Electronica, Dance and Club Music

This volume collects a broad range of perspectives on electronica, dance, and club music through 28 previously published essays (1979 to 2008) from journals and books on a diverse range of genres: rave music, South Africa's kwaito, disco, Tijuana's Nor-tec music, techno, Goa, India's trance scene, and others. Collected by Butler (Northwestern U.) and written by scholars working around the world in sociology, geography, cultural and performance studies, musicology, queer studies, African American studies, religious studies, ethnomusicology, English, anthropology, composition, and music theory, in the first section the essays explore the sonic practices of electronic dance music, including performance and production aspects, as well as its aesthetic values, musical elements, and the practices of DJing, video DJing, sampling, and the use of computer bugs and glitches. The second section looks at bodily aspects, including gender, sexuality, desire, globalization and culture, and spiritual dimensions, while the final section addresses how electronic dance music fosters affiliations and distinctions among groups of people, such as women in the Asian underground scene in Britain and monthly club nights for HIV-positive men, and topics such as genres, mainstream vs. alternative, and the position of women in the British rave scene. Annotation Ac2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Mark J. Butler, Professor, Northwestern University, USA