This article argues for the habilitation of a concept of style in electroacoustic music. It surveys the reasons for the neglect of style, looking in particular at the modernist embedding of electroacoustic theory and the consequences of postmodern genre formations. It considers the extent to which academic understanding of the materiality of music has moved from the analysis of sound to the analysis of media. It offers a critique of notions of sonic inclusivity and the differentiation of electroacoustic music from instrumental music. It emphasises the importance of comparative analysis and understanding the elements of style in electroacoustic music. It critically examines a number of techniques and frameworks for stylistic analysis. It concludes by encouraging the electroacoustic music community to engage more fully with notions of style.

This article explores the workings of genre in experimental electronic musics. Predominantly sociological in orientation, it has three main foci. First, it addresses practitioners’ and theorists’ resistances to the concept of genre in experimental musics. Drawing on recent developments in genre theory, it discusses the problems of agency, mediation and scale that any discussion of genre calls forth, pitting them alongside theories that emphasise genre’s necessity and inevitability in communication. The second section examines the politics of genre as they play out in practice, focusing on the Prix Ars Electronica festival and the controversy that ensued from the decision to change the name of the Computer Music category in 1999. The analysis focuses on issues of institutional mediation, historicity, genre emergence and the politics of labelling as they come into view when two broad spheres – electroacoustic art music and ‘popular’ electronic music – are brought into the same field together in competition. The third section deepens the analysis of Ars Electronica by zooming in on one of the represented genres, microsound, to examine how it is shaped and negotiated in practice. Using digital methods tools developed in the context of Actor-Network Theory, I present a view of the genre as fundamentally promiscuous, overlapping liberally with adjacent genres. Fusing Derrida’s principle of ‘participation over belonging’ with ANT’s insistence on the agency of ‘non-human actors’ in social assemblages, the map provides a means to analyse the genre through its mediations – through the varied industries, institutions and social networks that support and maintain it.

This article serves as an introduction to the ‘hybridity table’, which is a systematic compositional tool designed to aid in the creation of balanced cross-genre hybrid music. The hybridity table was developed as part of my doctoral research, and has been utilised in my ongoing creative practice-based research. The article will, in a broad sense, discuss the terms ‘genre’ and ‘hybridity’, drawing from the current literature, and will attempt to clarify how an understanding of these terms was utilised in the development of the hybridity table. Also included is a brief example of the table used in the composition of a short piece – Tracking Forward – as well as a discussion of key considerations for composing hybrid music using this table. Through outlining this new compositional tool it is hoped that this method might be utilised by other composers in their own creation of balanced cross-genre hybrid music.

Trip hop music emerged in the early 1990s, however, as a label the term ‘trip hop’ has always been problematic. Portishead, Massive Attack and Tricky, the artists frequently credited with creating trip hop, have unanimously rejected the label, claiming their music has nothing to do with trip hop. Despite the artists’ objections, music industrialists, fans and academics continually label their music trip hop or its alternate term ‘Bristol sound’, though specifics are never given as to what, if anything, distinguishes the two terms. This article seeks to mediate the discussion between opposing viewpoints by describing the Bristol sound as a style that relates to the trip hop genre. Following the introduction, the second section discusses the controversy surrounding the term ‘trip hop’ and suggests possible reasons behind the artists’ rejection of the label. The third section addresses the terms ‘genre’ and ‘style’ and outlines their similar points of reference while also highlighting their different areas of inquiry. The final section analyses several trip hop songs and identifies common elements that relate to the trip hop genre, before identifying explicit differences that distinguish the Bristol sound style. The analysis of style focuses on the spectral quality of the works and draws from Smalley’s (1997) theory of spectromorphology.

Cold, stripped-down, monochrome, pixelated, iterative, quantised, grid, pulse, glitch, noise: taken together, these words imply a growing aesthetic connection within a body of experimental and independent (or non-academic) sound-based artworks produced in the past few decades. Although realised in different mediums and belonging to different artistic categories, such works are connected through a certain aesthetic sensibility. Nevertheless, since the majority of these works have thus far received little scholarly attention, a framing discussion of the aesthetic principles and features that link them is overdue. This article examines this emergent phenomenon, accounting for the particular aesthetic features that connect such sound-based artworks, arguing for a more specific terminology to adequately account for this aesthetic across the various practices in which it is observed. Rejecting ‘minimalist’ as a descriptor, this article calls for an aesthetic frame of reference derived through Brutalism, understood as a crystallisation of key features of modernism and its various movements. The first author’s work is presented as a conscious effort to create sound art redolent of Brutalism, locating this work in the context of the revival of Brutalism in recent years, which, as will be argued, can be expanded to works from a wide range of contemporary artists and musicians.

This article applies a genre level approach to the tangled discourse surrounding the points of convergence between avant-garde electronica and electroacoustic music. More specifically the article addresses related experimental practices in these distinct yet related fields of electronic music-making. The democratisation of music technology continues to expand into an increasingly diverse set of musical fields, destabilising established power dynamics. A flexible, structured approach to the analysis of these relationships facilitates the navigation of crumbling boundaries and shifting relationships. Contemporary electronic music’s overlapping networks encompass varying forms of capital, aesthetics, technology, ideology, tools and techniques. These areas offer interesting points of convergence. As the discourse surrounding electronic music expands, so must the vocabulary and conceptual models used to describe and discuss new areas of converging artistic practice. Genre level diagrams selectively collapse, expand and arrange artistic fields, facilitating concrete, coherent arguments and the examination of patterns and relationships. Through the genre level diagram’s establishment of distinct yet flexible boundaries, electronic music’s sprawling discourse can be cordoned off, expanded or contracted to suit structured analyses. In this way, this approach clarifies scope and facilitates simultaneous examination from a variety of perspectives.

In Western countries and in Japan, experimental practices of music have developed into larger communities that share a common musical aesthetic and language, and are generally associated with genres such as noise music, free improvisation, or experimental music. However in South East Asia, and particularly in Indonesia, these categories are of little use for finding artists making unique music. Instead, distinctly individualistic styles and a form of musical experimentalism is found at the edge of more popular genres such as punk, metal, or as a result of incorporating traditional and indigenous musical influences. Ensembles Asia is project that aims to explore these forms of musical experimentations that slip through conventional categorisations of music. The project also tries to cultivate a new network of musicians through playing together in a large improvising ensemble.

Composers have been drawn to the world’s southernmost continent, Antarctica, for creative inspiration since the so-called ‘Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, it has only been since the final few years of the twentieth century that professional composers have had opportunities to travel to the far south as part of arts residency programmes to experience its environment – and its unique soundscapes – first-hand. Most composers who have visited Antarctica to date have utilised sound recording technologies to document their journeys sonically and have subsequently created compositions that feature their soundscape recordings. Typically, such compositions include biological sounds, such as vocalisations of penguins and seals (both on the ice and underwater); non-biological or ‘geophysical’ ambient sounds that emanate from the natural landscape, such as those created by wind, blizzards, and ice cracking and calving; and/or anthropogenic (human) sounds recorded within the Antarctic environment.

This article examines a series of recent compositions by four established composers who have visited Antarctica and used their experiences and field recordings to inform their creative work: Douglas Quin, Jay Needham, Lawrence English and Philip Samartzis. The primary aim of this research is to investigate what these composers’ Antarctica-related works reveal about their individual encounters with and perceptions of the frozen continent, as well as to consider the role of such compositions in conveying messages related to climate change to listeners around the globe – the vast majority of whom are unlikely to ever see or hear the place in person.