Sometime in 2007 I came up with the term, “Organic Electronic Music” to describe music I was producing with bassist Nils Westdal in our project, Keston and Westdal. I’m sure that I wasn’t the only person to think of this combination of words, and in fact, a quick search reveals several artists, labels, and others using the phrase. Our use of the phrase was a reaction to our distaste for genre labeling. In hindsight it would have been sensible to define the meaning of the phrase there-and-then, instead of simply using it in a few descriptions for tracks and albums.
In any case I found myself thinking about this recently and decided that it wouldn’t hurt to define what I mean by the phrase and perhaps discover some new music that ACB readers feel fits into my definition. In my view any style of electronic music can be considered organic electronic music (OEM). Dub step, house, downtempo, experimental, or even minimal techno can be “organic” as long as the music meets one or more of a few simple criteria. Click the link to read my brief list of parameters.
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