Music Definitions

Electronica : genres

Electronic music, especially in the late 1990s fractured into many genres, styles and sub-styles, too many to list here, and most of which are included in the main list. Although there are no hard and fast boundaries, broadly speaking we can identify the experimental and classical styles: electronic art music, musique concrète; the industrial music and synth pop styles of the 1980s; styles that are primarily intended for dance such as techno, house, trance, drum and bass and styles that are intended more as experimental styles or for home listening such as IDM, glitch and trip-hop. The proliferation of personal computers beginning in the 1980s brought about a new genre of electronic music, known loosely as chip music or bitpop. These style, produced initially using specialized sound chips in PCs such as the Commodore 64, grew primarily out of the demoscene. The latter categories such as IDM, glitch and chip music share much in common with the art and musique concrète styles which predate it by several decades.

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