by Angus Macdonald

Created on: December 21, 2007

Electronic music is seen by most people as being a simplistic form of music, if it is treated as music at all. Many people think that all electronic music is continual loops of rather boring, loud noises with no melodic influences, structure or musicality. Nothing could be further from the truth. The problem, in my eyes, is that electronic music is given nowhere near enough coverage by the media, especially considering the number of people who go out every weekend listening and dancing to various forms of electronic music. As a result, it is a purely underground music scene, where artists of truly genius proportions can walk amongst the general public without turning a head. This, in my opinion, is a great insult to all those artists out there who are breaking new ground, creating forms of music never heard before, especially when you consider the bland nature of pop music these days and the penny-a-dozen punk/pop bands who all play 3 chords between them and are never off the radio.

It is unfortunate that many people cannot get past their own objections to electronic music. They see raves, drugs and repetitive beats and think that there is nothing more to it. However, when you scratch beneath that surface and look into the world below, you find a wealth of fantastic music with far more range and depth than anything that has gone before. Artists can use anything to make music, and frequently do, drawing on influences from classical masters to punk heroes and blending them together to create fresh sounds. The monotony of most 'dance' music should never be mistaken for being all there is to electronic music, and as with any music scene the harder you look the better it gets. Take my favorite band, Orbital, for example. They list their strongest influence as the classical composer John Barry, who wrote the original scores for the James Bond movies. Orbital's sound is made up of vast sound-scapes, and can be listened to in bed as easily as on a dance-floor. New artists such as Squarepusher and Aphex Twin are creating entirely new forms of music, engineering rhythms and concepts never before imagined. All this and far more than I could possibly describe exists, beyond the sight of the majority of the public and treated like a second class form of 'entertainment' when it really is art.

The music industry has a lot of bad habits. For a start, they have a tendency to promote bland, dull, uninspired artists simply because they look pretty to 12 year olds. As a result we

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