The Rise of Conceptronica
Baroque with details, and teeming with the voices and instrumental contributions of over 20 collaborators, producer Chino Amobi’s 2017 opus Paradiso drew direct inspiration from epic narratives like The Odyssey and Dante’s Inferno, along with complex video games like Final Fantasy 7. Like many of his peers making conceptual electronica, Amobi’s ambition sprawls laterally into parallel forms. As he explains from his Richmond, Virginia home, he envisions merging Paradiso with his current project—a book/soundtrack titled Eroica, based on his fine arts master thesis—and developing the composite into spin-offs in other media: a film, a graphic novel, a play, an art exhibition, even garment production. “It’s like these layers upon layers,” he says.
I’m not exactly sure when I first noticed that electronic music’s conceptual bent had gone into overdrive. But at some point during the 2010s it seemed like a steady stream of press releases started arriving in my inbox that read like the text at the entrance of a museum exhibit. I also noticed that the way I would engage with these releases actually resembled a visit to a museum or gallery: often listening just once, while reading reviews and interviews with the artist that could be as forbiddingly theoretical as a vintage essay from Artforum. These conceptual works rarely seemed like records to live alongside in a casual, repeat-play way. They were statements to encounter and assimilate, developments to keep abreast of. Their framing worked as a pitch to the browsing consumer, not so much to buy the release but to buy into it.
Conceptronica isn’t a genre as such, but more like a mode of artistic operation—and audience reception—that cuts across the landscape of hip music, from high-definition digital abstraction to styles like vaporwave and hauntology. Concept-driven projects offer a way for artists to compete in an attention economy that is over-supplied while reflecting their enthusiasm for a vast array of ideas. Most of the leading conceptronica artists have been through art school or postgraduate academia, and they’re comfortable speckling both their work and their conversation with references to critical theory and philosophy. During our interview, Chino Amobi brings up everyone from the black studies and performance scholar Fred Moten to the ’90s cyber theory collective CCRU. Hyperdub producer Lee Gamble likewise enthuses to me about the inspiration sparked by listening to an unofficial audiobook of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, a deliriously dense philosophical work about capitalism, desire, and schizophrenia.
This high-powered discourse contrasts with the relatively down-to-earth vernacular of ’90s IDM luminaries like Aphex Twin’s Richard D. James and Luke Vibert, whose records were more likely to be daubed with puerile humour and porn references than concepts from poststructuralism. Another major difference between conceptronica and old-school IDM is that the latter could be used as a relaxing background shimmer, a spur to unthinking reverie rather than intellectual musing.
Fluent in the critical lingua franca used in art institutions and academia worldwide, conceptronic artists know how to self-curate: They can present projects in terms that translate smoothly into proposals and funding applications. Which is handy, because what sustains these artists is not revenue from record releases but performances on an ever-growing international circuit of experimental music festivals, along with subsidized concerts at museums and universities. Often trained in the visual arts rather than music theory, conceptronica artists increasingly resemble a figure like Matthew Barney, whose work involves multiple media and is staged on a grand scale, more than IDM pioneers like Autechre, whose focus has always been overwhelmingly on sonic experimentation.
Despite these differences, ’90s IDM and ’10s conceptronica are similarly positioned in terms of their relationship with the electronic dance mainstream. IDM was a minority-interest adjunct to the drug-fueled rave culture. Its producers took aspects of functional styles like techno but muted their dance imperative to create something that worked as introspective home-listening. Or they would push the formal features of genres like jungle—the chopped, sped-up breakbeats—towards dysfunctional extremes, making them both challengingly avant-garde and slapstick silly.
