Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City once said that when she was broke, she would buy Vogue instead of dinner because it fed her more. I’ve been there too. Late at night and not a single crumb in my room, not even a shabby, mushy apple, the only viable option was to get my dopamine from a more spiritual source—music. Once electroclash started pulsating in my headphones, the sound intoxicated me with relief. It seemed palpable and dense, wrapping around my temples, the synthetic noise infiltrating me. Ultraprocessed and high-bpm, it felt relaxing and enveloping. It morphed my anxiety into a trance-like state, and every blood vessel in my body gravitated towards my headphones, just like the ocean tides tend to the moon.
I’m lucky to be neighbours with someone who shares my fascination with Electronic Dance Music, or EDM. On the outskirts of campus, in Perkins Hall, you can always hear enticing noises leaking from under the door—they belong to Johan Sorensen, a composer, producer, DJ, and sophomore concentrating in Math, Music, and Computer Science.
I asked Johan what he is working on right now.
J.S.: “I guess I'm experimenting with dimension and dimensionality. In my maths and computer science classes, we talk a lot about structures and surfaces; I want to find more ways of representing things—movements, lines, and shapes—with rhythm and sound.”
We talked about how EDM reimagines overstimulation. It possesses a unique ability to mimic the human consciousness—overflowing with divergent thoughts, viscous and unpredictable. “Electronic music is this hyper-genre,” says Johan. “With the internet, we have access to so much information, and we are constantly consuming such crazy shit, you know what I mean? And EDM is such a wonderful representation of that sonically. You hear all these weird and cool things, and you think—oh well, I've never heard that before. And then it just goes by. And then you don't think about it anymore.”
We seek solace in the collision of machine-generated sound; our world is changing so rapidly that we can no longer find solutions by simply indulging in nostalgia for varnished wooden surfaces and folk fests. No matter how tender the acoustic guitar sounds, it fails to capture the pressure of competitive internships in alluring skyscrapers, spiderwebs of to-do lists, and phones vibrating from “breaking news” notifications. EDM allows us to fight fire with fire—instead of escaping from overstimulation, we escape in it.
The membrane of a human cell can be modelled by a circuit—the way ions are let in and out is similar to the work of resistors and wires in a battery. Maybe this is how EDM jumpstarts our bodies; it gives us an intense electric jolt, making the little batteries light up and lose their minds. The interplay of clicking, snapping, creaking, squealing, and ringing—“all these little things scratching at your ears, all these small guys”—offers a rich palette for every imaginary tastebud in our music perception.
But in an all-you-can-eat buffet, you can physically still only eat so much. I asked Johan if EDM is a manifestation of gluttony or a long-awaited ideal dosage for satiety. “I don’t know if we’ve always been craving it, but now we are. Nowadays, as people are trying to do the next thing, create their next sound, be new and original, oftentimes it just ends up being about getting louder, and harsher, and crazier. The first DJ goes on, he plays, he has a good time. The second guy, he's got to top that, so he increases the volume a little bit, and then the next guy after that pushes it up a little bit more. And then it just goes on.”
The exponential trajectory of EDM’s distribution and intensification is related to the context of its production. “A lot of the time, the relative benchmark isn't a Beethoven symphony; it's what the guy from two months ago was doing. And then when you keep only looking back by those short intervals, [EDM consumption] becomes passive.” Mirroring the decrease in our attention spans, EDM establishes a desperate competition for our time. “It’s definitely challenging,” Johan noticed, “to get your point across in as little time as possible.” Even if our participation is brief and unfocused, it suffices; at least we are under the exposure, choosing the sonic flow over silence.
EDM makes me think about immortality, and not simply because dancing to it benefits your cardiovascular system and provides an outlet for escapism. Electronic music cannot die, just as it was never born; it’s a floating, borderline product of various music-making techniques, social practices, and distribution models. In his essay “Disco as an Operating System,” Tan Lin, an American author and filmmaker, claims that disco is the sound of data entering and leaving a system, and “not an explosion of sound onto the dance floor but an implosion of pre-programmed dance moves into a head.” How did EDM manage to become a supreme collision of the humane and soulless, the anthropogenic and artificial, the spontaneous and calculated?
Tan Lin goes on to position EDM as the genre-less sound of the post-medium era. He says, “Asking what disco is is no less difficult than asking, ‘What is music?’” The diverse nature of EDM, which includes media formats from house and trip-hop to techno and electro-funk, reflects that disco was genre-less enough to “be absorbed into culture as a whole.” Now that we have DJ sets, there is no limit on reproduction; a melody can be sampled, mashed up, and remixed infinitely many times, and it’s no longer the chicken or the egg—it’s a whole research facility with genetically engineered species and a cloning apparatus. Moreover, who even are DJs in this worldview—thieves or architects, craftsmen or charlatans, derivatives or integrators?
J.S.: “The salesmen.”
Electronic music makes us feel immortal because none of its synthetic components are subject to aging. As Tan Lin wrote, “No one really listens to disco, not even the listener; it is passively absorbed by a brain connected to a dancing body”—and if no one interacts with it, not even by listening, then what damage could ever be done to it? Our bodies can’t digest EDM, resist its influence, just like they can’t filter out microplastics. It's impossible to break electronic music down into components, not only because there are so many, but also because it’s simply the sound of input and output of a data system: elusive and non-nutritious. Like a waxy plastic apple, EDM is forever fresh, and as long as we have turntables and loudspeakers, so are we: sweaty, genre-less, non-biodegradable, angry, short-circuited, rogue.
However, if we keep building up the intensity, will there be a point at which all of our receptors for pleasure, loudness, and neuroticism are saturated? EDM is developing in a trajectory that resembles a famous math problem, sometimes called “the unbearable quickness of doubling.” Many years ago, the ruler of India wanted to reward a wise man who invented chess. The man humbly asked them to place a rice grain on the first square on the checkerboard, then double the number of grains on the second one, and keep doing so until all 64 squares were filled. Square 5 had 16 rice grains, square 10–512…on square 64, there were nine quintillion. The only difference is that EDM is not limited by the size of the checkerboard; music has become so easy to produce that every minute, hundreds of songs are released on hundreds of platforms. When it’s impossible to go any louder, will we reach a plateau, or will it be a supernova explosion?
J.S.: “Maybe the end will just be noise. That would be funny. I guess it will keep going until a point where it converges to noise. Imagine—in twenty years, people are listening to harsh noise all the time, because it’s the only thing more stimulating than what we have now.”
And maybe after that, it will just be silence.
But then, of what use will our wired headphones be?
