FM | RETROSPECTIVE
Electronica
What’s in a name? That which we call electronica, by any other name would smell as sweet
© Richard Ecclestone
One of our biggest issues in this column is that the genres we discuss are so frequently disputed, even by the artists widely associated with the very same styles. Genres aren’t necessarily a bad thing, but you’d be forgiven for thinking so based on some of the arguments they inspire.
Electronica is a bit different. It’s almost certainly not a genre that many of its purported originators would even recognise, let alone lay a claim to. Far from it, electronica is a catch-all term in two different ways, depending on where you come from. In the US, it was generally considered a broad term for all electronic music throughout the ’90s; in the UK, it’s usually associated more with downtempo styles which defy categorisation elsewhere.