Observer/Anthony Burgess prize for arts journalism 2021: Milo Nesbitt on Electronic: From Kraftwerk to the Chemical Brothers
Milo Nesbitt, 22, is currently studying for a master’s in English at Oxford University
At one point in Electronic, which opened in July 2020, you come to an array of variously sized plastic circles, packed tightly together and lit at an angle so as to project their shadow on to the wall behind and above them. There’s a moment when you wonder what these shapes are: some kind of abstract art, a mountain-range silhouette, a heartbeat. Then you realise, of course, that it’s a spectrogram for the song you’ve just listened to through your headphones – and that these black plastic circles are supposed to look like records. It’s a lovely reflection of electronic music’s ways of generating meaning without necessarily relying on lyrics. These signs could mean anything; they could mean everything.
Electronic music has always had a utopian impulse to it. The critic Owen Hatherley has written that Kraftwerk’s music was “an imaginary universal language that anyone could learn, anyone could speak, anyone could dance to”. The 1988 “second summer of love” could easily be contextualised as a moment of escape from the Thatcherera Conservative rule. The origins of techno in post-industrial Detroit testify to black creativity under repressive conditions. Captions in this exhibition note that the dancefloor has often acted as a space of freedom for the queer community. Peter Gay once wrote, in a different context, that “the cure for the ills of modernity is more, and the right kind, of modernity”; electronic music might be the best evidence yet.
Certainly visiting the Design Museum felt like a relief after months of lockdown, albeit a strange one: branding its atmosphere as “clublike” while having to enforce social distancing and make people bring their own headphones is a difficult balancing act to pull off. Seeing people dancing, an activity that necessitates proximity, in photographs or on video, felt instinctively unsettling. But in terms of range and quality, the exhibition’s subtitle – “from Kraftwerk to the Chemical Brothers’” – actually undersells it. The material on display encompasses the music’s origins in cold war-era science experiments through to present-day promotional nightclub graphics.
There’s a nice detail about how the Moog synthesiser first came to prominence at the 1967 Monterey pop festival, an occasion otherwise noted as a touchstone of rock’n’roll authenticity, all feedback and free love. How fitting, given that in terms of staying power – and, perhaps, countercultural cool
– electronic musicians have long outstripped hippies. It’s also pleasing to see due credit given to disco, sometimes still a too-easy shorthand for 70s lameness and bad clothes. Amazingly sensual photographs by Tina Paul and Bill Bernstein are on hand to amend the genre’s public image.
The placement of Detroit techno within the city’s industrial history, and a whole room dedicated to Kraftwerk, do enough to emphasise the music’s avant-garde “man machine” element: this is, and always has been, the sound of the future. Dub might have been given a bigger role than a sole mention of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, though it’s easy to nitpick about an exhibition that aims for, and mostly achieves, comprehensive coverage; it’s both one for the heads and a beginner’s guide.
One way to tell the story of electronic music is as a transition from private to public settings, solo to shared pleasure. For all of its long and storied history as communal musical space, it has a parallel one as domestic sonic world-building. One of the earliest ways in which electronic sound first found an audience was via the home technology of the radio and the television, for which the BBC Radiophonic Workshop started producing incidental noise and music in 1958.
It’s understandable that the exhibition emphasises the sexier narrative of dance music. Two ecstatic large-format photographs by Andreas
Gursky, including 1985’s Union Rave, are some of the first, and best, things on display. But under the circumstances, when we have had to domesticate our musical experiences more than usual, it’s worth paying attention to this shadow history, too.
A risk of exhibiting in a museum something so lively, so current, is that it gets framed as a specialist interest, one taste among many, whereas the value of electronic music is at its most visible when it seems to synthesise and connect an entire culture. The curators seem to know this. A 1990 cover of theFacemagazine, on display near the end as part of a section on acid house, predicts a “third summer of love” and features mentions of the Stone Roses, Prince and Madonna alongside a prefame Kate Moss. None of these people, on the face of it, have that much to do with electronic music; yet here, they all become drawn into a cultural moment spawned by just that. Ultimately, the exhibition’s message sounds true: electronic music is now the air we all breathe, the ocean we all swim in.