Yesterday an online conference on the spread of the internet and its effect on music was organised by think tank New Music Strategies. The most interesting speaker for readers of this site was Joe Muggs, the terrific music journalist. He spoke about how club culture and electronic music anticipated our online world, and thus what we can all learn from underground dance music.
One of his points was that for electronic music, the central artwork was the night and everything spills off from that – a decentralised web that take in tunes, DJs, lights, friendships, drugs, after parties and dumb conversations that in some way go back into the scene. Which is, if you think about it, really similar to social networking and the online world, in that we’re all constantly creating this vast object that is made up only of the relationships and the actions of the people in it. It’s a lovely idea – that we should muck in, fuck up, have a bash and talk nonsense, and we should do it as much as possible, because every conversation we have and friend we make somehow contributes to this vast wibbly-wobbly thing we either call “electronic music culture”, “the internet”, or, by extension, “life”. His opening volley is above, and is really important.
