Musique concrète (1948): Musique concrete began in Paris in 1948, when Pierre Schaeffer recorded trains, cut the tape, reversed it, looped it, and declared that recorded sound itself…
Électroacoustique (1948): The academic formalization of sound experimentation: institutional studios from Cologne to Brussels, tape and synthesis, spatialization, scores made of sound…
Krautrock (1968): Krautrock is West Germany's refusal of Anglo-American blues in the 1970s and its invention of a trance all its own: motorik, the straight, obstinate pulse…
Kosmische Musik (1971): Kosmische Musik is the synthetic branch of krautrock, the Berlin School: Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze stretch analogue sequencer patterns across entire…
Space Music (1972): Space music is the mainstream cosmic electronic sound of the 1970s: clear melodies floating over planetary pads, somewhere between science popularization and…
Proto-Techno (1977): Proto techno is Kraftwerk, in Dusseldorf between 1974 and 1981: the man machine, the robotic melody, the electronic beat embraced as a total aesthetic. Trans…
Synth-pop (1979): Synth pop rewrote pop music entirely on synthesizers in England and Germany between 1978 and 1984: unstoppable melodies played on visibly artificial machines,…
Early Industrial (1975): The first industrial circle, active from 1975 to 1982: Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, and SPK, treating music as hostile information and the concert as…
Funk (1967): James Brown tightened soul onto the first beat, Sly Stone made it psychedelic, Parliament sent it into orbit: funk is the science of groove as a collective…
Philly Soul (1967): Philly soul came out of Philadelphia in the early 1970s, where Gamble and Huff industrialized orchestral soul: silky strings, the MFSB house band, love songs…
Dub (1969): Kingston, early 1970s: King Tubby and Lee Perry discover that a mixing console is an instrument. They gut songs, swell the bass and drums, drown everything…
Hip-Hop (1979): Hip-hop is a root, not a branch, of this family tree. Born in the Bronx, it invented the isolated, looped break, sampling as a form of composition, and the DJ…
Reggae (1968): Reggae is a root here, not a branch. Jamaican reggae gave the world the sound system, the bass as foundation, the instrumental version and a remix culture…
Elektronische Musik (1951): Cologne, 1951. Three years after Paris, West German radio opened a studio that took the exact opposite stance to musique concrete: where Schaeffer recorded…
