The style was born in New York dance parties named GHE20G0TH1K, which started in 2009. These parties featured voguers, punks, and fashionista,, took place in warehouses across Brooklyn and Manhattan and started to radicalize the city's nightclub scene within a year. The style that defined the deconstructed club movement was directly shaped by the possibilities of CDJs, and DJ sets, in turn, have inspired producers to imitate this chaotic experimentation in their own music, creating feedback that continued to re-imagine the expectations of the dance-floor music. The MP3s used by DJs on GHE20G0TH1K had a crunchy, cruddy texture while being played on a bigsound system, which came to define their aesthetic. Each member of the collective came from a different background, but they incorporated those differences into the mix, hybridizing a melange of Jersey club, Baltimore, footwork, and punk music, as well as elements of house and techno. Artists from the labels Night Slugs, Fade to Mind, and Keysound, that mixed together rebooted ballroom/vogue house and the new wave of instrumental grime, all with a stark, hi-tech machine sheen are also called among the pioneers of the genre. The term itself started circulating in the mid-2010s and was used as a sort of lasso term to describe a disparate, international genus of producers taking club music and turning it avant-garde.
Characteristics
The genre steps away from the dance music tropes, like four on the floor beats, stable tempo, and constant mix with joyful chaos, proposing a sonic canvas where ballroom breaks, field recordings, a cappella rapping and heavy metal are adjusted into dance-floor music. The genre characterized by its disruptive element of the mix and its wide dynamic tempo range, alternating between atmospheric breathers to high-BPM tracks. The genre adopts ideas from the post-structuralism.
Visual art
The music, often accompanied by music videos, resembles visual art. Some of the artists, such as Matthew Barney, studied visual arts rather than music. The visuals are often abstract and despicable mutational grotesque, decomposing forms. This crossing between the visuals and experimental electronic music has become such a thing that one of the key labels in the genre PAN has launched an imprint, "Entopia", dedicated to producing soundtracks for art installations, films, theater works, dance, and fashion podiums.
Reception
The music journalist and critic Simon Reynolds called style a conceptronica and said that "it isn't a genre as such, but more like a mode of artistic operation". He compared the genre with 1990s IDM, saying that the pioneers of the early IDM, such as Aphex Twin or Luke Vibert produced their music with juvenile humor, creating a chilly background for unthinking daydreaming rather than intellectual thoughts of the latter. But genres are rather connected by their background, while IDM was a commentary on the last days of the club and rave trends, the deconstructed club is also able to work over the dance music history, e.g. Berlin duo Amnesia Scanner gleaned inspiration from the Euro-techno sound known as hardstyle, Stine Janvin did loose homage to the 90s rave trends completely based on manipulating the sound through her voice, while Venezuelan producer Arca drastically decimate hedonistic rap and R&B in her early track "Doep".
