Electro rock

Electronic rock or electrorock is a subgenre of rock that uses synthesizers, MIDI, the computer or any technological innovation to produce music. In the 1920s, the experimentation of the musique concrète and the Theremin paved the way to a new way to create music, manipulating the sound with to the inventions the technology was making available to the artists. The first computer to generate music was a CSIRAC in 1950-51; Joe Meek with the album I Hear a New World in 1959, and The Tornados with the track Telestar in 1962 were the pioneers of the electronic rock, using shynts in their productions. The new instruments the musicians could use were the first guitar stompboxes and the Mellotron, a keyboard instrument forerunner of the modern samplers. The Mellotron was widely employed by artists such as The Moody Blues, the Beatles, King Crimson, Yes and Genesis, in order to add string, brass and woodwind textures to their compositions. The Beach Boys were among the first to use the Tannerin (a keyboard version of the Theremin) in a rock song in their track I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times in 1966, the period when the Moog synth was making its debut on the music scene. The following year The Monkees, one of the first bands to buy a Moog synth, published the album Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd., rapidly reaching number 1 on the US charts; after a couple of months, the Doors made their Moog debut with the album Strange Days. The decade ended with the neat supremacy of the new instrument in the mainstream commercial scene, boosted by its endorsement by the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel.

Then, at the beginning of the 1970s, the list of great musicians that started using the synth was quite long: Pink Floyd, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, The Who, Electric Light Orchestra, Genesis, Return Forever, Weather Report, but also Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Can and Faust. The “Kraut Rock” of the latter, together with Brian Eno’s contribution, gave the final boost to the development of electronic rock. In Japan too, Isao Tomita with Electric Samurai: Switched on Rock, and Osamu Kitajima's with the album Benzaiten included synth sounds in their new electronic rock music productions.

Despite the initial enthusiasm for the new instruments, in the 1970s many bands avoided using the synths, whose sound they considered a counterfeiting of traditional instruments. The first punk bands were among those, but from the second half of the decade post-punk and new wave bands were already employing drum machines, synths and samplers to reproduce industrial setting sounds, thus paving the way to industrial music. Pop and rock music followed the trend: many artists like Cat Stevens, Ultravox and the Japanese Yellow Magic Orchestra started to take advantage of the potentiality of the new instruments.

MIDI and digital audio were the detonators of electronic music in the 1980s. The synth was dominating both the pop and the rock scene, with Depeche Mode and Duran Duran leading the trend, but also the New Romantics like Spandau Ballet, A Flock of Seagulls, Culture Club ABC, Soft Cell, Talk Talk, B- Movie and Eurythmics that fused glam and electronic elements.

The first platinum discs of industrial rock came in the 1990s with Ministry and Nine Inch Nails, but also the indietronic of Stereolab and Disco Inferno was popular in the last decade of the millennium. The artists of this new phase were mixing indie sounds and electronic music, flanked in the experimentation by the pioneers of electroclash, like I-F, and of the new rave/synth rock of Klaxons.

In the last years, metalcore and post-punk bands have been using electronic music devices to generate drums and vocals, creating subgenres or styles like electronicore, synthcore, trancecore and many others.