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© Copyright 2001, Jim Loy
I'm listening to a CD by Darude, called Before the Storm. It is of the electronica or techno genre, which is mostly minimal melody, with an electronic sound and an unbelievably heavy beat, and sometimes a speaker or singer endlessly repeating a few words. In many of these pieces, the sound is nice (sometimes very nice), much like new age music. And the music has a great deal of energy. But the heavy heavy beat is a joke, it's got to be meant as a joke. I've got the bass turned all the way down to zero, and the beat is still an incessant heart beat that will intrude into my dreams. I guess that is the heavy beat that I hear from passing teenagers. I am damning with faint praise here, but I like this CD. It has some fragments of catchy tunes. The liner notes are almost totally uninformative, except that it was recorded in Finland. A friend of mine says that techno is like listening to a xylophone underwater. I suppose this is a reference to the electronic sound.
I asked the people at the local record store if there were any electronica with no vocals at all. They recommended two CDs, which I bought. I guess my idea of vocals differs from theirs, as both CDs had many pieces with talking and singing. These vocal fragments are spliced in repeatedly as if they were instrumental. In the Darude CD above, there is a catchy tune (which I really like) called Out of Control, in which a raspy electronic voice endlessly repeats the words "Out of control." It does not sound much like singing. But I have found no good electronica without any humanlike voices at all.