Conceptronica, likewise, often has a warped-mirror relationship with contemporary dance styles: hence the rise of the term “deconstructed club.” Associated with Berlin’s PAN label, a hub for conceptronic artists, Amnesia Scanner and M.E.S.H. have both gleaned inspiration from the bombastic Eurotechno sound known as hardstyle. Fellow PAN artist Stine Janvin’s Fake Synthetic Music is an oblique homage to rave based entirely on manipulating the sound of her own voice. Others warp and mutilate hedonistic rap and R&B styles: Venezuelan producer Arca’s early track “Doep” resembled 50 Cent slipping into a coma.
Where IDM was a running commentary on rave and club trends as they went down in real time, conceptronica is also able to ransack the archive of dance history. On tracks like “The Shape of Trance to Come,” Lorenzo Senni, an Italian producer who’s recorded for legendary experimental electronica labels Warp and Mego, remodels the Euro style that filled ’90s superclubs with fluffy euphoria. Lee Gamble’s 2012 debut for PAN, Diversions 1994-96, consisted of memory mirages of jungle raves in the English Midlands—not a period-precise retro recreation, but more like a ritual conjuring of the intensities he experienced during his misspent teenage years.
Conceptual electronic music still draws sustenance from dance music at its most mental and mindless—beats purpose-built for druggy all-night bacchanals. But although it uses the rhythmic tools of body music, it doesn’t primarily aim to elicit a physical response. It’s music to contemplate with your ears, to think about and think with. In that sense, it’s closer to an art exhibition of photographs or video taken at a bygone club than actual club music. Gamble’s Diversions, in fact, closely parallels the visual artist Mark Leckey’s celebrated found-footage work Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, an elegy for British working class dance cultures like rave and Northern Soul.
Amnesia Scanner—the Berlin-based duo Martti Kalliala and Ville Haimala—bring up a visual artform, albeit a lowbrow and pulpy one, when describing their work: video games. They compare Amnesia Scanner to “a game design studio.” The idea of “point of view” guides them during the recording and mixing process, in which they use binaural elements to simulate 360-degree surround sound. “While it’s us building this world, we are not in the center of it,” says Haimala.
“World-building” is one of the buzz terms of ’10s left-field music, popping up in interviews and reviews so frequently it’s verging on cliché. There was even an album titled World Building, by the enigmatic dark ambient artist White Goblin, released via the international netlabel Quantum Natives. Several artists on Quantum, like Recsund’s Clifford Sage, work in game design and 3D animation: Their music is conceived in tandem with the videos they place on YouTube and is meant to be experienced as a single unified artform.
The ambition to build worlds clearly owes a lot to the pervasiveness of games as a generational youth pastime. It also connects with the popularity of young adult fiction and dystopian fantasy franchises in television and film. Digital audio software provides similar superpowers to CGI: The user can conjure the illusion of moving within a realistic yet fantastical alternate reality, immense in scale and impossibly detailed. Hubris and grandiosity—if not an outright god-complex—seem like occupational hazards.
Immensity of scale applies not just to the physical dimensions of these virtual worlds, but their propensity to extend themselves through time. In his book Digimodernism, the critic Alan Kirby identifies “onwardness and endlessness” as hallmarks of 21st century culture: page-turning propulsiveness, the unfolding of saga-like narratives teeming with plotlines, characters, and locations, spawning prequels and sequels galore. (In 2010, Tolkien-fan Grimes set the tone for the conceptronica decade when she announced to Dummy magazine her desire to “make a tome… I want to have like 30 albums.”)
Thinking big has become endemic in marginal music. Experimental electronic musician James Ferraro is working on an epic project entitled Four Pieces for Mirai: a cycle of four records, plus a prelude EP, accompanied by a 600-page text. Lee Gamble is halfway through a trilogy—or, as he prefers to put it, a “triptych”—for Hyperdub: an audio-allegory about late capitalism bearing the cryptic title Flush Real Pharynx. Released early this year, the first installment, In a Paraventral Scale, gets its name from a type of snake scale, which doubles as a reference to a ’90s jungle classic (Source Direct’s “Snake Style”) and a sideways allusion to “the way capitalism works—slick, shape-shifting, seducing you with beautiful objects.”
