Electronic music, anyone?

CONCEPT

I want to review Snivilisation by Orbital, and some other electronic music albums, but I don't know if I have it right. So I'm posting an "overview" in the hope that you'll let me know when I'm right, correct me when I'm wrong, and generally offer your point of view as comments.

Here's the form as I understand it. Please respond:

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From the outside, "electronic music" is amazingly easy to understand, and just below the surface it becomes startlingly difficult. It's easy because, with no familiarity, one can recognize the stuff easily enough... if there's a synthetic beat, we call it electronic, and listen for the following squiggles. But in fact, a number of factors (I'm specultaing things such as the ability to use computers to make consistantly minute distinction in timing and texture is an important one) enable electronic music to easily fracture into innumerable subgenres. More significantly, this "fracturing" happened as the necessary technology became simultaneously available in different parts of the world. The impetus for this was the advent of the computer; synthesizers had been in use since the sixties, and there were forms of exclusively electronic music from the early seventies. However, the versatility and accessibility of computers from the late eighties on opened up possibilities for a greater variety of electronic music and more convenient production.

Two familiar examples come in the form of Chicago house and Detroit techno. From the beginning there may have been cross-pollination, but the two forms evolved at the same time in two different cities, in many ways propogated by groups with different political, economic, and artistic concerns. House, as music developed for a club setting had a more commercial orientation from the start (although later developments would open it up in new directinos), while Techno, initially mixed at alcohol-free all-age parties in Detroit was more austere, mathematically minded, and deemphasized vocals. While this is an oversimplificaion, it illustrates a different pattern of development than, say, Blues music, which took root in the Mississippi Delta, then moved north, first to Memphis and New York, and later collecting in Chicago. The accumulative quality of Blues music (you can hear the Delta in Chicago blues) is generally absent from electronica.

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What do you all think of that?