Read the reviews for Scottish producer Rustie's Glass Swords, one of the year's great albums, and there's this word that keeps on recurring. *Dummy'*s Chal Ravens hails its "no-genres-barred maximalism," The Wire's Mark Fisher situates the album in an electronic dance counter-tradition of "maximalism" and "managed overload," and Pitchfork's own Jess Harvell refers approvingly to the record's "maximalist zeal." "Maximalism" is vague and capacious enough to contain a whole bunch of ideas and associations, but the general slant of these verdicts is that there are a hell of a lot of inputs here, in terms of influences and sources, and a hell of a lot of outputs, in terms of density, scale, structural convolution, and sheer majesty.

Shove "digital" in front of "maximalism" and you've got a phrase that captures what has emerged as the dominant current in electronic music over the last year or two. Like all trends, digital maximalism achieves self-definition through contrast with what came before. Until quite recently, electronic dance music, by and large, had always been under the sway of minimalist aesthetics. The key terms-- as praise terms for fans and critics, and ideals for producers and DJs-- were "deep," "dark," "stripped-down." Oh, you can find exceptions: Basement Jaxx's Prince-like largesse, 808 State's garish fusion-techno, the endlessly morphing complexities of the Future Sound of London. But overall, deep/dark/stark ruled. Especially in the 1990s-- just think of that decade's most feted electronic artists: Richie Hawtin, Robert "Minimal Nation" Hood, Jeff Mills, Photek, Basic Channel, Green Velvet, Gas, and many more. But minimalism's thrall extended a long way into the 21st century too: German microhouse and minimal (cutely compacted by aficionados to mnml), grime (think Wiley's skeletal Eski rhythms), the angularity and severity of DFA-style postpunk-influenced dance-rock, electroclash, and above all, dubstep.

Reversing all these priorities, Glass Swords swaps deep/dark/stark for flat/bright/busy. This music has no interest in "atmosphere"-- it's about dazzle so fierce it chases away all the shadows. And rather than aiming for a hypnotic trance induced by subtly inflected monotony, tunes like "Globes" and "Cry Flames" are eye-poppingly awake. The mood is up!, preposterously euphoric but genuinely awesome: not so much striking a balance between sublime and ridiculous as merging them until they're indistinguishable.

Listen to Rustie's "All Nite" from Glass Swords:

Rustie: "All Nite" (via SoundCloud)

Compared with the analog hardware that underpinned early house and techno, the digital software used by the vast majority of dance producers today has an inherent tendency towards maximalism. In an article for Loops, Matthew Ingram (who records as Woebot) wrote about how digital audio workstations like Ableton Live and FL Studio encourage "interminable layering" and how the graphic interface insidiously inculcates a view of music as "a giant sandwich of vertically arranged elements stacked upon one another." Meanwhile, the software's scope for tweaking the parameters of any given sonic event opens up a potential "bad infinity" abyss of fiddly fine-tuning. When digital software meshes with the minimalist aesthetic you get what Ingram calls "audio trickle": a finicky focus on sound-design, intricate fluctuations in rhythm, and other minutiae that will be awfully familiar to anyone who has followed mnml or post-dubstep during the last decade. But now that same digital technology is getting deployed to opposite purposes: rococo-florid riffs, eruptions of digitally-enhanced virtuosity, skyscraping solos, and other "maxutiae," all daubed from a palette of fluorescent primary colors. Audio trickle has given way to audio torrent-- the frothing extravagance of fountain gardens in the Versailles style.

Rustie's Glass Swords swaps electronic dance music's tendency toward

deep/dark/stark for flat/bright/busy. It has no interest in "atmosphere"--

it's about dazzle so fierce it chases away all the shadows.

If Glass Swords represents the triumph of more-is-more, the path to victory was paved by Rustie's buddy Hudson Mohawke (with 2009's Butter). Other key figures in the rise of maximalism include Flying Lotus and Thundercat (whose 2011 album The Golden Age of Apocalypse was FlyLo produced). Then there's the varied and distinct shades of progtronica represented by Nicolas Jaar, Amon Tobin, SebastiAn, and Dam Mantle; the more stadium-rocky bombast of Joker; such banging-yet-convoluted Nightslugs producers as Mosca and Jam City; and the chuck-it-all-in-a-blender splatterstep of Skrillex and Bassnectar. (The latter describes his music as "omni-tempo maximalism... an amalgamation of every sound I've ever heard," which sounds potentially catastrophic.)

