It’s electric, and it’s eclectic

What is electronic music? That was the central question posed in a class called “Music and Computers” that I took as a freshman at UC Irvine. The answer took about 10 weeks to fully explore, and was long, convoluted and steeped in history. To help understand electronic music, I studied pioneers in the genre including French composer Pierre Schaeffer, the inventor of a style called musique concrète; John Lennon, George Harrison and Yoko Ono, who recorded “Revolution 9” on the Beatles’ White Album; and Radiohead, who utilized electronic sounds on “Idioteque,” off their experimental album Kid A.

If you want to know what electronic music is like today, you should check out this year’s Sacramento Electronic Music Festival at the TownHouse Lounge. The annual three-day event features more than 25 knob turners, beat makers and vinyl spinners of all kinds. Whether you want to see locals like Sister Crayon, the New Humans or Dusty Brown—or national acts Tycho, Daedelus and Bonjay—SEMF has what you need. The festival was created last year by Sacramento musician Adam Saake to showcase the eclecticism of the local electronic music scene. So open your ears and get your eyes ready, too, because if it’s anything like last year’s festival, the two-story TownHouse will be filled with everything from dancing hipsters to unicorn masks, and even live art demonstrations.