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This chapter examines the role of electronic dance music (EDM) in a reconceptualization of listening. It shows how EDM has developed since the 1980s at the outer edges of mainstream culture into a highly diversified major genre in globalized popular music. It considers EDM's general formal properties, especially its composition and performance; the listening environment, particularly the institution of a “safe space” or temporary autonomous zone; and how chemical sensory alteration through the use of illegal drugs changes the listening experience. It also discusses the reasons for participation in EDM events such as teknival, especially how listeners seek an ecstatic experience. Finally, it explores the ways in which EDM works around the habitual patterns of both musical structure and listening subjectivity as people seek to reexperience ecstasy or at least to reanimate the original feeling.

This chapter explores how sound systems place electronic sounds in a social context, eliciting powerful affective experiences that are framed by conceptual meaning. The chapter begins by tracing the origins of the sound system culture and dub-reggae of Jamaica. This approach, which prioritizes DJ performances over ‘live’ musicians, would prefigure the electronic dance music culture of the 1980s and 1990s. Exploring this area, this chapter examines how the design of Chicago house and Detroit techno provided high-energy dance experiences that reflected the ethos of the respective sub-cultures. Later, in the UK rave scene, breakbeat hardcore, drum & bass, and ambient house each used sound design to support an accelerated youth-culture fuelled by ecstasy, delivering trance-like experiences framed by conceptual meaning. In the global Goa trance and psy-trance scenes, this capability is explicitly characterized as ‘technoshamanic’, and the DJ as a ‘master of ecstasies’.

The success of Brazilian music in a climate of increasing inattention and overstimulation altered the image and brand of Brazil in the global marketplace in the early twenty-first century. This chapter focuses on the contrasting examples of Bebel Gilberto and Seu Jorge, and how they approached their careers in Brazil and abroad. Both artists found their most enduring success through new distribution and licensing channels that privileged cut-up and remixed Brazilian music with clear references to iconic images of a Brazilian past in the international imaginary, especially bossa nova of the 1960s. The strategy of licensing recordings to accompany other forms of consumption is shown to have exaggerated the challenges of musically representing Brazil to an increasingly connected and sensorily crowded world.

This chapter discusses the electronic dance music culture (EDMC)—clubs, festivals and the like—in relation to religiosity. Studies suggest that the collective alterations of consciousness happening in EDMCs such as moral panics and hysteria are similar to the alterations of consciousness expressed by Christian fundamentalists during an intense spiritual revival. In addition, sociologist Paul Heelas says that the contemporary studies about EDMC exemplify the shift from the “revolutionary” to subjective or “expressive life,” in which participants that are typically strangers to one another may experience a spontaneous “flash of mutual understanding on an existential level, and a ‘gut’ understanding of synchronicity.” This empathetic sociality reveals a compulsion consistent with the “neotribes” identified by sociologist Michel Maffesoli.

Fusing sample-based literature and scene-centered discussion, this chapter explores sampling in the context of the industry logics that underpin scene formation. Based on a decade of ethnographic research in the Sydney club scene, it situates the growth of electronic dance music (EDM) culture in a framework of global dance music. The central argument is that the city’s dance music industry has become increasingly international in outlook through sampling the content of overseas scenes and through the technologies that have eroded previously existing scene boundaries. In the same way that many dance music tracks sample and mash the sounds of other sources, the chapter demonstrates how contemporary EDM scenes sample and select from the content of a global circuit of EDM culture. It discusses the relationship of Sydney to other international scenes, making points about conventional notions of center and periphery and illustrating the global flow of cultural objects.

Chapter 8 discusses the orientation of Central European musicians to aesthetics, production technologies, and distribution networks of the turn of the millennium that are collectively termed world music 2.0, arguing that study of local information flow enriches the overall notion of world music 2.0. The chapter reviews how electronic dance music (EDM) became a key component of the millennial sound world and of world music 2.0 in Central Europe. The chapter then describes musicians who continue to think locally as they merge sensibilities: the Slovak duo Longital developed a futurist aesthetic; the Austrian composer and musician Christof Dienz blended alpine ideas, avant-garde art music, and EDM; and Hungarian composer-producer Károly Cserepes infused musical dreamscapes with local sounds. The chapter concludes that the Central European musicians occupy a liminal space between analog world music 1.0 and networked world music 2.0.

The act of listening to music to reach altered states of consciousness is common across many different cultures around the world, ranging from tribal settings in Central Java, Indonesia, to EDM (electronic dance music) dance clubs in the Western world. Despite the widespread listenership to trance music, we lack a comprehensive, scientific account of how features of the musical surface and structure map onto the psychophysiological experience of music. This chapter provides an overview of existing research that connects the phenomenology of trancing to psychological and neurophysiological findings. It highlights two recent empirical studies that investigate how listeners’ enjoyment and self-reported altered states of consciousness are influenced by harmonic repetition and complexity in uplifting trance (UT) pieces. This leads to a discussion of the connection between the structural properties of trance music and their impact on listeners’ enjoyment and on altered states of consciousness.