Merging sound and vision, dance and concept, into a work of “total art” is a longstanding aspiration that goes back through the multi-media happenings of the ’60s, via the idea of gesamtkunstwerk—“total artwork”—popularized by German composer Richard Wagner in the 19th century, all the way to the Ancients with their indivisible blends of poetry, drama, song, dance, and ritual. Rave embraced lights, lazers, and projections as a way to enhance and amplify the culture’s escape into a hallucinatory asylum from reality. But in the ’90s the visuals were generally only a loosely coordinated accompaniment to what the DJs or live performers were doing. Music remained the main attraction.
What’s striking about electronic dance culture in the ’10s is the audio-visual turn that has taken place across the board. EDM behemoths like Skrillex provide pulpy thrills by splaying across giant screen towers a spectacle of CG animation and projection mapping to match the music’s rollercoaster spills. Meanwhile, on the experimental festival circuit, the visuals are more abstract and abject—mutational grotesquerie, dissolving forms. This cross-contamination between the visual arts and experimental electronica has become such a hot zone that PAN have started an imprint, Entopia, dedicated to music written for art, film, theater, dance, and fashion.
Indeed, there is something of an audio-visual arms race going on within what the writer Geeta Dayal mischievously dubs “the festival-industrial complex”: musicians competing with each other not just to wow audiences but for places on the lineups. Festivals increasingly look not just for someone who can deliver a slamming DJ set or sonically stunning performance, but for world-exclusive premieres of a new show that impacts with the avant-garde equivalent of razzle-dazzle.
“The idea of going onstage with a laptop and lighting done by some person you’ve never met before—that just doesn’t make any sense at this point,” says Gamble. “The expectation is a lot higher than that.” That puts more pressure on artists to create visuals that work in tandem with the music. But it’s not like a sound art exhibit in a gallery, something to be appreciated in a low-key, ruminative way. Gamble adds, “At a festival, you need that immediacy and impact, something that can hit people fast and hard.”
Gamble realized a while back that, alongside limited-edition vinyl and streaming services, the festival stage is the primary place where his work lives, but also the main way he makes a living. Accordingly he has teamed up with Quantum Natives’ Clifford Sage, who works with world-building gaming software, to create a show around In a Paraventral Scale. For the track “BMW Shuanghuan X5”—thematically inspired by a Chinese black market copy of a BMW and incorporating Doppler-effect samples of the vehicle in motion—Sage developed a video accompaniment in which virtual car components assemble themselves in response to Gamble’s sonic triggers. The sound and visuals bring out the themes of the record: The seductive mystique of brands, and the way that consumer desire cannot distinguish between the authentic original and the fakesimile but still mystically believes there is a difference worth paying for.
A quest for another sort of authenticity—the paid-for privilege of being present at an Event—fuels what Amnesia Scanner call “the experience economy” of today’s festivals. Just as much as bottle-service raves on cruise ships or EDM gatherings like Electric Daisy Carnival, experimental music festivals are selling exclusivity and a sense of occasion. There’s a seemingly ever-growing number of these gatherings—Unsound, Flow, RMBA, Supernormal, Decibel, Nuits Sonores, Supersonic, and many more—along with all-year-round arts institutions like Somerset House in London. Some are funded by national or local government, or by arts and culture ministries; others draw financing from corporate sponsors.
“Europe is so full of these festivals now, and it’s very often where our music happens,” says Amnesia Scanner’s Haimala. “Kids don’t necessarily have so much money that they would buy individual tickets to concerts by our kind of artist, but they will invest in a festival ticket. So that’s where the competition started between artists—everyone trying to do more ambitious shows.” He points out that many of these festivals have music by night and a conference element by day, with panels and lectures. This discourse in turn feeds into the theory-buzzing roil around conceptronica. The festival circuit, adds Kalliala, “has created a demographic that can be marketed to.”
