Drum and bass is one of the fastest electronic dance music (EDM) genres to achieve significant cultural attention, often running in excess of 170 BPM (beats-per-minute); around twice the speed of the soul and funk records from which its ‘breaks’ are sourced. Its emergence via dance clubs and raves in the deindustrialised spaces of inner-city London during the early 1990s points to an interrelationship between the stratified experience of speed in an accelerated culture and the effects of post-industrialisation on the genre’s mainly urban and working-class participants, many of whom have been socially and geographically immobilised by the fast and fluid transactions of deterritorialised techno-capital. This chapter considers the role of drum and bass as both a form of cultural resistance within underground EDM against the socially deleterious effects of an accelerated culture, while palpably embracing the jouissance produced by speed in its sonic and wider cultural contexts.

Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, this chapter shows how women artists navigate the gendered complexities of working in the highly male-dominated occupation of electronic music production and performance. Using a feminist critical management studies lens and positioning the construction of subjectivity as a relational, and power-laden process, the discussion notes six subjectivities enacted by women producing and performing electronic music. (1) The Intersectional Artist (2) The Genderless Artist (3) Visible Woman: Invisible Artist (4) Shrinking Violets and Tough Cookies (5) One of the Boys and (6) Bringers of Divine Feminine Energy. The discussion addresses the impacts these subject positions have on women’s careers and concludes by showing how women’s collectives, despite representing an additional burden on those who organise them, are challenging the status quo by providing public and visible action through the ‘safety and strength in numbers’ of collective activism.

This chapter presents an analytic autoethnographic account of techno production within the Berlin electronic dance music scene. The discussion analyses the composition, production, and creative processes underpinning several commercially successful techno records: ‘Ellipse’, ‘Pulse Train’, and ‘Cognitive Resonance’. Observations of the production practice reveal several rhythmic principles underpinning techno music: sixteenth notes flow in uninterrupted ‘pulse trains’, kick drums articulate 4/4 beats; groupings in powers of two predominate; polymetricity enables non-binary groupings. Describing a process of integration in the global techno scene and its Berlin focal point, the chapter is written in the first person to show the author’s presence. Links are drawn between personal experience and rhythmic structures in techno music. Three insights emerge: pulse trains as central rhythmic structure of techno music; interiorising production techniques and immersing oneself in scene-specific aesthetic codes; and using embodied knowledge, gained through listening and dancing, is a significant component of producing techno.

DJ culture has long been associated with the collective experience of the dance floor in Electronic Dance Music Cultures (EDMCs), yet it has also spread through various forms of broadcast technology, from radio to television and the internet. In this chapter, we explore some of the ways that DJ culture adapted to the conditions of social isolation that defined the Covid-19 pandemic. We are particularly interested in the adoption of the streaming platform Twitch to facilitate aspects of virtual belonging and online community that emerged to redress the absence of the dance floor. We are also interested in how ‘online DJing’ constructs conditions for virtual engagement by remediating forms of broadcast media. In this chapter we address how DJ culture navigated the transition from in-person events to ‘being-scene’ on the screen, and how affective experiences of the dance floor, the ‘vibe’ and its communitas transformed during this process.

This chapter introduces the notion of the rave moment as an aesthetic experience that foregrounds affect. Its theorisation takes place in the context of an affect-deficit society through the case study of a series of dance parties that took place in Blackburn, UK, between 1989 and 1990. Seemingly resisting a categorisation within hegemonic discourses of raves, the Blackburn parties are used to show that the rave moment is a cultural product that can be exported and adapted. Its flexibility is evident in the changing character of the parties with regard to their location, organisational structure, popularity and promoted values. On the one hand, it is difficult to portray them as a coherent series of events. On the other hand, the parties were retrospectively labelled as ‘raves‘ in an attempt to fit their development into common narratives of rave culture. This tension is used as a starting point to argue for a reframing of electronic dance music events as contextualised aesthetic experiences.

