Ice on the Circuits/Coldness as Crisis: The Re-subordination of Laptop Sound

Monroe, Alexi

2003

Contemporary Music Review 22(4): 35-43.

Language: English

This article examines issues surrounding the cultural reception of "laptop music", as well as its wider socio-political implications. By tracing the reactions to industrial and techno music, laptop music is placed in a historical political context. Reactions to these electronic forms manifest oscillations between technophilia and technophobia. It is argued that the characteristics for which electronic sounds are criticised can be positive conceptual strengths and that the coldness perceived in some laptop sounds and performance can be a positive aesthetic counterweight to the overheated status of mass popular culture.