Reflections on 2009 : Phylum Sinter

Experimental electronic music is a spiked frontier, full of anguished political minds that would be better to be called punk, traditional musicians that have grown tired with their normal style or instruments, bored teenagers that somehow believe that peacocking as a producer might get them chicks, and others that are technically brilliant but sound displaced against any setting they might be mashed in with. The genres we cram these artists into have always fallen short of the truth, oversimplifying complex differences, but in 2009 it was funny to see so many well established, unique artists eschew their signature to try their hand at this thing called 'dubstep' -- which is only a vague idea really outside a few staple sounds in the first place -- and more often than not, end up sounding like different takes on the exact same track. I won't get into specifics, but i'm guessing you've noticed something along these lines too. The truth is that dubstep is the new IDM; a publicity-generated movement that will have detractors and pundits but never enough to warrant their own section as permanent as "rock" or "classical" in any record store. Even now both terms are seeing a renaissance and dividing into subsets and back again into the larger umbrella terms.

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