Music Book Review: Bedroom Beats & B-Sides by Laurent Fintoni

Bedroom Beats & B-Sides: Instrumental Hip Hop & Electronic Music at the Turn of the Century

by Laurent Fintoni (Music 781.66 Fin)

 

Home studio recording productions have become increasingly common in recent decades, mostly built around computers as the center of home studio spaces. However, this book takes us back to the era immediately before computers became the focus of recording studios, where a “bedroom studio” for making beats consisted of hardware devices like samplers, turntables, drum machines, and analog or digital tape recorders. The mid-90s were a magical time for DJs, with a wide stylistic overlap between instrumental hip-hop and a range of electronic dance music idioms. Bedroom Beats & B-Sides begins its exploration at this pivotal moment in music history, and then takes us forward to about 2010, by which time many new genres have coalesced and new technology has enabled lots of people to make music on their own terms without the cost and complication of going into formal recording studios.

 

The book features a unique organizational style into “tapes” rather than chapters, with each “tape” containing song-based subheadings that serve as recommended listening lists. There are some classic as well as obscure song references to track down, and like the music discussed in the book, they’ll take you all over the US and Europe to burgeoning underground music scenes whose artists proved to be influential. I found this book especially exciting in how it ties the work of all of these scenes together, inspiring and influencing one another as they all evolved. The lines between hip-hop and electronica are quite blurred during the period documented in this book, and we can see how artists like DJ Shadow and the Beastie Boys matured alongside the work of Aphex Twin and Massive Attack. Since the time period this book focuses on, pop music in general has continued to absorb influences from many styles, and musicians have taken more control over their own sounds by making their own recordings. The essential changes in technology and society that made this possible are well documented in this book.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Bass, Mids, Tops: An Oral History of Soundsystem Culture by Joe Muggs & Brian David Stevens, Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop by Nate Patrin or Raw Music Material: Electronic Music DJs Today by Walter Huegli.]

[ publisher’s official Bedroom Beats web page ] | [ official Laurent Fintoni web site ]

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

 

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