Resident Advisor’s playlist curation is excellent, and Early Electronic Music is no exception. A far out descent into analog-generated squiggles, bubbles, percolations, and sine waves from the genre’s formative stages, it successfully demonstrates how electronic music was born out of a unique intersection of novelty and avant-garde. After all, Raymond Scott and Perrey and Kingsley, both active in the mid-20th century, used cutting-edge technology to make silly pop throwaways. At the other end of the spectrum there’s Morton Subotnick, a serious composer who recorded for the classical label Nonesuch. RA also deserves props for diversity. Their tracklist contains a cut each from Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire, two visionary female composers who largely were written out of electronic music’s development. It’s worth noting that the playlist focuses on pieces made by electronic processes exclusively, thus explaining why hybrid examples, including Bernard Hermann’s theremin-laced scored for the science fiction landmark The Day the Earth Stood Still, have been excluded.