This chapter addresses the nightclub as an architectural typology. It will consider what the Italian architect Carlo Caldini, co-designer and owner of Florence’s Space Electronic nightclub (1969–2017), called the nightclub’s ‘inexistent architecture’ - in other words, the importance of sound and light over bricks and mortar in the design of club spaces. This was echoed by the critic Aaron Betsky who described a design of ‘rhythm and light’ (Queer Space, 1997) in his description of New York’s iconic Studio 54. The discussion further considers a range of nightclubs from the late twentieth century including Rome’s Piper club, Florence’s Space Electronic, and Electric Circus, Studio 54, Area, and Palladium in New York. In addition, it brings in other voices from architecture, design and music – including Simon Reynolds’ concept of the ‘affective charge’, to position design and architecture as a key realm in electronic dance music culture.

This chapter theorises the embodiment of timbral gesture in electronic dance music (EDM) as a convergence point between the vexed categories of affect and meaning. It is argued that timbre is inseparable from gesture in the listening experience and that the embodiment of synthesised gestures affords listeners new ways of experiencing their body-minds by exercising their perceptual agency through sonic prosthesis. In social EDM settings, the heightened potential for entrainment to both the music and other co-participants, together with the established role of entrainment in facilitating social bonding, suggests that the timbral gestures of EDM could be key to fostering intersubjectivity among those present. Considering this, the imaginative embodiment of timbral gestures is shown to constitute a necessary first step towards the communal rationalisation of the EDM experience and the social emergence of musical meaning.

This chapter identifies and analyses five major electronic dance music (EDM) cultures of mainland China: mainstream clubs-based EDM culture, local clubs-based EDM culture, klubbing-based EDM culture, provincial dancing-based EDM culture, and mic-shouting-based EDM culture. The first two cultures are based on the dance club, the third on karaoke venues, and the final two on social media. Chinese EDM cultures and styles are circulated regionally but not globally. Yet, they have been given ample opportunity to grow due to the very large domestic night-time economy. They are locally distinctive and participated in by millions of Chinese clubbers and audiences. Several studies have already identified these local EDM styles, but the local EDM cultures remain unexplored. The discussion helps fill the research gap by analysing major Chinese EDM cultures’ local cultural characteristics and potential social implications.

Downtempo electronic dance music culture (EDMC) genres were popularised from 1989; much like more up-tempo forms they have roots stretching back to the late 1960s and 1970s, with the White Room at Heaven nightclub a particularly important moment. Several variant forms, such as ambient, ambient dub, ambient techno, chill out, downtempo, ambient house, chill hop, and trip hop connect with ecstatic forms of trance; listeners use such music to induce states of relaxation, stillness, meditation, blissful somatic consciousness, euphoria, or to lower tension or stress levels, in various contexts.

This chapter traces the development of EDMC ambient and chill out music, and explores techniques used by musicians composing in such styles, examining how they interact with, for example, deep listening, time, space, flow states, entrainment, and mystical or spiritual traditions. Framed by phenomenology and embodiment, it discusses how specific approaches aim to manipulate the listener’s experiential perception, as well as their mood and state of consciousness. As well as the listener’s experience, the processes of chill out composers are considered, examining the affordances of chill out music.

This chapter examines the profound impact of reggae sound system culture on both British and global music scenes, tracing its evolution and influence across racial and geographic boundaries. Initially, it explores the origins and cultural significance of sound systems in Jamaica, focusing on figures like Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd and Duke Reid, and their role in shaping social events through innovative audio technology. It then shifts to the migration of sound system practices to Britain, highlighting the adaptation of these practices within British urban life, with key figures like Dennis Bovell leading the way. Finally, the chapter discusses how sound system culture influenced global music, particularly electronic genres such as dub, jungle, drum and bass, and grime. It emphasises the lasting legacy of sound systems in modern music, despite the decline of traditional systems in Jamaica and the UK, showcasing their ongoing global impact.

This chapter introduces the electronic dance music culture kuduro (‘hard arse’) from Angola. It delineates the diasporically intertwined history of kuduro, introduces the main aesthetic strategies and, finally, focusses on the undervalued microphone practices of animação). Based on ethnographic research, the contribution crystallises the insight that kuduro, as a practice that requires deft skills and stamina, is throughout its history intrinsically tied to electronic dance musics around the globe rather than representing the exotic other to Western EDM. This fine-grained analysis of the material leads to the conclusion that kuduro is best understood within the framework of sound system cultures of the Black Atlantic, throwing the specificity of kuduro into sharper relief while also situating it within the larger context of similar practices.