the transfer of an originally ambivalent futurist constellation into the sheer reactionary.

However, in the course of punk and new wave, the electronic disposition also became a part of the first, and in a broad sense self-reflexive, pop music. It was during this period that that fundamental break between the relation between material and method, object and processing, which became known as the digital revolution, became apparent. This was the moment at which the electronic generation of sound was suddenly subject to a different paradigm. The issue was no longer new and extended sounds such as in the classic talk about the endless variety of the wealth of sound that originally characterized the discourse on the justification of a large part of electronic music and in particular electronic pop music. Rather, the issue was the promise of generating sound digitally and electronically to be a perfect imitation of that produced by non-electronic instruments.

With this, the development of electronic pop music into something aesthetically reactionary was now in a dual sense also further intensified by an illusionistic

aspect. If the synthesizer-oriented pop music of the 1970s was already illusionistic in that it produced continua and made cuts invisible—but still in a discernibly electronically artificial, postinstrumental sense, it was now the case that the illusion was to be perfected, that one should now hear historically earlier, non-electronic sound generation media. The first interfaces that the digital production dispositive of sampling were to make available promoted themselves by claiming they were capable of reproducing the sounds of natural instruments in a remarkably authentic way. This was due to the fact that what was referred to as sampling was nothing more than a digital recording process, and that as far as the term sampling goes, it was used in even more generally in a physical sense—in general a process of collecting as many data of a continuum as possible that require as little memory space as possible, and yet making the continuum appear as remarkably true to life as possible to the human senses or other receptors. To achieve this, a sampling rate was defined that laid down the number of the required accesses per time unit, to be valid for a particular industrial standard.