The audio-visual turn made by experimental electronica makes sense given its immersive ambitions: If world-building is your goal, then rather than just create the sounds that inspire mental movies, why not make the movies themselves too? With games and CGI-laden fantasies, the impetus behind world-building is leaving reality behind for a zone of adventures that are thrilling but safe. What’s different about the recent wave of conceptronica is its engagement with the real world in all its alienation and danger. As much as world-building, the impetus is world-changing, or at least world-critiquing.
Alongside the conceptualism and the audio-visuality, there has been a political turn in ’10s electronic music: artists taking strikingly committed stances, often rooted in a minority identity based around race, sexuality, or gender. This contrasts with earlier phases of dance culture, where the politics were more implicit.
House music came out of the gay underground and represented values of pride, acceptance, unity, and love, but as shared subliminal principles far more than declared positions. Jungle likewise conveyed its worldview as vibe rather than ideology: Its tense rhythms and menacing bass sonically expressed an attitude of militancy and street realism, which occasionally came into focus through roots reggae or gangsta rap samples about Babylon falling or the police, but generally avoided overt statements. As used in a whole swath of different scenes and subcultures, the word “underground” itself was at once potent and vague: It evoked opposition to the corporate music industry and mainstream values, but fell short of a defined politics.
Informed by the self-reflexive awareness of its makers and their background in higher education, conceptronica is a lot more clear-cut and committed. This new politicization partly reflects the urgency of the present. Having created purely abstract works that drew inspiration from his formative rave experiences or from arcane research into aural hallucination, Lee Gamble felt that everything changed in 2016. “Brexit was happening, Trump was happening, and I was like, ‘Am I now supposed to make an ambient record for everyone to just zone out?’” he says. “In these times, making music about escapism would be a cop out.”
In some quarters, though, a shift was discernible well before the horrific lurch towards populist authoritarianism and xenophobia that has convulsed the world these past four years. This drive towards electronic music addressing real-world issues began during the Obama years, drawing on the same post-crash discontents about inequality, precarious work patterns, and the seeming impunity of the global financial class that fueled the Occupy movement and the student protests in Britain.
In 2015, UK producer Jack Latham made what then seemed like an unusual intervention with his second album as Jam City. Dream a Garden featured for the first time his fragile vocals singing politically-conscious lyrics that blended rage and sorrow. The video for the single “Unhappy” consisted of a montage of shopping malls, armed police, advertisement hoardings, drone strikes seen from above, and gaunt models taking selfies against a backdrop of urban decay. At the end, Latham walks away from the camera with the slogan “Class War” visible on the back of his jacket, then the inspirational message—“Stop Being Afraid—Another World Is Possible”—flickers across the screen.
In interviews, Latham spoke of how the power structure wanted people to be miserable and isolated, atomized individuals competing for scraps left by the plutocracy and drugging themselves with narcotic entertainments. Reflecting this state of affairs, even dissecting it, wasn’t enough: Dream a Garden was a paean to the power of collectively envisioning a better life.
This shift to earnest and somewhat heavy-handed polemic (“Love Is Resistance” was another Jam City slogan of this era) was all the more striking given how glossily surface-oriented Latham’s 2012 album Classical Curves had been. That record was about the seductive power of “the aesthetics of wealth”—fashion runways, status brands, velvet-rope glamour—with the sorcerous allure of artifice and illusion seemingly left unchallenged. Now, according to Latham, “We don’t really have the luxury to just be repulsed and fascinated” by the “visual culture” of hyper-capitalism. Instead, it was time to “really be clear about what side you stand on.”
Latham’s trope of the garden as utopia cropped up later in 2015 on THE GREAT GAME: FREEDOM FROM MENTAL POISONING (The Purification of the Furies), a collaboration between Chino Amobi and the Houston, Texas producer Rabit. What sounds like a female GPS voice on its “professional British woman” setting repeatedly declares: “We will find our way back to the garden.” Recalling the thinking behind the project, Amobi talks of a politically-engaged music that is “helping and healing” as much as angry and militant; when the newsfeed pumps so much toxic stress through your system, a politics that only amplifies rage and dread is counterproductive.
