murmurations

Electronic music fans will no doubt have come across the way of categorising their favourite artists and albums not by trendy sub-genres but by the associations artists and listeners make with that music. In her excellent recent book on the aesthetics of experimental electronic music, Listening Through the Noise , Joanna Demers devotes a whole chapter to the idea of musicians and listeners interpreting music through some external concept, of the music signifying some external thing or working as a metaphor. As Demers points out, futurism is one concept that often features in electronic music discourse; another, ironically (or perhaps inevitably) enough, is nostalgia, famously exemplified in Boards of Canada's evocation of 1970s educational TV shows. The work of metaphors such as these goes beyond giving the music some 'meaning', in an intellectual sense, for the listener; it can, if the listener is receptive, play an active role in shaping the way we listen to the mu...