The 400,000-odd people who flocked to Las Vegas last month for the Electric Daisy electronic dance music (EDM) festival probably didn’t make much of its name. Clad in sparkly tutus, neon spandex, glittery bikinis, and enormous furry boots, they came to dance, to gaze starry-eyed at the LED graphics, and to enjoy the warmth and communal spirit of the crowd—not to question the unlikely juxtaposition of electricity and daisies.

But the tension at the heart of the growing electronic music movement is manifest in the festival’s name. Electronic music festivals like Electric Daisy, Electric Forest, and Electric Zoo celebrate a culture of warmth, geniality, and flowers on the one hand, and a musical tradition of impersonal digitization on the other. The Raver’s Manifesto, an anonymous document that outlines the electronic music movement’s core tenets, epitomizes this apparent inconsistency: “the thunderous, muffled, echoing beat was comparable to a mother's heart soothing a child in her womb of concrete, steel, and electrical wiring,” it proclaims. The music that gave rise to P.L.U.R.—“peace, love, unity, and respect,” a doctrine that underlies much of the American EDM scene—is at once tenderly maternal and brutally mechanical.

Why is it this music—which has seen an unprecedented surge in attendance in recent years, with the Ultra Music Festival in Miami boasting between 50,000 and 60,000 attendees each day—that has occasioned such an explicit celebration of human connection and community? “Rave culture, despite all the negative attention it receives about its ties to club drugs, is really about togetherness,” a raver gushed to me.

But electronic music often lacks the spontaneity of jazz or hip-hop, which lend themselves more easily to improvisation. (DJ Deadmau5 recently scandalized critics when he confessed that his “live” performances consist of premixed sets: “we all hit play,” he titled the gloomy Tumblr post.) And it usually lacks the plaintive human voices that grace sappy pop hits. Yet, it is electronic music, heralded by The Atlantic as “the new rock,” that has triggered the resurgence of old-fashioned, hippy-dippy sentimentalism.

The question of why EDM has prompted the second coming of flower-power is complicated by the music’s origins, which have often invoked futuristic and post-human imagery that seems to clash with contemporary festival culture. The 1970s German electronic band Kraftwerk, one of the most important forerunners of contemporary electronica, made albums with names like The Man-Machine and Computer World, while American techno originated with a group of Detroit artists who called themselves Cybotron and produced tracks like “Cosmic Cars” and “Cyber Ghetto.” Juan Atkins, a founding member of Cybotron and an important DJ in his own right, once likened the sound of a synthesizer to “UFOs landing on records.” A few years later, Detroit DJ Richie Hawtin, widely credited with instigating the second wave of Detroit techno, adopted the persona of the robotic Plastikman, a pale, otherworldly figure with cold, glowing eyes.