Electronica

Electronica includes a wide range of contemporary electronic music designed for a wide range of uses, including foreground listening, some forms of dancing, and background music for other activities. Unlike electronic dance music, it is not specifically made for dancing.

The term was first used in the United States in the early 1990s with regards to post-rave global-influenced electronic dance music. After beginning as an underground genre, electronica has grown to influence even mainstream crossover recordings. Elements of electronica are used today by many popular artists in mainstream music.

In the mid 1990s, electronica began to be used by MTV and major record labels to describe mainstream electronic dance music made by such artists as Orbital (who had previously been described as ambient) and The Prodigy. It is currently used to describe a wide variety of musical acts and styles, linked by a penchant for overtly electronic production, a range which includes more popular acts such as Björk, Goldfrapp and Braindance, artists such as Autechre, Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada to dub-oriented down-tempo, downbeat, and trip-hop. Madonna and Björk are said to be responsible for electronica's thrust into mainstream culture, with their albums “Ray of Light” (Madonna), “Post” and “Homogenic” (Björk).

It could be noted that older bands such as New Order and Depeche Mode had built on the new wave of music of the 1980s and added more dance and electronic instrumentation and alternative rock influences to become early pioneers of electronica music. These two groups are very commonly cited as being hugely influential to the first generations of underground and later, alternative electronica artists.

This description is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses materials from the Wikipedia article "Electronica".