Finally, there was the return of Justice, who-- along with Digitalism and Jackson and his Computer Band-- pioneered an early form of digi-max overload with the 2D blare of 2007's †. Described all too accurately by the duo as "a progressive rock record played by guys that don't know how to play," this year's Audio, Video, Disco was an ELO-meets-ELP farrago of clumsy crescendos and wannabe-epic fanfares, flashy rifferama and shrill male vocals that get you picturing crotch-hugging spandex. All of prog's oppressive bombastitude, in other words, but none of its redeeming complexity, fleetness, and occasional sublimity.

Daft Punk are obviously Justice's forebears, and reviewers have rightly pinpointed 2001's Discovery as a prime antecedent for Glass Swords-- in particular the guitar solos on "Digital Love" and "Aerodynamic"-- and Rustie's album is indeed plastered with gushing geysers of super-slick scalar prowess. But where Discovery's daring was to fold 70s soft-rock and pomp pop (Supertramp, 10cc, ELO) and 80s metal (Van Halen) into dance music, Glass Swords ventures further still into the forbidden zones of rock's past. Rustie's idol is Eddie Van Halen's own favorite guitarist, Allan Holdsworth, a solo artist and Soft Machine veteran renowned for his ultra-fluid legato style. Rustie admires his "clean, soft, smooth" sound, which Holdsworth once described as shaved ("I start with a hairy sound, give it a shave, and see what's left"). In the 80s the gadget-happy Yorkshireman would become controversial in the technical-magazine-reading community for embracing the SynthAxe, a fretted MIDI-controller that triggers an array of electronic synthesizers; Rustie himself sometimes uses a more recently invented MIDI-guitar that has pads as well as strings.

Fusion-infatuated electronica always held back from slipping on

the bellbottoms and going all the way. Until now.

Fusion has been a hallowed reference point for electronic dance music since pretty much forever, emulated and sampled by everyone from Massive Attack circa Blue Lines to artcore drum'n'bass headz, along with Detroit techno mavens and countless deep house and broken beats producers. But veneration for the 70s as a lost golden age of musicality and "vibe" was always filtered through a tight-pegged tastefulness. Fusion, for electronic producers, meant jazz-funk far more than jazz-rock: Roy Ayers as opposed to, say, Mahavishnu Orchestra. Fusion was drawn on as a textural palette (Rhodes piano, soft-glowing guitar-tone, succulent analog-synth splashes, a dash of flute) and it's been admired for qualities like lightness of touch, loose-yet-tight grooviness, and an overall atmosphere of stoned mystic profundity. But the side of fusion involving grandstanding solos, overblown conceptual conceits, and extreme duration (19-minute tracks!) has been given a very wide berth. Basically, fusion-infatuated electronica always held back from slipping on the bellbottoms and going all the way.

Until now. Glass Swords constructs an alternate history for electronic dance music that bypasses the minimalism of Kraftwerk and Moroder altogether. It's a snazzy thread that veers toward a forgotten gaggle of British ex-fusioneers who embraced sequencers, MIDI and Fairlights (Man Jumping, Startled Insects, Landscape), and then reaches back all the way to the gaudy electronic color-schemes of Yellow Magic Orchestra and Weather Report. Rustie's a fan of the latter's 1976's Black Market, but the key Weather Report platter in this alternative family tree is 1978's Mr. Gone-- filled with disco flirtations and synth-heavy sounds, it earned a one-star review from a deploring Downbeat.

Alongside the Moogy wonderlands of 70s prog and fusion, you can hear swanky 80s synth-funk tones throughout Glass Swords, plus sped-up helium-diva vocals from early rave and arpeggiated melody-riffs that suggest trance if it had been invented by Bootsy Collins. There are analog surrogates in Rustie's library of "soft-synths" (digital simulations of vintage keyboards that are kept inside the computer's audio workstation software), but he has no special hang-up about analog fatness or warmth and is equally fond of the digital synths of the late 80s/early 90s for their nostalgic associations with movie soundtracks of the era. The overall effect of pulling from all these different phases in the evolution of electronic music technology is a fiesta of retro-futures: as if flashing back simultaneously to all the moments when a bunch of new machines changed the sound of music could somehow redeliver that original shock of the now. But there's no melancholy for a "lost future," just delirious reiteration, thrilling overkill.

