here's one, for while you're away.

ethereality is our new normal. yours and mine. we live on clouds now; transmit our dreams through waves. (that's the internet.)

this means that you experience the world "synesthetically." instead of pure physical senses, your headspace is affected by senses that are translated through these waves instead. you don't experience physical time nor place anymore: the monitor provides your senses digitally.

but certain shifts in media transmission made this synesthetic experience more bodily, and more oppressive.

the advent of EDM in 2008-11 was characterized by hard, in-your-face sounds that typically lacked spatial recognition and had poor mastering. the stereo sensibilities of old Lady Gaga and Skrillex tracks alike were off. let's not even talk about Nicki's Guetta-produced pop stuff.

most of this was good, but it lacked an awareness -- of panning, widening, limiting, EQing.

it was flat.

artists eventually found their way around these, and this wouldn't be noteworthy except for its correlation with a particularly intriguing phenomenon: the proverbial & literal widening of the virtual worlds, of the synesthetic networks, through which these songs were transmitted.

at the tail-end of this era of EDM -- circa 2011-2012 -- Spotify rose to prominence. SoundCloud rose with it.

many of us have since pivoted to these programs, on which music is as intangible and free-flowing as the internet itself.

except the internet doesn't "flow" just anywhere, and the internet isn't an entirely physical property.

but it /does/ facilitate yours.

your senses interpellate the data stream, giving it a new life inside of your head. this is how the internet is "synesthetic." the network transmits a sensory experience to you, /regardless/ of your actual lived "interaction" with that data. data comes to life through you.

but at the time where these streams truly came to the forefront of virtual-cultural experience, neither the EDM genre nor its contemporary pop byproducts occupied space inside your head, literally and figuratively.

these productions didn't have the audio-spatial range.

Electronic music needed to adapt. More importantly, it needed to take up space.

but it didn't need to do this simply to stay relevant -- as a figurative maneuver, to stay "at the forefront of your mind." it needed to literally imperialize the space inside of it. beyond it.

because, in the new synesthetic world order, physical "sense" is nonsense.

to be tangible in the "real world" under virtuality is to imperialize the most intangible planes of its existence.

Contemporary pop, moving in time with EDM, has shifted towards the sounds of banging drums, slow-swelling basses, glowing synth pads, and low-passed ambient rumbles to widen itself within you. And it had to do that to retain any sense of humanity. Of touching you. Of moving you.

Take, for instance, Troye Sivan's "Seventeen" -- which in my opinion remains the most brazen example of this new production style. Everything about this song has been engineered to maximize the space it takes up.

The auditory "space" that EDM + electronic contemporary pop began to fill signified, in literal audio-spatial terms, the only modes through which we, as newly virtual creatures, could be affected. the only media by which could be enveloped.

the only ways we could be embraced.

in a sentence: EDM's means of production (referential pun intended) evoke the highest order of this multimodality. it has expanded to subsume you within it, to remind you that physical sensation does not come to you unmediated anymore in the realm of data.

EDM began to widen its soundscapes to reference its own affective properties: that the space it takes up inside your head is quite literally the most bodily presence you will feel within yourself in a world where connectivity is no longer synonymous with touch.

but it couldn't have weaponized affect in this way without the broadening of new virtual technologies -- Spotify and streaming culture, for instance -- that solidified the domination of a mediated sensory experience, in which affect is no longer your own.

Electronic music sounds fuller now because electronic producers realized that it needed to turn its sights on the spaces you actually occupy: your head.

And, thanks to the internet turning all sensory experience into a synesthetic singularity, you need not occupy anywhere else.

... sometimes, some days, i wish i could.