As one of the meatsacks whose job you're about to kill... eh, I got nothin, it's damn impressive. It's gonna hit electronic music like a nuclear bomb, I'd wager.
"What officer?? No way, this isn't gabber! It's simply an electronic composition at a nice, legal, 80 BPM where the bass and rhythm sections are in 4/8 to achieve a thrilling allegro feel."
The thing is, if EDM's trained probably two generations of producers, DJs and listeners to distinguish the quality of beats based on inhuman, machinelike perfection, you can't really roll that back and try to groove with fallible humans and call that better. So 'canned' only means 'created properly, at leisure, to produce an artifact that's ideal'.
You can manipulate elaborate networks of machines and some of the trance guys are very into that, and it takes a different type of skillset. I've got some ideas on how to incorporate live musical performance into this kind of bionic music flow, but it's important to understand most people won't respond positively to a 'human element' tacked awkwardly onto a machine beat: you need very practiced humans to fit into a context like that, and you need very practiced humans to put together a 'Daft Punk' type human context that grooves as hard as the machines.
And if you work that hard on the human groove it leaves no time to be innovative in the tonal/arrangement zone that EDM absolutely requires, so you end up being like 'wow that's good retread funk' but the real progress is being made elsewhere, in areas you can't really reach.
It's interesting. But just as you can't undistort the electric guitar, you can't un-rhythm the quantized robot rhythm. I'm actually fascinated and delighted with what's been done in trance and psytrance: it's not JUST robot rhythm, it's a very carefully crafted and incredibly demanding thing with no margin for error. You can put a-rhythmic texture stuff across it all you like, but you just can't 'play an instrument' as part of that mix, the timing is way way too tight.
Welcome to the future, where DJs are kneecapped by the cloud libraries they have access to.
To be fair, though, this isn't even nearly as troubling as Beatport et al pushing cloud DJ music subscriptions. There is a whole new generation of "talent" whose literal stage performances are 100% reliant on a good internet connection -- I imagine anyone who has gigged professionally would be horrified!
To me one of the most important attributes of a DJ is their ability to curate and find music that I have never heard before from sources that are new to me. Essential to this is the care and feeding of your own personal music library, in CD/Vinyl/MP3/FLAC/some other unencumbered format. Curating spotify playlists just isn't the same, and serendipitously stumbling on a new track in some random playlist is not nearly as emotionally relevant as discovering some gem on a $2 secondhand whitelabel, or the CD bargain bin at the thrift store, for example. To say nothing of all the unimaginative troglodytes that are simply going to hit up the genre top 10 and add all that to their crates and think they're ready to go.
I shudder to think about what the future of the electronic music underground means with all these cloud zombies running around. These kids know there's no cell service out in the middle of the desert right???
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