Back in the ’40s and early ’50s, building simple electronic projects was a popular hobby of many people. Back then, you could buy, you know, a few parts and – with tubes and build something on your kitchen table, and it would actually work.
But we will lose the millions of records being created daily in a dizzying array of electronic forms unless we find a way to preserve and keep them accessible indefinitely.
In the Federal Government, electronic records are as indispensable as their paper counterparts for documenting citizens’ rights, the actions for which officials are accountable, and the nation’s history.
I don’t really like club music or hip hop or electronic music at all. I’m like an old person.
I love a lot of different styles, but my heart belongs in electronic music.
I had an album out at exactly the same time as ‘Love to Love You’ called ‘Einzelganger,’ and it’s great, all electronic. I’m using a vocoder, doing all this cut-up stuff on there, but no one knows about it.
EDM is, like… Event-Driven Marketing, I think, is the acronym there. It reminds me a lot of disco. That had some hang-time, like, 10, 15, 17 years tops… Not too many people are forward-thinking about electronic music. They’re just kinda like, ‘Now, now, now – do it, do it.’
My hip-hop fans are a little spoiled – they want a particular level of lyricism and energy that I’m known for. When they don’t get that, it takes a little time for them to open up to it. But electronic fans are as free as the music. On social media, they were so excited and loud; they’re in awe.
There’s definitely a push and a pull to ‘legitimize’ electronic music live by playing the same way that a band would play.
Back in 1999 and 2000, a few of us… a very few of us… Douglas Clegg, Seth Godin and I… offered free electronic copies of our books in an effort to reach an audience we otherwise wouldn’t have reached and to test out a new marketing concept for books. Despite the industry screaming we were crazy, it worked.
What kind of music keeps its relevance? That’s why I purposely try and avoid any particularly current trends in electronic music. I do actively stay away from the most popular rhythms of the moment. In six weeks’ time, those will sound out-of-date.
I grew up around electronic instruments. To me, the turntable is an electronic device. At the same time, I had access to drum machines and keyboards through my uncle; then track recorders into computers. At an early age, I was messing with computers more than most hip-hop musicians.
I combine aspects of many styles of music and create my own musical forms by way of electronic instruments.
Privacy is one of the biggest problems in this new electronic age.
Some grocery stores began using electronic scanners as early as 1976, and the devices have been in general use in American supermarkets for a decade.
I’m basically a music nerd, especially when it comes to electronic music.
Honestly, I’ve been reading a lot of books on visual art. I’ve been reading a lot of books by Olivia Lang, I’ve been listening to a lot of folk and singer-songwriter music, but also a lot of electronic and really hard techno. I’m just trying to create something that pulls from everywhere and that hopefully feels unique.
I’m fascinated with the electronic devices that we can mess around with.
New Order has always been a hybrid band. We always mixed guitar, bass, drums with electronic.
Everyone making electronic music has the same tool kits and templates. You listen, and you feel like it can be done on an iPad. If everybody knows all the tricks, it’s no more magic.
People don’t realize enough how important and influentical John Carpenter has been in electronic music. He did his soundtracks by himself, using mostly electronic and analog synthesizers. He’s a cult figure with DJs these days for good reasons.
There will be an electronic currency, and it will be universal, and we must accept that fact.
The war in Iraq, the abuse of detainees, electronic eavesdropping, Guantanamo Bay – these things were all done on our behalf and they may turn out in the end to have created more terrorists.
When I recorded Contra la Puerta, I never really thought out doing the material live. Mostly because I haven’t really seen any electronic music performed live in an interesting way.
The relentless invisible storm of radio signals and electronic particles, the hustle and bustle, and the billions of petrol explosions in the engine blocks of trucks and cars seem to churn up the molecules of life and heaven so violently that the beautiful fogs are unable to hold together like they once did.
I had been building electronic musical instruments since I was a kid.
I spent my childhood tinkering with electronic circuits, on breadboards, as they used to be called, in particular making radio transmitters.
I’ve never been one of those musicians to differentiate between acoustic and electronic sounds. I just see it all as sound sources to be used. This translates into my live shows as well.
I don’t feel like a live set even seems super real for an electronic act like me. It’s not really that entertaining. I’ve seen a lot of my favourite acts take it to a new level with a live band and stuff, which is amazing, but for me, a live set would be boring to watch.
Email is not the simple exchange of text messages. Email is the electronic version of the interoffice mail system used for formal letter or memo communication.
With the violin, for example, one understands culturally that the sound comes from the instrument that can be seen. With electronic music, it is not the same at all. That’s why it seemed so important to me, from the beginning of my career, to invent a grammar, a visual vocabulary adapted to electronic music.
As president of the American Historical Association, I started a programme to make dissertations into e-books in 1999. Before I knew it, I was involved in other electronic projects. Harvard invited me to become director of the libraries in 2007.
I came up with the idea for what later became Paychex in 1970 when I was working for Electronic Accounting Systems, a company that sold payroll processing to companies with 50 to 1,000 employees.
I love British folk music, but I’m not obsessed with it. I love the Celtic stuff, and Enya is a favorite, but that’s more electronic.
I’m not much into current electronic stuff, what I think of as lounge electronics, mumbling electronics.
The electronic media introduced this idea to the larger audience very, very quickly. We spent years and years and years meeting with activists all over Europe to lay the groundwork for a political response, as we did here.
I had this instrument that I built in high school. It was a huge, six-foot-long stringed instrument, and I started playing with that amplified and singing through power electronic stuff. I played those shows, and it would blow the lid off of everybody, and everybody would flip out.
I have a lot of alter-egos: I would love to be a back-up singer for someone someday. I have an electronic side-project. I have a ’90s grunge side project; I have a piano project… I have this industrial, goth-electronic song, super creepy sounding, just really dark and dreary.
My main interest in synthesizers when I was an older teenager was to escape from the spell of the 12-tone system or, in a more broad sense, the spell of the European modern-music system. That led me to explore towards electronic music and ethnic music.
The basic idea behind a paper trail is that you take one of these electronic systems and you augment it with a printer that prints out people’s vote as they vote.
That’s what my music… I’m working on a solo record right now, it’s gonna be more hip-hop than anything, like electronic hip-hop, futuristic hip-hop. I’m probably gonna be rapping on it.
‘The Burning Dark’ needs a certain kind of soundtrack – something dark and moody, electronic, weird. One of my favourite bands is Ladytron, and I think they’d fit the bill quite well.
In the corporate world, there is no ground more fertile for appearing smart than the rich earth that is electronic communication. Your email writing, sending and ignoring skills are just as important as your nodding skills, and even more important than your copying and pasting skills.
I’m an electronic guy, I’m a freak for electronic music but real instruments, the dynamic range of it, and the emotions, there’s no comparison.
Historically, more media has been consumed sitting in front of the television than any other device. Controlling this screen has been the goal of major technology, consumer electronic, and telecommunications companies.
At a time when club music has gone more electronic, I’ve gone the other way: organic and world music.
Ever since we’ve had electronic communications, and particularly during a time of war, presidents have authorized the electronic surveillance of the enemy.
It doesn’t seem expected for us to do something like that, but I love electronic music. I spend a lot of my time listening to that and just trying to understand what makes it work – what makes it move people the way it does and why they have some of the best-selling festivals in the world.
The whole thing of moving the currency through currency sorting and detection machines and so on that was the whole process actually encouraging electronic transactions.