The specific inspiration for the “freedom from mental poisoning” concept, though, was “this idea of overclocking,” says Amobi, referring to tricks by which users can increase the computation speed of their technology. For Rabit and Amobi, overclocking served as a metaphor for a media culture and a digital way of life that was morbidly accelerated and overstimulated—not just with distressing news and inflammatory views, but advertising and the habit-forming endorphin buzzes triggered by social media use.
Where Amobi and Rabit’s music is cyberpunk and dystopian in vibe, Holly Herndon—the Berlin-based American producer who’s the most well-known conceptualist in contemporary electronica—offers a more optimistic vision of “science fiction politics.” Drawing on the expertise of a bevy of technocrats and futurologists when she makes records, she can come across a bit like the Elizabeth Warren of electronica, brimming with can-do confidence and problem-solving pluck. While she’s keen to stress that there is a critical attitude to technology involved in her work, Herndon says, “I’m all about trying to feel agency with the technology that I’m using, and trying to imbue my audience with a sense of agency. When things go down the purely dystopian angle, I start to feel kind of hopeless. That cedes control to those who are already in power, already driving the narrative.”
PROTO, Herndon’s latest album, builds a bridge between the choral church music of her Tennessee childhood and the congregations of sinners at house clubs and raves. Using the pooled voices of around 300 people—a core ensemble of experimental vocalists, plus the contributions of a live concert hall audience, plus the artificial intelligence program Spawn—PROTO is all about tapping into “some sort of shared release” and “communal catharsis.” Says Herndon, “That’s what I’ve been craving. We have figured out a lot of ways to spend time with each other online, but I think people need to be emotional with each other in real time and real space.”
Besides the political concerns and the interest in music as a remedy for alienation, another thing that Holly Herndon, Jack Latham, and Chino Amobi have in common is that they all stepped out in front of their own music. It’s as though the politicization of electronic music demanded visibility: putting yourself on the line facially and vocally. Amobi started out making low-profile electronic noise as Diamond Black Hearted Boy, but ultimately decided that the artistic alias had been a mask behind which he no longer wished to hide.
Along with using his given name, Amobi placed his image on the front of Paradiso, whose cover is an identity card that certifies him as a citizen of Non Worldwide—as though the label was a transnational political entity of dissident dreamers. In contrast to Amobi’s defiant stare, Herndon gazed into the far distance on the front of 2015’s Platform, unblinking blue eyes trained on a brighter tomorrow. In electronic dance history terms, Amobi is Detroit techno unit Underground Resistance, embattled, but this time with the masks off; Herndon is Chicago house legend Joe Smooth, dreaming of the promised land.
The public positioning of oneself in terms of identity politics has become so intensified this past decade, it would be surprising if electronic music wasn’t affected. Amobi observes that the “post-blogosphere” of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram has introduced a new “level of words and articulation. Certain people find the voices that they identify more with in social media, and they find support there. People feel more confident to speak and articulate.”
Amobi and Non Worldwide are part of a loose network of queer and trans electronic artists that includes Elysia Crampton, Arca, Lotic, and SOPHIE. All make music as genre-nonconforming as it is gender-nonconforming, blurring the boundaries not just between contemporary and archival dance genres but between the rave tradition and noise, industrial, and musique concrete. Like Amobi putting his imaginary ID card on the front of Paradiso, these artists figure prominently in their own music, rather than standing to one side of it. They use their voices, they feature in artwork and in videos, and live, there is often a theatrical staging of the artist as a physical being that contrasts with the relatively faceless and disembodied way that left-field electronic music has tended to present in the past. Arca’s current project—a four-part experimental cycle titled Mutant; Faith that blends theatre, technology, design, and sound—shows how increasingly conceptronic artists are performers as much as producers.
