart mostly by speed and where the weight lands. HOUSE sits around 120 beats a minute; DUBSTEP counts about 140 but puts its WOBBLE on the half-beat, so it feels much slower than it is.
The engineering of the drop
A DROP works because of everything that happens before it. The PRODUCER strips the track back, takes away the BASS, sweeps a FILTER so the sound gets thin and bright, and often speeds a snare roll up until it blurs — every element pointing forwards. Then the whole track returns at once, and the low frequencies that a SUBWOOFER pushes through your chest come back with it.
Nothing new actually happens at the drop. It is the release of tension built in the thirty seconds beforehand, which also explains why it is overwhelming on a FESTIVAL field and does almost nothing through a laptop speaker.