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© HfG Karlsruhe

Christopher von Frankenberg’s thesis outlined the contours of global musical phenomena that could be described as ‘Internet music’ or music for the ‘Post-Internet’ youth. Phenomena that started around the early 2010s and are still continuing until this day. Internet Music wasn’t just defined as music on the Internet, but music heard as being shaped by, symptomatic of, or straightforwardly ‘about’ the perceived effects of the Internet, with the two often conflated. Nevertheless, the term ‘electronic online underground’ is more appropriate in order to outline this ‘style’. The term ‘style’ proved as essential since the analysed phenomena went beyond a mere audible output and often had conceptual dimensions (‘Accelerationism’, ‘Hauntology’, ‘Posthumanism’, ‘Gender- & Identity politics’) as well as connections to the art world (‘Post-Internet-Art’). Through a historical, cultural and musicological analysis, the ‘High-Tech’-aesthetic of the ‘electronic-online-underground’ was juxtaposed to its predecessor, the ‘Indie’-aesthetic. Here, the thesis reflected upon their modes of popular music production (means music-making outside of the commercial music industry), their aesthetics (an idea about what sounds good or a style or even a life-style) as well as their function as “counterculture” (a community of music making contrary to the normative taste, a protest, a form of resistance, a ‘sub-culture’ that could be distinguished from main stream culture).