Border music, music of memory: DJs’ experimentalism through the Semiotics of Culture

Abstract

The paper analyzes musical pieces of experimental DJs from two categories related to the semiotics of culture: semiosphere and its borders and memory of culture, developed by the Russian semioticist I. Lotman. The discussion is about the characteristics of electronic dance music, its subgenres, and the differences put in experimentations produced by these DJs. The corpus of analysis is formed by compositions of three artists: DJ Tudo, Psilosamples and Dandara. The argument and the analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of these two categories for the understanding of the productive and creative dynamics of this kind of work that differs from the mainstream of electronic pop music.

Keywords electronic music; DJ; experimentalism; semiotics of culture