Electronica

Electronica is both a broad group of electronic-based music styles intended for listening rather than strictly for dancing and a music scene that started in the early 1990s in the United Kingdom. In the United States, the term is mostly used to refer to electronic music generally. The original wide-spread use of the term "electronica" derives from the influential English experimental techno label New Electronica, which was one of the leading forces of the early 1990s introducing and supporting dance-based electronic music oriented towards home listening rather than dance-floor play, although the word "electronica" had already begun to be associated with synthesizer generated music as early as 1983, when a "UK Electronica Festival" was first held. At that time electronica became known as "electronic listening music", also becoming more or less synonymous to ambient techno and intelligent techno, and was considered distinct from other emerging genres such as jungle and trip hop. Electronica artists that would later become commercially successful began to record in the late 1980s, before the term had come into common usage, including for example the Prodigy, Fatboy Slim, Daft Punk, the Chemical Brothers, the Crystal Method, Moby, Underworld and Faithless. Around the mid-1990s, with the success of the big beat-sound exemplified by the Chemical Brothers and the Prodigy in the UK, and spurred by the attention from mainstream artists, including Madonna in her collaboration with William Orbit on her album Ray of Light and Australian singer Dannii Minogue with her 1997 album Girl, music of this period began to be produced with a higher budget, increased technical quality, and with more layers than most other forms of dance music, since it was backed by major record labels and MTV as the "next big thing". According to a 1997 Billboard article, "the union of the club community and independent labels" provided the experimental and trend-setting environment in which electronica acts developed and eventually reached the mainstream.