Foreword

Some time after my passion for electronic music took off, a friend of my father, hearing about it, came to our place with a VHS recording. It was Jean Michel Jarre's concert in Houston 1986, the biggest musical concert to date, all the factors taken into account. In that moment I knew JM Јаrres music quite well, but I didn't know that he was also staging these spectacles. After we have seen through this remarkable footage, there was a single question in the minds of us all: how is it possible that we didn't even know about this happening?

This returned me to the similarly enigmatic question that I had from before: namely, I didn't only like the music of JM Jarre, Vangelis, Mike Oldfield and others; I was also deeply disturbed by it. Something made it different from what we usually call music, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

Of course, I reached for musical literature, only to find nothing.

With time, I realized that these composers were almost non-personas in musical world, and that musicologist and musical critics simply didn't write about them. The only words uttered about theirs work were considering theirs commercial success, on that way putting them in the same basket with Madonna or Michael Jackson, say. How was this possible? And what was actually happening?

With time, some books that tackled the field of electronic music did appear. But, I was completely dissatisfied with the content they offered. The approach and the ideas presented in these books had little to do with what was actually achieved by best electronic composers. So I continued passionately hoping for a book that will substantially cover this obscure, yet exciting territory.

But it wasn't happening, And so, one day, I decided to try to do something about it myself. Being neither a musician nor a writer, I was an unlikely candidate for this job; however, I still started recollecting and systematizing the sketches I made for myself over the years. It was quite a gruelling process; I had to melt those sketches down to a unified structure of a book, and do the research on musicians and musical fields I knew very little about at the time. But the years of being powerlessly irritated about the phenomenon of obscuration of most successful electronic music gave me the needed energy.

The result is this book, containing the conclusions and the ideas that I vaguely had from my very first encounters with the popular pioneering electronic music.

I hope you will find it an interesting read.

Dalibor Dragojevic, Pancevo 2016