I came across this insightful criticism of dubstep DJ Skrillex by relational_sense on Reddit. My summary and own thoughts:

Skrillex was at the right place at the right time to ride the brostep wave: the dubstep accepted by the mainstream is boiled down to its essence as the drop followed by “crunchy” womp-womp-womp (or wub-wub-wub). Brostep is “in a sense ‘counter-culture’ in its rejection of preconceived notions of how music ‘should sound’”. All his songs are based particularly closed on the pop song structure, which effectively creates emotional tension. His songs have a very narrow emotional range that is created using very similar samples in all his songs.

Historically, dubstep was considered an “introspective” genre that was quite emotionally nuanced. This trend lives on in the cross-pollination of dubstep and minimal techno. The other direction dubstep has gone, as expanded upon in a comment by FelixByrd, is to be a mixing pot of diverse influences – apparently Bassnectar is a good example of this. As YouTube will show you, a dubstep remix can be made of any song and a dubstep song can bring in any sample.

Skrillex used to be a punk guitar player. He has a distinct look and a good stage presence. He started out as a producer, essentially playing around with a narrow range as discussed above. When he started DJing, he didn’t have much in the way of DJ skills. He’s an argument one way or another in the debate about whether DJs are more than jukeboxes. Apparently his skills have matured since then.

The mainstreaming of brostep has brought a large number of unsophisticated fans. Many of them consume dubstep because it’s fashionable and don’t really care about the rest of the genre. This has created a vicious cycle in electronic music, because the brostep fanbase is large enough to distort the entire genre. We “hate” Skrillex because he represents that process.

Dance remix wip of a NIN tune: rearranged, moar bpms, pan adjusted, and firing automated sidechains.

See remix.nin.com for your own sample pax.

Via Dutchman, who’s down with this sickness:

My joke here is that Moombahton is, at its genre-heart, the song Moombah played at a reggaeton tempo (108 BPM), and Moombahcore, as a genre, is Moombahton with distortion applied. At least, that’s my naive understanding of it all (and I defer to Jared).

They’re not really one-song genres though, as the idea is to take that sound and make variations on it.

I’ve been meaning to recommend The Electro Show as a podcast for those interested in this stuff. The shows start with music history/appreciation of the particular weekly theme/genre and then have a selection of tracks, in roughly a 50/50 mix for the hour-plus show.

This is a genealogical, geographical and temporal diagram of electronic music genres. It’s more up to date than Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music. Of course it isn’t linked to any samples or (not particularly helpful) commentary, so it’s better as an overview:

• With HTML5 animation
• As a static image

I’m not sure what the meaning of their transitive links are. For example, if UK Garage evolved from Jungle, and Grime evolved from UK Garage, what does it mean to directly connect Jungle and Grime? And would it perhaps not be more accurate to connect Drum & Bass to Grime?

Anyway, each of these detailed links could be dissected with great detail, but it does a good job of capturing the broad strokes. The diagram does an excellent job of using colour to help with spatially distant and overlapping links.

Since this is HTML5, the code can be stolenremixed to make other visualizations with dynamic bezier curves.

Chinese Man, via The Hip Hop Zone, via Daz:

Playing with Massive, mixing for headphones:

Today was “payday” — really my business’ outstanding invoices got resolved — so “my business” — actually, they ARE for my business because I can use them on games — got some new equipment:

That’s me playing the nanoPAD2, which is a cheapo Korg pad controller*, and the X-Session Pro, which is an M-Audio DJ mixing board. I, or “we” maybe, was/were going to get an APC40, which is something similar and slathered in blinkenlights and much more costly, but the Akai factory was destroyed in the Thai tsunami and no one in Canada has been able to buy new Akai stuff since before XMas. Or so, at least, the kind hipster at Moog Audio informed me.

I used the pads to trigger all the instruments, and tweaked various parameters like snare snappiness and the frequencies of the noise floor during the drop with the mixer.

* like Araabmuzik uses

More new techniques: all the instruments play in their own dominant frequency range, the kick is unprocessed but I changed from the simulated 808 to the simulated 909, added snare rolls and crash cymbals, and played with some new software instruments & effects (Sound Toys).

This is structured as the lead-up to a notional first drop. I don’t like the lead, but it’s mostly there to counterpoint the bass. Snares need work. The lead pans wide, so if you’re not on headphones it’s mud.

A 909, correctly compressed, with just a touch of EQ, is the business. — The Dance Music Manual

Here is a test of a bunch of different new techniques, particularly band-filtering instrument tracks. The bass is sharply attenuated above 1khz, while the piano lead has the same done, below 1khz. This carves out a sense of space in the mix and helps it gel — neither sound interferes with the other. The structure is the simplest, most straightforward I could think of at the time that would get me to 64 bars. A maj / F# min, 140 bpm.

Here is the same with heavy sim-vinyl distortion:

Thanks to Dutchman.