Well, since I love electronic music I would like to introduce you to it genres...
Ambient
Ambient music is a style that focuses on sound and space rather than melody and form. It is music that is intentionally created to be used as both as background music and as music to listen to. It usually features slowly evolving sounds, repetition, and is relatively static.
In 1978, Brian Eno released Ambient 1: Music for Airports. It came out at the peak of disco, and was largely ignored when it was released. Music for Airports has grown in significance every year since, though. Ambient 1 was a beautiful manifesto. It is a set of intriguing, timeless soundscapes, artfully packaged. It is also the beginning of ambient music.
Eno wanted to make music that would support reflection and space to think. Eno did this by creating music that was beautiful, but did not have a center of focus to demand your attention. In his liner notes, Eno puts it this way: "Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."
From
Synthopia
BreakBeat
Breakbeat music was arguably introduced to the Bronx massive (a collection of people, usually friends) by Kool Herc in 1969, a DJ who arrived there from Kingston, Jamaica, with a skill known as 'cutting breaks'. It was Grandmaster Flash, the legendary Hip Hop pioneer, though, who first utilised 'breaks', who created Breakbeat music, and who started a revolutionary new form of music production.
Breaks?
Breaks are often the moments when a drummer gets to shine. The key features of a break, therefore, are that they generally feature percussion only and are usually a little bit 'flash'.
In any musical track that employs drums and a drummer to keep to a particular tempo and add rhythm (irrelevant of the genre/period), there usually exists a standard drum pattern1. This standard rhythm will continue for a section of several bars - the exact number depending on:
The time signature that the track is written in
The style/nature of the track itself
How flash the drummer is feeling at the time
In the last bar of the section, the standard rhythm (or beat) is broken up by a bar that is a little different. The aim of this bar is to break up the monotony, create a sub-rhythm and lead the musicians into the first beat of the next section. This bar is called the break.
Breakbeats?
Old School
By using two record decks and a mixer2 the DJ uses two records to:
Play a break from record A
Quickly change the source on the mixer to record B
Play a break from record B while simultaneously re-cuing the break on record A
Quickly change the source on the mixer back to record A
This process (cutting) is then cycled, creating a new rhythm entirely made from breaks. Skilled DJs can quickly locate different breaks on the record/different records and create a whole new backing track over which MCs (or rappers) can wax lyrical.
New School
With the advance of technology it is now possible to sample music, chop out the breaks and re-combine them without needing the proficiency of the DJ who can do this on the fly. This is clearly an art in itself but differs somewhat to the 'old school' DJs who were essentially using their record decks as a live musical instrument and humanising the recycled beats. Some 'new school breaks' sound more electronic due to this lack of human quality but the relative merits of each 'school' can be, and are, argued elsewhere (furiously!).
From
BBC
Next posts will be about this genres:
Electro
Hardcore
House
Industrial
Jungle/Drum N Bass
Techno
Trance