Electronic dance music (EDM) is a broad range of percussive electronic music genres made largely for nightclubs, raves, and festivals.
Today, I will introduce 5 styles of electronic music. For each style, I have used my favorite songs as examples. If you like them, you can search the playlist and explore more good music.
Trip-Hop
Trip-Hop is one of the branches of electronic music. Its name origin is "Trip+Hip Hop"= Trip-Hop” because it originated from Bristol in the United Kingdom, so it was originally called "Bristol Hip-Hop". Trip hop is the latest London street dance music. It uses a lot of minor chords and adds soundtracks from horror films and science fiction films. therefore, Trip-Hop is a kind of psychedelic, Jazz-like, silly Break beat music with a little hip hop rhythm. In the world of trip-hop, you can swim in the dark hell, and you can dive in the light. you will find yourself always in both loss and hope. The most recognized performers in Trip hop are Portishead, Tricky, and Massive Attack.
House
Dancing music developed from disco in the 1980s. This is the music played by DJs in Chicago. They mixed a record of the German electronic band Kraftwerk with the regular rhythm of electronic drums and black blues singing and house was born. It is the most basic form of electronic dance music, 4/ The rhythm of 4 beats, one drum per beat, and simple melody, often with high-pitched female voices. After disco became popular, some DJs changed it, deliberately making disco less commercial, bass and drums became deeper, and often turned into pure music works, even if there are singing parts, most of them are sung by dancing female singers. Short sentences, often without clear lyrics. Gradually, some people added elements such as latin, reggae, rap or jazz. By the late 1980s, house broke out of the underground and became the darling of the popular charts in Chicago, New York and London. House also has many small branches, such as Epic House, Deep House, Hard House, Progressive House and so on. Here is a song in the style of Progressive House, Wake Me Up by the famous passed away Swedish DJ and producer Avicii.
Ambient
Ambient sounds like it never changes, but in fact it has been making changes, such as long-term sound effects, or progressive music arrangement, etc., which often create a layered sense of space, and it is called "situational music" . Ambient often sample the sounds around life, such as human voices, car sounds, and even other music melody. Created by Brian Eno in the 1970s, it is a very avant-garde style of electronic music. Later, branches such as ambient house and ambient techno appeared. In fact, there will be a shadow of ambient in many kinds of music, and even some classical music also has hints of ambient.
Trance
Trance also known as goa trance, originated on a small island in India. Goa is the name of this island. The melody often has an Indian characteristic. The characteristic of this kind of trance is that it attaches great importance to the melody, the subtle changes between the notes, and there are often overlapping melody and the high-pitched TB-303 sound. It smells of ambient. Evolved from techno, Trance is a kind of Psychedelic dance music, will make you feel trance when you listen to it, but it still retains the rhythm of dance music, and pays great attention to the performance of bass. Some of them will have a "hypnotic" effect, mainly in 4/4 beat.
Drum&Bass
Drum&Bass is an electronic dance music based on, literally, drums and bass. The music is often psychedelic due to the uncontrolled loop, and the sound takes the low-frequency shock route. Generally speaking, Drum&Bass originates from jungle and is more monotonous in rhythm than jungle, but most Drun&Bass uses a lot of vocals, especially female voices, so they are less likely to give people the cold alienation of general electronic music. The early jungle was more violent and belonged to black street music, because the jungle party at that time was mostly have complicated jungles with above 200bpm, while Drum&Bass was slower, between 150-190 bpm. When listening to this type of music, in addition to the feeling of the music itself, the rhythmic processing and the sound of the bass line are also interesting. Drum&Bass also like to play tricky rhythm, as well as the performance of Bass, such as fast, complicated beats, and the use of various electronic drums or drum sounds from samples.