Editorial: Commercial music and the electronic music studio – influence, borrowings and language

Abstract

The genesis of this issue of Organised Sound was a June 2020 article on how an electronica duo created an entire album, designing ‘beats, bass, pads and all’ with the EMS Synthi 100 unit #30 (Trew 2020) that was borrowed from the Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music (IPEM). At the same time, the United States was undergoing a racial reckoning, decades in the making, ignited by the killing of George Floyd in police custody on 25 May 2020 in Minneapolis. This killing and the subsequent protests prompted institutions to examine how they have failed diverse populations. When thinking about how to increase diversity in electroacoustic music, the guest editors concluded that we can take an electroacoustic approach to music that is not traditionally considered academic. We asked questions such as: As we strive for inclusive practices among these disciplines, how have limitations and powers of oppression affected electroacoustic and popular media? What does an approach to the study of electroacoustic music and commercial media production that is informed and invigorated by social justice look like? How can education/training in both areas strive towards diversity? Stated otherwise, are there any stigmas/limiting factors for the hip hop artist to break into electroacoustic music or vice versa? Do we need to reconfigure our definition of electroacoustic in order to recognise people with similar creative instincts, much as George Lewis, who is a leading voice in both jazz and electroacoustic music, has highlighted in the case of black experimental artistry through his history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (Lewis, 2000, 2008)? The guest editors of this issue found that the unusual case study of the EMS Synthi, and its partnership – at the same time crossing academic and commercial, as well as ‘vernacular’ and ‘art’ music boundaries – has offered an approach that can be adapted to serve the deep mixing of other arenas. Specifically in 2016, sibling duo David and Stephen Dewaele, aka 2manydjs (also known as the prog-rock electronica band Soulwax) embarked on a remarkable collaboration with the IPEM in their hometown of Ghent, Belgium. The commercial music duo, whose music appeared on the soundtrack of Grand Theft Auto V, convinced IPEM to let them house the institute’s legendary EMS Synthi 100 for a year while the ‘research center in systematic musicology’ underwent restoration. Somehow this extremely academic institution1 worked with a band who won the Red Bull Elektropedia Awards for their reinvention of Robyn’s ‘Ever Again’. The result of this collaboration was a ‘highly collectible package’ with a vinyl record and 48-page pamphlet titled ‘EMS Synthi 100 – DEEWEE Sessions Vol.1’. IPEM is credited as a collaborator, and the pamphlet includes an interview with Ivan Schepers, the IPEM technician who has been the synthesiser’s long-term custodian. This was not just a casual borrowing of gear or a rehousing solution, it was a deep mixing of two mutually exclusive worlds: electroacoustic academia and commercial music. Though the collaborators under discussion were all male Europeans (not a population we typically examine when promoting diversity initiatives), their partnership was successful in navigating across demographic and aesthetic boundaries. The structure of their partnership may offer an approach that can be adapted to serve the deep mixing of other arenas that heretofore have excluded a more diverse range of artists. In the 20 years sinceOrganised Sound first dedicated an issue to investigating relationships between music technology and popular music (issue 5/2, 2000), critical interdisciplinary research and practice has uncovered ample cross-pollinations between electroacoustic and commercial media. When we consider and document these influences, we draw on a variety of approaches to analysis that layers the semiotics of music in general with elements particular to electronic music that have emerged and developed in parallel within communities producing electroacoustic music, popular music, audio pedagogy and sound design for film, television and games. This issue explores those points of crossover and in this editorial, we suggest areas where future development is still needed. Naturally, each audio subfield has its own vocabulary and canonical references, and there are