Another effect of this post-historical electronic overload is a super-intensified sense of artificiality and plastic-ness. Glass Swords' sound-world is utterly denatured. Sometimes it recalls the "superflat" aesthetic of Takashi Murakami: fine art inspired by anime, manga, and other forms of Japanese pop culture, often with overtones of sexual fetishism and grotesquerie. Hence "Inside Picachu's Cunt", the title of a track Rustie contributed to a Warp compilation. At other times the glistening, globular textures of Glass Swords recall Airbrush Art, that 70s Los Angeles school of lip gloss pin-ups and palm trees kitsch, and its 21st century successor, hyperrealism, which uses digital technology to create images more crisply high-definition than the naked human eye can perceive by itself.

Glass Swords is superhuman too, a spectacle of flexed virtuosity that's been bionically enhanced using digital's bag of tricks. Most of the nu-progtronica producers don't really have the chops in the traditional muso sense, but they do have the "cut-and-pastes": the 21st century skills of editing, and effecting. For instance, most of the leads on Glass Swords emerged through jamming on synths, then the best takes were pieced together, cleaned up, and in some cases sped-up to intensify the wow-factor. But a couple of tracks on the album feature honest-to-goodness electric guitar solos: Before he got into DJing, Rustie played guitar between the ages of 10 and 15 and got pretty proficient. Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner's The Golden Age of Apocalypse-- a record positively unctuous with Jaco Pastorious/Stanley Clarke bass-noodle-- is another 2011 marker for the skills-thrill aesthetic, though it's the result of a more literal digital maximalism: the handiwork of Bruner's nimble fingers. It also seems significant that Rustie's ally Hudson Mohawke is not only a fan of Holdsworth-era progger Jean-Luc Ponty but started out as a champion decktician in turntabilism, that performance-oriented, show-offy offshoot of hip-hop.

The overall effect of pulling from many different phases in the evolution of electronic music technology is a fiesta of retro-futures: as if flashing back simultaneously to all the moments when a bunch of new machines changed the sound of music could somehow redeliver that original shock of the now.

Like Butter and Hudmo's Satin Panthers EP from this year, Glass Swords isn't dance music so much as rock music achieved electronically. The intent is blatantly signposted through the album's artwork and logo, designed by Jonathan Zawada according to Rustie's "Roger Dean meets Zelda" guidelines. As well as the 70s heyday, Rustie follows through to what the proggers did in the 80s, which in most cases involved glossing up and crossing over. Glass Swords is full of the gated drum sounds pioneered by ex-Brand X member Phil Collins. Rustie has dabbled in drumming as well as guitar-playing, so he knows how to program patterns and fills that sound "rock" and he seals the illusion by using plug-ins that replicate naturalistic drum-kit sounds. There's simulated slap bass in there, too, and the pingy sound of what could be an ersatz Chapman Stick, a ten-string omni-guitar that never quite caught on.

This deliberately dated universe of twangy twiddle and denatured digital crispness received an unlikely new recruit this year in the form of James Ferraro, hitherto known for the no-fi haze of albums like Last American Hero and *Edward Flex Presents: Do You Believe In Hawaii? *These were no preparation for this year's Far Side Virtual, Ferraro's attempt to compose a "symphonic music" whose basic cellular vocabulary comprises ringtones, computer start-up chimes, and the ultra-brief refrains that serve as IDs for TV production companies at the end of programs. Made quickly by soundtrack composers toiling solo in their home-studio sweatshops, this audio filler sounds cheap and nasty precisely because it relies on digital simulations of acoustic instruments like horns, piano, strings (the sonic equivalent of fake wood paneling). Ferraro's heightened deployment of this ersatz palette-- so close to "the real thing," yet falling fatally short-- creates a creepy feeling of unlife that is similar to animatronics.

