Human Excess: Aesthetics of Post-Internet Electronic Music
Anders Bach Pedersen · University of Michigan Library Repository · 2017
There exists a tenacious dichotomy between the 'organic' and the 'synthetic' in electronic music.In spite of immediate opposing qualities, they instill sensations of each other in practice: Acoustic sounds are subject to artificial mimicry while algorithmic music can present an imitation of human creativity.This presents a post-human aesthetic that questions if there are echoes of life in the machine.This paper investigates how sonic aesthetics in the borderlands between electronic avant-garde, pop and club music have changed after 2010.I approach these aesthetics through Brian Massumi's notions of 'semblance' and 'animateness' as abstract monikers to assist in the tracing of meta-aesthetic experiences of machine-life, genre, musical structure and the listening to known-unknown noise.The idea of a post-Internet society acts as framework for the intimate relation between pop and avantgarde in contemporary electronic music.This relation is a result of a sonic contextualization of late-capitalist society via the Internet.Finally I discuss how pop is the noise in the avant-garde and how the human in a post-Internet era presents itself through synthetic plasticity.