Human Excess: Aesthetics of Post-Internet Electronic Music

There exists a tenacious dichotomy between the ‘organic’ and the ‘synthetic’ in electronic music. In spite of immediate opposing qualities, they instill sensations of each other in practice: Acoustic sounds are subject to artificial mimicry while algorithmic music can present an imitation of human creativity. This presents a post-human aesthetic that questions if there are echoes of life in the machine. This paper investigates how sonic aesthetics in the borderlands between electronic avant-garde, pop and club music have changed after 2010. I approach these aesthetics through Brian Massumi’s notions of ‘semblance’ and ‘animateness’ as abstract monikers to assist in the tracing of meta-aesthetic experiences of machine-life, genre, musical structure and the listening to known-unknown noise. The idea of a post-Internet society acts as frame- work for the intimate relation between pop and avant-garde in contemporary electronic music. This relation is a result of a sonic contextualization of late-capitalist society via the Internet. Finally I discuss how pop is the noise in the avant-garde and how the human in a post- Internet era presents itself through synthetic plasticity.