This introduction to Inner Sound: Altered States of Consciousness in Electronic Music and Audio-Visual Media outlines the background, aims, and scope of the book. The chapter begins by introducing altered states of consciousness through a description of visual hallucinations, which may have provided a basis for some of the oldest-known artworks. Next, a brief historical overview of altered states is given, from ancient shamanic traditions and cults, to modern-day use of psychedelic drugs such as LSD. The use of altered states in these contexts has resulted in a variety of associated art, literature, music, films, and video games, which in recent years have been rendered with the aid of new sound and audio-visual technologies. These works provide the main focus of Inner Sound, which explores the relationship of altered states of consciousness with electronic music and audio-visual media, in order to develop a conceptual theory of ‘Altered States of Consciousness Simulations’.

This chapter examines the transition of televisual mediations of music festivals in the social media landscape of the 2010s as a complex mediatization process with far-reaching implications for festival cultures and industries. A case study of the Tomorrowland festival in Belgium illustrates how this broader transformation is happening for electronic dance music (EDM) festivals, which mushroomed in the 2000s, when a mix of EDM and Top 40 songs came to dominate pop culture images of the millennial generation. The core argument is that the transformation of televisuality in the transition to social media like YouTube and digital culture more generally has happened primarily through a new genre of cinematic online video, which is produced for marketing purposes but also has implications for the festival experience and digital festival design. These festival marketing movies expand the Disney-derived festival design and the millennial culture of self- mediations within a new information economy.

This chapter explores the concept of implicit perceptual learning through the lens of timbre sensitivity in San Francisco electronic dance music (EDM) listeners in the 1990s. Cross-fertilizing theories of timbre perception with Web ethnography, the chapter argues that members of this subculture created a shared lexicon with which to describe timbral changes in EDM music. Through this discourse, listeners slowly learned to hear their own music in a new way through a process of perceptual learning. The chapter explores the valorization of “nonspecificity” in the EDM community, claiming that timbre played a crucial role in the development of an aesthetic that eschewed conventional musical signification.

This chapter describes the Electronic Body Music (EBM) that emerged from Belgium from 1981–1985. Musician Luc Van Acker is both historically important and a good example of what sort of efforts laid the groundwork for EBM. Van Acker is a founding member of Revolting Cocks and a hired hand for Shriekback, Arbeid Adelt, and My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult. His desire to participate in music culture at a very young age was influenced by the journalistic and technological tastes that he and his family, as Belgians, had access to. He was also affected by Belgium’s peculiar milieu of artistic isolation at that time. The chapter then turns to the EBM’s most formidable name, Front 242. More than any other industrial act, Front 242 analytically embraced the unspoken expectations that machine design placed on humans. In this way, they differed somewhat from earlier industrialists who celebrated technical ineptitude and rule breaking. This is followed by a discussion of kinetic exertion as a predominant theme in EBM.

This chapter explores the triangular relationship between sexuality, HIV/AIDS, and popular music in South Africa by focusing on the musical genre known as kwaito. Kwaito is a form of electronic dance music that emerged together with South Africa’s democracy in the early 1990s. Appearing in tandem with the demise of apartheid, kwaito music became the soundtrack of liberation as well as other struggles still to be fought, particularly poverty, crime, unemployment, and HIV/AIDS. This chapter considers the social implications of kwaito performance as they relate to discourses of sexual violence and rape. The chapter also looks at the lives and careers of artists such as Zola and Khabzela, as well as the ways that kwaito implicitly parallels the sexual and social power structures associated with AIDS among South Africa’s youth.

2002’s Die Another Day was the first Bond film in decades to seriously tweak the Bond-song formula. Madonna’s song set a new tone for the genre: hers is the first in which the singer narrates from Bond’s perspective. It inaugurates the Bond-song that deals explicitly with the traumatic core that makes up Bond’s persona. From the Bond desperately seeking to “close [his] body” against torture and perhaps rape in Madonna’s song, via the post-traumatic wail of Alicia Keys’s and Jack White’s “Another Way to Die,” for Quantum of Solace, to Adele’s musical psychoanalysis in Skyfall, the Bond of the 2000s is a traumatized subject, and the songs become so many records and treatments of trauma.

The Bond-songs and their films have kept going for more than half a century. What does it mean to keep going? What happens when the Bond-films and Bond-songs go in different directions? And what does it mean that there’s always a “next” Bond-song? The coda to this book takes up these questions, and imagines what the “next” Bond-song will do. We come, finally, to a question that animates this book as a whole: what do we want from the Bond-songs?