> I've started thinking that club music is really where the cutting edge of music is ... no. Club music is pretty much uniformly simple musically. I have heard all of two electronic dance albums that did anything at all interesting with the music, the rest are just fucking around with synths. "Heeyyyy, check it out! I can make the bass wobble!" is not cutting edge. Of course I'm not going to stand here and say "nothing in the entire genre is worth listening to" because that would obviously be absurd. So here's an autocounterexample: Caravan Palace. Those guys are genuinely cutting edge. Their music is super theoretically complicated in ways I don't see many other artists doing. They do this thing with diminished chords to make modulations that shouldnt make sense work. And wonderful melodies. That's breaking ground. But calling caravan palace edm is a stretch: they're a nine person swing band that plays with a synthesizer! It should be said that there isn't much of a "cutting edge" to be on musically. We figured it all out already, for the most part. That's why John Cage got famous: weird, experimental pieces were the only thing left untouched by composers over the last half millennium. So no matter who you are or what you do musically, chances are pretty darn good you're rehashing old ideas. "But wait!" You claim, "that can't be right. Edm requires computers to make, it hasn't been around for long at all! How can it have been done before?" Ah. But there's no difference between a c# played by a computer and a c# played by a violin. The theory is the same, all the computer does is let you play around with timbre. Which opens no new doors theoretically. Edm is exactly as original and cutting edge as nearly all the other music out there: not at all. I personally predict edm will be remembered like disco.
You seem to think that music begins and ends with tones. I find that to be a reductionist and immature view of the matter. It's kind of like saying that it doesn't matter if it's Michelangelo or your 2 year old son that draws a lady. They're both ladies, it doesn't matter if one is painted with nuance and depth, while the other is a stick figure. Why don't you go and listen to MIDI arrangements of classical music, if you think timbre is so unimportant? You're sounding like a 16 year old that just learned about musical theory. You want the world to be simple, but it is not.
Innovation in timbre sounds oxymoronic to me. That doesn't mean timbre is unimportant or irrelevant to the music, it means claiming music is "breaking new ground" because of its timbre is laughable. There's no logic to it. There's no such thing as an objectively superior or inferior timbre. No such thing as a more complicated timbre. No such thing as an innovative timbre. Just different timbres and people's subjective opinions of them. Because you like electronic does not make it more innovative or cutting edge.