https://pitchfork.com/features/article/2010s-rise-of-conceptronica-electronic-music/

A quest for another sort of authenticity—the paid-for privilege of being present at an Event—fuels what Amnesia Scanner call “the experience economy” of today’s festivals. Just as much as bottle-service raves on cruise ships or EDM gatherings like Electric Daisy Carnival, experimental music festivals are selling exclusivity and a sense of occasion. There’s a seemingly ever-growing number of these gatherings—Unsound, Flow, RMBA, Supernormal, Decibel, Nuits Sonores, Supersonic, and many more—along with all-year-round arts institutions like Somerset House in London. Some are funded by national or local government, or by arts and culture ministries; others draw financing from corporate sponsors.

“Europe is so full of these festivals now, and it’s very often where our music happens,” says Amnesia Scanner’s Haimala. “Kids don’t necessarily have so much money that they would buy individual tickets to concerts by our kind of artist, but they will invest in a festival ticket. So that’s where the competition started between artists—everyone trying to do more ambitious shows.” He points out that many of these festivals have music by night and a conference element by day, with panels and lectures. This discourse in turn feeds into the theory-buzzing roil around conceptronica. The festival circuit, adds Kalliala, “has created a demographic that can be marketed to.”

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But you can also sense some of the same problems that afflicted post-punk four decades ago, especially in its later years, when it reached an impasse. With conceptronica, there can be a feeling, at times, of being lectured. There’s the perennial doubt about the efficacy of preaching to the converted. That in turn points to a disquieting discrepancy between the anti-elitist left politics and the material realities of conceptronica as both a cultural economy and a demographic—the fact that it is so entwined with and dependent on higher education and arts institutions.

As fascinating as conceptronica can be, something about it always nagged at me. If its subject, in the broadest sense, was liberation, why then did I not feel liberated listening to it? It rarely provided that sense of release or abandon that you got with ’90s rave or even from more recent dissolute forms like trap, whose commodity-fetishism and sexual politics are counter-revolutionary but which sonically brings the bliss. The parallel is truest with post-punk’s critical commentary on rock itself, the way it refused the simple freedom and cutting-loose of ’60s and early ’70s rock in favor of tense, fractured rhythms that expressed alienation and unrest.