SOPHIE’s “Faceshopping” is a striking example of the producer stepping forward to front her music. The 2018 song and video works simultaneously as a critique and a celebration of the idea of self-as-brand, drawing inspiration equally from 21st century social media and from the tradition of flamboyant display in ballroom and drag. A digital simulacrum of SOPHIE’s face—already a stylized mask of makeup—is shattered and reconstituted using computer-animation effects.
From “Faceshopping” and Paradiso to Arca’s recent vocally-oriented work, another common quality is a sense of drama and expressionistic excess hovering in an undecidable zone between euphoria and dysphoria. Apocalyptic theatricality is a thread running through Amobi’s work, from the courtly trap of “The Prisoners of Nymphaion” to the baroque EBM of “Blood of the Covenant.” And tracks like “Power” and “Distribution of Care,” by the Berlin-based producer Lotic, are full of peaky dissonances and nerve-shredding, high-end sounds.
If a single sonic motif runs through a large proportion of conceptronica, it’s the crashing drum—a dramatic effect that sounds ceremonial and regal, but also vaguely punitive, like the smash of a police baton, or evocative of urban unrest, like the tinkling shards of a shattered riot shield. This imposing but ungroovy approach to percussion—probably first heard on Jam City’s Classical Curves—is a key factor in what the critic Matthew Phillips identifies as a “neo-futurist” aesthetic in electronic music. Discontinuities and ruptures replace steady dance beats. This is how club music should sound, it’s implied, in the age of drone strikes and tweetstorms: not lulling dancers into a hypnotic trance, but placing them on red alert.
The agit-prop sector within conceptual electronica is woke music, in all senses. “Using cacophony and unusual sonics, I reject the passive experience of listening, and try to use sounds that are active to wake the listener up and to bring them into the moment,” Amobi has said. This rhetoric recalls the post-punk band This Heat, whose song “Sleep” agitated against consumerism and entertainment as mass sedation. In conceptronica and post-punk alike, there’s a similar interest in demystification and seeing through the blizzard of lies: When Lee Gamble uses the late theorist Mark Fisher’s term “semioblitz”—the desire-triggering, anxiety-inciting bombardment of today’s infoculture—I’m reminded of Gang of Four’s 1979 song “Natural’s Not In It” and its line about advertising as “coercion of the senses.”
But you can also sense some of the same problems that afflicted post-punk four decades ago, especially in its later years, when it reached an impasse. With conceptronica, there can be a feeling, at times, of being lectured. There’s the perennial doubt about the efficacy of preaching to the converted. That in turn points to a disquieting discrepancy between the anti-elitist left politics and the material realities of conceptronica as both a cultural economy and a demographic—the fact that it is so entwined with and dependent on higher education and arts institutions.
As fascinating as conceptronica can be, something about it always nagged at me. If its subject, in the broadest sense, was liberation, why then did I not feel liberated listening to it? It rarely provided that sense of release or abandon that you got with ’90s rave or even from more recent dissolute forms like trap, whose commodity-fetishism and sexual politics are counter-revolutionary but which sonically brings the bliss. The parallel is truest with post-punk’s critical commentary on rock itself, the way it refused the simple freedom and cutting-loose of ’60s and early ’70s rock in favor of tense, fractured rhythms that expressed alienation and unrest.
Speaking to the music’s makers helped me both understand and also “feel” it more. Conceptronica is drawn to the residual disruptive power that still feels latent in archival underground genres like jungle, ballroom, and gabba, but also contemporary sounds like grime and trap. It wants to take the unwritten manifesto of emancipation and solidarity within these musics and articulate it crystal-clear. As one of the style’s vanguard figures, Chino Amobi talks about wanting to create critical art but combine it somehow with dance culture’s ecstatic communion. It’s a difficult balancing act, and a noble ambition.
Listen to selections from this essay on our Spotify playlist and Apple Music playlist.
Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