Listen to James Ferraro's "Global Lunch" from Far Side Virtual:

James Ferraro: Global Lunch (via SoundCloud)

Although Far Side Virtual's reference points in its song titles and sound-bites-- Google, Starbucks, Macs, iPods, Pixar, Gordon Ramsay*, "Sex and the City"--* are 21st century, sonically the album seems to hark back to the early 90s: the same clunkiness and thin-bodied textures characteristic of early digital synths and short-memory samplers that has recently attracted other hypnagogues such as Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never. As with Lopatin's Returnal and his sound-art project "The Martinellis Bring Home a Desire System" (based on a 1994 infomercial for Macintosh Performa), Far Side Virtual seems to undertake an archaeology of the recent past, conjuring the onset of the internet revolution and 90s optimism about information technology. But that recent past could equally be a case of "the long present" in so far as the digiculture ideology of convenience/instant access/maximization of options now permeates everyday life and is arguably where faint residues of utopianism persist in an otherwise gloomy and anxious culture. As Adam Harper wrote of Far Side Virtual, "Each track is bristling with the maximalist promise of a world of possibilities waiting behind the screen for your double-click." That word again: maximalist.

***

I got quite a long way into this piece before discovering that the term "digital maximalism" was already claimed by a writer operating completely outside the context of music criticism: William Powers, the author of Hamlet's BlackBerry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age. Powers coined "digital maximalism" to describe the contemporary creed that the maximization of connectivity is both essential and life-enhancing. Hamlet's BlackBerry is just one of a growing genre of book-length critiques of modern lifestyles deemed overly organized around screens and hand-held telecommunication devices, and the common note sounded by all these books is that maximizing connectivity can max out your nervous system, leaving you in a brittle state of hectic numbness, overwhelmed by options, increasingly incapable of focused concentration or fully-immersed enjoyment.

Some reviews of Glass Swords have connected these two kinds of digital maximalism, musical and lifestyle. One of the very first writers to single out Rustie as an emerging talent made this link in a Pitchfork column a couple of years ago: Martin Clark suggested that Rustie's overloading of "the midrange with bleeps and riffs heading in disparate directions" served as "a metaphor for living in intense digital excess." Rustie politely demurs from this kind of reading of his music, noting sagely that people have been hand-wringing about the shriveling of attention spans for decades, and pointing out that "I'm not plugged-in all the time-- I'm too busy making music!"

Still, there's no doubt that something about Glass Swords and its ilk that seems to speak to our current moment. The super-sharp sheen and crisp separation, the compressed-and-EQ'd in-your-faceness of the sound parallel the endless upgrades in audio-video entertainment, from high-definition flatscreen TV to CGI-saturated movies and 3D cinema to the ever-more real-seeming unreality of games.

The combination of computer (infinite flexibility) and internet (infinite "inspiration") can also cause complete artistic paralysis: the impulse of fusion collapsing into con-fusion, the musical equivalent of a gone-too-far collage.

Digital maximalism doesn't just affect the vividness and hyperactivity of the music, it also expands the range of sources it draws on. Which is why you can find similar properties of post-everything omnivorousness, structural convolution, and texture-saturated overload in such disparate, often outright non-electronic entities as Montreal solo act Grimes, Battles, Sun Araw, Dâm-Funk, Florence and The Machine (and "my "incorrigible maximalism," as Ms. Welch put it), and Gang Gang Dance. The latter's latest album Eye Contact starts with the maximalist maxim: "I can hear everything. It's everything time." A proposition that sounds very 2011 but is also very 70s, echoing not just the ambition of prog and fusion, but their hubris too.

Grimes, aka 23-year-old musician Claire Boucher, talks of her music as "post-internet... The music of my childhood was really diverse because I had access to everything, so the music I make is sort of schizophrenic. Basically, I'm really impressionable and have no sense of consistency in anything I do." Digital technology makes the artistic self at once hollow (buffeted by torrential, every-which-way flows of influence) and omnipotent (capable of molding sound and melding styles at will). Having access to so many resources and being able to manipulate them so extensively lends itself to a certain grandiosity. Grimes talks of being a maker of worlds and envisions her discography unfolding with Tolkien-esque endlessness: "I want to make a tome-- access every genre of music, and also create new genres with them. I want to have, like, 30 albums." Her forthcoming LP is titled Visions and apparently draws on everything from Enya to Aphex Twin, New Jack Swing to New Age, K-pop to glitch. This makes her an exemplary exponent of the new post-everything: a genre that refuses to make up its mind what it is or what it's for, shifty and evasive, slithering hither and thither across the entire past and the whole wide world of music.

