Eastern Developments Music

Eastern Developments Music was a music imprint¹ started by Guillermo S. Herren and myself in 2001. The music didn’t fit into a specific genre although we were most associated with electronic music based on Herren’s work as Prefuse 73 on Warp Records. We couldn’t have imagined that a broad genre of music would be later dubbed “electronic dance music” or EDM² which unfortunately was also the catalog prefix for the imprint. At the time the term IDM — intelligent dance music, also ludicrous — was used in the music press but we never described our releases as such. If we needed to throw around a string of letters to describe what we were trying to accomplish we would mention two of our influences: EPMD and ECM.

Since the label was associated with electronic music we wanted to avoid the visuals looking overly tech-y (see The Designers Republic) and emphasize a more hand-crafted, pre-digital aesthetic. We also wanted the packaging to reflect the individual artist projects but also feel like an East Dev release. I am not sure we were totally successful.

1. John Hughes at Hefty Records was our initial sponsor. Allen Avanessian at Plug Research was our second. Thank you both for everything. Thanks to Caroline for the distribution. Matt Booth was our business partner and I suspect his job was a lot like herding cats.
2. In my opinion a better term for EDM is BAM — Black American Music. You can easily draw a historic line through the direct influences of what is today described as “electronic dance music.” A very non-exhaustive list could include: hip hop, techo, electro, house, disco, funk, soul, r&b, jazz — all music created by Americans of Black heritage, all dance music and the more recent stuff made by electronic tools. Throw in dancehall, grime, garage, ragga, drill, etc and you can remove the A and just call it Black Music. I will leave the rest to music critics and social science professionals.