Wiardgroup

I found this on Amazon.com in a reader's review.

Pretty tough stuff. An interesting observation about the 
technology being more lively than the users...

"Although there was a spate of published historical surveys of 
electronic music during the early-to-mid 1970's, with the 
exception of Peter Manning's *Electronic & Computer Music*, 
there have been almost no synoptic overviews of the subject 
since then. Now comes Joel Chadabe's *Electric Sound*. One 
must admit that Chadabe's book does fill a void in the historical 
consideration of electronic music, and, for that reason alone, I 
wish that I could be more enthusiastic about it. The focus of this 
extremely overpriced paperbound book, however, is less on the 
significant achievements of composers of electronic music than 
it is on the technological means of creating it. One is hard 
pressed, indeed, to find references to more than a handful of 
significant compositions. Such an attitude is typical of the 
Post-Modern mentality (and, yes, there is such a thing, I'm sorry 
to say), in which artists of all stripes arrogantly offer 
over-intellectualized concepts and elaborate compositional and 
performance processes as justification for whatever results they 
achieve, no matter how nugatory these results may be. Here, 
one finds an inadvertent confirmation of that most basic critique 
of electronic music: That it is ultimately the soundtrack to a 
futuristic, technocratic nightmare in which the technology itself 
has become more vibrant and alive than those who create and 
ostensibly manipulate it. If one were to go by this book, then one 
would be justified in believing that, with perhaps the exception of 
Stockhausen's works, there have been no masterpieces of 
electronic music whatsoever. There has, however, been a lot of 
interesting hardware and software created for it. Could there be 
a more damning indictment of any artistic field of endeavor?"