The History of Electronic Music ★★★

If you enjoy music, unless your listening repertoire is entirely restricted to tuning into Radio 3, at some point over the last fifty years or so, your ears will have encountered sounds generated, in one form or another, by transistors and microchips. Yet how has electronic technology come to
dominate not just the music of the twenty-first century but also had a surprising and possibly unexpected influence on popular culture for decades?

Having discovered electronic dance tracks in the early 1990s, courtesy of a mix cassette tape – anyone under 30 just Google it – comedian and DJ Vinney White conducts a whistle-stop tour of how music has evolved since antiquity, but in particular how electronics have had a profound influence on modern musical culture. Combining samples with illuminating banter, in The History of Electronic Music, he lifts the lid on how seemingly obscure technology and little-known snippets of decades old records came to dominate everything from hip-hop, to house, to rave culture.

As educational as it is amusing, for lovers of electronic music, White’s show comes across as a little contradictory. His background as a DJ means the narrative very much focuses on dance, meaning that pioneers of electronic music such as Wendy Carlos, Robert Moog and the inventors of the
Fairlight CMI are inexplicably ignored. To be fair, it’s a big ask to encapsulate the entire catalogue of electronic music in sixty minutes. However, that combined with a comedic narrative that, on occasion, strays from bassline to base, results in a show that, entertaining as it is, just falls short of 808 State of the art.