Listen to Grimes' "Oblivion" from Visions:

Grimes: Oblivion

From the same Montreal milieu as Grimes comes Doldrums, aka Airick Woodhead, who presents a darker view of life under the sway of hyper-connectivity in the form of a sound he calls "future shock." It translates to a genre-scramble of Bollywood strings, electronic smears, strangulated samples, and rickety breakbeats that form a dense thicket entangling Woodhead's shrill androgynous vocals. According to his label No Pain in Pop, Woodhead belongs to the last generation who can remember what the rhythms of life were like "pre-internet and 24-hour status updates." The new Doldrums EP Empire Sound is a protest against the "overhype" and "plasticity" of contemporary music culture. Perhaps it's the lingering, embedded-nervous-system memories of a less frenetic analog era that make songs like "I'm Homesick Sittin' Up Here in My Satellite" and "Lost in My Head" so distraught.

Books like Hamlet's BlackBerry express a yearning to rewind the clock to pre-internet days. Although they sensibly imagine creating special cordoned-off zones of immersion in the here-and-now, they are part of the same spectrum of net-discontent that includes more extreme fantasies of total withdrawal: all those testimonials from email addicts who've gone cold turkey and are attempting to see if it is even possible to live off-line.

Flying Lotus by Elisabeth Vitale

The alternative to such dreams of seclusion and info-sensory deprivation is to plunge deeper into digitalism, learn to surf (or "Surph" as Rustie has it) the data-tsunami. One musical expression of this is Flying Lotus' sound on Cosmogramma and Pattern + Grid World EP: a fissile fusion of genres and idioms, as many as 80 layers in a single track. Derived from "cosmogram," a word for geometric maps devised in ancient cultures that depict the known universe, Cosmogramma is where the astral aspirations of 70s fusion merge with the superpowers of digital technology and the infinite reach of the internet. Like Grimes, the ambition levels with FlyLo are soaring and grandiose: "Just building a universe is the most inspiring thing to me-- this is my opportunity to present a world to somebody!" he exulted in a Resident Advisor interview. "I feel we're in a time now where people can handle whatever you can throw at them as long as there's something they recognize that they can hold on to, so why not just really fucking go there? Why not just have all these things from our past as well as all of the newest technology from today in one, and just really come up with the craziest shit we can?... With as much access as we have to all this stuff, to our musical history, our world history, we definitely can be killing shit way crazier... We have the technology!"

That FlyLo quote conveys the master-of-the-universe feeling these digital audio programs provide musicians who achieve fluency in them. You become at once a composer free to interminably tweak your score and a conductor able to repeatedly reconfigure your orchestra and run through endless variations of interpretation. That said, my own fleeting acquaintance with digital audio workstations (dabbling on my brother's Ableton) left me wondering how users manage to even start a track, let alone finish one. The combination of computer (infinite flexibility) and internet (infinite resources of raw material and "inspiration") seems far more likely to cause complete artistic paralysis: the impulse of fusion collapsing into con-fusion, the musical equivalent of a gone-too-far collage. A lot of music today walks a line between collecting and hoarding; as Mark Richardson put it in his Resonant Frequency column, music-as-Tumblr-- the barely-annotated heap of all that's caught your ear.

Listen to Rustie's "Ultra Thizz" from Glass Swords:

Rustie: Ultra Thizz (via SoundCloud)

Of course, people have been fretting about information overload for decades, even centuries. As Nicolas Carr points out in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, only 50 years after Gutenberg there were folks griping about how there were too many books in print for people to assimilate and digest. Pere Ubu coined the term "datapanik" in the 70s, while the too-muchness and hyper-acceleration of modern existence inspired the 1982 movie Koyaanisqatsi. Godfrey Reggio's film is meant to be a sobering portrait of a sick society: the title is a Hopi Indian word for "Life Out of Balance." But the sped-up time-lapse images of bustling streets and subways, in combination with Philip Glass' rippling and soaringly choral soundtrack, makes Koyaanisqatsi a real rush. Despite its intent, you might just walk away from it feeling like Jonathan Richman, "in love with the modern world."

That's the emotion that Rustie's Glass Swords instills: giddy buoyancy, the euphoria of gliding frictionlessly across the datascape. "Ultra Thizz", one of the stand-out tracks, gets its name from the hyphy scene's slang for MDMA. The sound of the word echoes fizz and jizz, effervescence and ejaculation. It's perfect onomatopoeia for an album that's like a pornucopia of instant-access bliss.

*Simon Reynolds is the author of Retromania, Rip It Up and Start Again, and Energy Flash. *