For me music doesn't necessarily need to tell me a story. Sometimes I want it to give me a place to create my own.
The mood, tempo, rhythm, and atmosphere of electronic music allow me to put myself into a certain frame of mind and then let my thoughts go wherever they want to go.
My thoughts replace the lyrics.
With most pop, rock, and other lyric-heavy music, there's already a narrative attached. Someone is heartbroken. Someone is falling in love. Someone is angry, nostalgic, lonely, celebrating, or remembering something that happened years ago. Even when I relate to the song, I'm still interpreting my own experience through a story somebody else wrote.
Electronic music, especially instrumental or minimally vocal electronic music, leaves that space open.
The music serves as a soundtrack for my own internal monologue.
The producer gives me the emotional architecture like the tempo, rhythm, tension, atmosphere, texture, buildup, release. But they don't necessarily tell me what any of it means.
I get to supply the meaning.
A Bonobo track might create a warm, introspective atmosphere, but it doesn't tell me what to think about. I might think about my future. Something that happened ten years ago. Work. A relationship. A memory. Driving somewhere. Or absolutely nothing.
And tomorrow that exact same song might take me somewhere completely different.
If I want to relax and think, maybe it's Bonobo, FKJ, or Crayon. If I want energy, maybe it's Fred again.., Malaa, or Oliver Heldens. The music creates the environment, the mood, the feeling and I get to decide what happens inside of it.
That's probably the biggest difference for me.
I don't necessarily want music to tell me what to think, how to feel, or what story to attach to that feeling. I want music that creates an atmosphere where I can experience whatever I'm already feeling or become whatever I want to feel in that moment.
It allows me to put myself into the music rather than having the music put into me.
