There is a movement, which to the untrained eye is a gyrating mass of flayling limbs, inebriated flesh and stale perspiration, trapped in a haze of illicit drugs, energy drinks and precoital douchebaggery. It's a human evolutionary experiment gone so horrible wrong it would make the doyen of electronic music Giorgio Moroder wish amnesia upon himself.
The devotees – those who have put in the hours on the dancefloor, and religiously pirated the latest mixes off zippyshare – will tell you it is the beautiful symbiosis of music and technology [they may be high]. It’s a world where art is measured in beats per minute and sound waves. They will tell you the human experiment is well and truly working [definitely high] and that the DJ is the mad Dr Frankenstein.
Jokes aside, come mid-February and South Africa will be caught in the international slipstream of electronic music when the Mother City hosts the Cape Town Electronic Music Festival (CTEMF) February 7 – 9 and the iconic dance event Ultra Music Festival hits Cape Town and its richer offspring Johannesburg February 14 and 15 respectively.
What lies in wait are two very different events paying homage to electronic music, both cashing in on South Africa as Electronic Dance Music's (EDM) burgeoning frontier – a desired destination for the world's best DJ's and grateful promoters.
What can also be expected is a debate about why EDM is loved … and hated by some, whether it’s just another form of pop music, and whether any of this is worth our time. There are those who may believe that it doesn’t even deserve a place in a sophisticated publication like this. But we’ll do it anyway.
Critics have labelled EDM a catch-all for anything from House music to Dubstep to Trance, and everything in between. A kind of one-stop shop for people who don’t know exactly what they’re looking for. EDM is the Evangelical to electronic music's Catholicism. It’s seen as the bastard child of a once noble collections of genres started by Italian producer Moroder in the 1970s and further pioneered in the 1990s and 2000s by the likes of DJ, producer and king of minimalist Richie Hawtin, who graced our shores last year.
Moroder's collaboration with Donna Summer in the 1970s on Love to Love You Baby and I Feel Love triggered an evolutionary shift in music; the way we listened to it, the way artists composed and arranged, how audiences consumed it – and of course how we danced to it. Electronic music latched on to the technological revolution sweeping the world at the time and the result was synth disco and everything that came after it – hip hop, trance, rave and house music – all kinds of house music. At the forefront of it all was the DJ, the master of ceremonies in this beats-per-minute world.