The untold story of Canadian electronic music from post-war laboratories to global pop.
For decades, the history of Canadian electronic music has existed in fragments — footnotes, anecdotes, and half-forgotten stories preserved by enthusiasts and archivists.A Nation of Innovators brings together these scattered fragments into the first comprehensive account of how Canada helped shape the global development of electronic audio. The book begins in the postwar years and spans four decades, revealing a vibrant culture of innovation, experimentation, and collaboration that is rarely mentioned in mainstream history books.Michael Rancic places these developments within a broader context that includes technology, creativity, and politics. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and decades of music journalism, he reveals how early electronic music was shaped not only by engineering achievements, but also by collaborative communities that included avant-garde music composition, psychedelic music, reggae, disco, hip-hop, and experimental pop.What appears, at first glance, to be an individual act turns out instead to be a deeply social practice rooted in shared curiosity, improvisation and play.
The book also addresses the pivotal moment when popular support declined and the free market took over, reshaping the tools available to musicians and the place of Canadian inventors on the world stage. This shift had dire consequences: musical instruments that were made in university laboratories or independent workshops had difficulty securing their production.In large quantities, even as the electronic sound became increasingly important in mainstream music.
By highlighting the work of overlooked engineers, composers, and scene builders, Rancic shows how their innovations paved the way for contemporary electronic and pop artists—from Caribou and Grimes to The Hallucinations Nation and Kaytranada—and for the digital production environments that shape the music of Drake, The Weeknd, and Justin Bieber.In doing so, A Nation of Inventors reframes electronic music as a key site for understanding Canada's cultural identity, its technological imagination, and its artistic legacy.
Comprehensive, meticulous, and rich in detail, this book provides an essential account of how Canada's early electronic musicians and inventors helped build the audio world we now take for granted.
