Jean-Yves Leloup, ELECTRO – DE KRAFTWERK À DAFT PUNK, 2019

This book offers a panorama of electronic music through the exploration of its history, its imagination, its innovations and its connections with other arts. It is the very first work devoted to codes and cultures of electro, by passionate observers and artists involved in this movement. Electronic dance music, whose founding genres are house and techno, was born over thirty years ago in Chicago and Detroit thanks to the talent of black American musicians and DJs. Accompanying the digital revolution and dethroning rock culture, this music conquered Europe through the underground phenomenon of rave parties. Beyond the music, the electro scene has a political and counter-cultural dimension: queer activism, do it yourself spirit, festive nomadism, ephemeral and community initiatives … Its utopias and its energy take the pulse and set the tempo of our time. Accompanied by testimonies from actors on the electro scene, photographers’ portfolios document the codes and tribes of dancers, clubbers and ravers, from New York disco from the seventies to Berlin today, via golden age of rave parties in the late 1980s, through more than 250 images.