My lovely Sunday morning tradition continues this week, and here I am, drinking my coffee and checking out NPR Music. This week I dedicated my time to listening to their latest installment of World Cafe with James Blake (linked above).

For those who don’t know, James Blake is an artist from the UK who oddly enough has created a beautiful fusion of soul and dubstep. Now, my first exposure to dubstep (judge away) came from Britney Spears’ first single off of “Femme Fatale” - “Hold It Against Me.” In the bridge of the song, there is a dubstep breakdown, and from then on I was enamored with the music movement. 

In this session of World Cafe, Blake talks about how he never really thought about the idea that electronic music could be organic, or come from raw emotion. He wasn’t trying to deny the idea that it could, but he never even thought about it.

This got me thinking about how I never thought about electronic music in that light until very recently. For me, the genre of music that holds the most raw emotion, and that I connect to is soul music. That’s not saying there aren’t other forms of music, or other artists in different genres that I connect to. But I never got to the point where electronic music sparked that visceral reaction, or I never really connected to it. However, I started exploring electronic music a little while back, and that connection started popping up. A lot of that started when I bought James Blake’s self titled debut on a whim. That lead me to explore more music in that light, and it helped me recognize the raw emotional elements in music from electronic artists. 

That connection that I reached with Blake’s music made me re-evaluate music from Robyn for instance, as well as other artists in the genre or similar genre’s, and I was able to see that organic element, as well as the emotional effort put into this realm of music

This exploration of electronic music has in turn inspired me to expand my musical horizons even more, and search out music, that probably even just a year ago, I wouldn’t have dedicated time to. This is both incredibly exciting and immensely overwhelming (there is so much music out there!!). However, I have time to continue to explore, it just means I’m gonna need a bigger hard-drive, and a bigger CD/Vinyl cabinet….hello Ikea.

Talk soon.