It's easy to transport yourself back to the genesis of electronic music—the avant-garde enclaves of San Francisco and New York and Paris—where tape loops became one more instrument in orchestras that shunned no particular sound. As a stunning technological leap, the tools of synthetic noise belonged primarily to the engineer-composers of the period, the Cages and Stockhausens. You'd expect that as those tools became increasingly available to the masses, that electronic music as a genre would crossbreed with rock, become less cerebral, trade Zen-like focus for something muscular.

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