Alright Dan, I can't say I think you're totally wrong, cause I don't. A lot of electronic music and I mean a
Lot is total non musical crap thrown together by someone who probally doesn't know the first thing about decent composition. But I can't say that for everything that doesn't use actual insturments.
You say that you feel electronic music is mostly random bits thrown together and pitchshifted until it sounds good. With some things that's true. But I think there is definately a bunch of things that would fit into that genere that are definately musical pieces with full composition. Early video game soundtracks in paticular, especially things done in the pre Playstation generations aren't all fantastic, but a good number of them are, they display immense emotion and show the impressive skill of the composer and sound programmer, managing to produce entire musical pieces that are enjoyable to listen to in their own right with immensely limited resources and hardware.
Here are some examples off the top of my head,
Mega Man 2 - NES
Castlevania 1-3 - NES
Mega Man X - SNES
Chrono Trigger -SNES
Final Fantasy 6 (There's a goddamn opera, which aside from the horrid "voices" is beautiful) - SNES
All of which can be listened to in their native emulated condition from
www.zophar.net , players and plugins for the formats are also available
