Electronic music and the studio

In 1996 Yuko Nexus6, a composer and lecturer based in Nagoya, Japan, coined the term kotatsutop music to describe the current state of electronic music in Japan. One can find kotatsu, low tables, covered by blankets with a heater underneath, in almost every Japanese household. Nexus6 implied that the tools for making electronic music were just as ubiquitous as this piece of common household furniture: ‘Those days when synthesisers and computers were the prized possessions of a limited number of universities and other institutions are over, and instead, these items can be found cluttering the tops of kotatsu in small boarding houses in these same areas’ (Nexus6 1998). It should come as no surprise that the face of electronic music has changed dramatically since the 1940s, but the field has changed spectacularly even within the past ten years. My laptop is more powerful today than the fastest computers I had access to ten years ago, and I can store more data on a portable drive no bigger than my finger than I ever could on the hard drives in the studios where I worked fifteen years ago.