Creating timelines is clearly the done thing at the moment. At the same time as Courtney Barnett’s live archive launched, Google Arts & Culture built a new interactive website that works through the long and involved history of electronic music and club culture in all its myriad forms.
With the wonderfully alliterative title of Music, Makers and Machines, it was created in collaboration with Groove (the Berlin-based electronic magazine), the Museum Of Youth Culture, the Bob Moog Foundation, the Western Broadcasting Corporation in Germany, French-Japanese electronic record label/fashion company Kitsuné and the Swiss Museum & Center For Electronic Music Instruments. With names like this involved, the level of authority and credibility is extraordinarily high and that is reflected in the breadth and depth of the material on the site.
It starts its journey back in 1895 with Thaddeus Cahill’s Telharmonium (which was 60-feet long and weighed 200 tonnes) and from there works through all the musicians, inventors and locations that shaped the direction of modern electronic music. It is packed with videos, photos and audio clips at key points to illustrate each moment in this long and fascinating journey.
Users can tailor their trip through the site by picking what kind of music fan they are – from Tech Nerd to Total Novice.
It also offers the inside stories of hugely influential studios in Paris, Cologne, Milan, Berlin and Munich where landmark recordings were made and pioneering artists worked.
On top of this is the social history side of electronic music – gathering together the flyers that shaped the aesthetics of dance music as well as telling the history of pivotal subcultures and scenes.
You could, in all honesty, lose days here exploring every nook and cranny of the site, expanding your knowledge and playing around with AR recreations of synths, drum machines and samplers.
It is a phenomenal undertaking and will surely evolve as new stories and names are added. Music marketing does not have to be about selling something – it can equally be about simply celebrating something.
