A Nation of Tinkerers: A History of Electronic Music in Canada from 1945 to 1985

A Globe and Mail and Toronto Star National Bestseller

The untold story of Canadian electronic music from post-war labs to global pop.

For decades, the history of Canadian electronic music has existed in fragments—footnotes, anecdotes, and half-remembered stories preserved by enthusiasts and archivists. A Nation of Tinkerers gathers these scattered pieces into the first comprehensive account of how Canada helped shape the global evolution of electronic sound. Beginning in the post-war years and spanning four decades, the book uncovers a vibrant culture of invention, experimentation, and collaboration rarely acknowledged in mainstream histories.

Michael Rancic situates these developments within a broader story about 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 breakthroughs in engineering but by collaborative communities spanning avant-garde composition, psychedelia, reggae, disco, hip-hop, and experimental pop. What appears, at first glance, as solitary tinkering emerges instead as a profoundly social practice rooted in shared curiosity, improvisation, and play.

The book also examines the pivotal moment when public support receded and the free market took hold, reshaping both the tools available to musicians and the visibility of Canada’s inventors on the world stage. This shift produced lasting consequences: instruments once made in university labs or independent workshops struggled to secure mass production, even as electronic sound became central to mainstream music.

By illuminating 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 Halluci 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 Tinkerers reframes electronic music as a key site for understanding Canada’s cultural identity, technological imagination, and artistic legacy.

Expansive, incisive, and richly detailed, the book provides an essential account of how Canada’s early electronic musicians and inventors helped build the sonic world we now take for granted.

Michael Rancic is a freelance arts and culture journalist based in Toronto. He’s the co-founder of multistakeholder music journalism cooperative New Feeling and has written for Maisonneuve, The Walrus, Hazlitt, Spacing, CBC Music, and Bandcamp Daily, among other outlets. His work often looks at the intersection of emerging art, public policy, and technology.

A 2026 CIBA Booksellers’ List Selection

A Shelf Life Books (Calgary, Alberta) Book of the Month

Listen to Michael Rancic on 101.5 UMFM’s Turning Pages with Michael Elves

Read an excerpt in The Grind

Read an interview with Michael Rancic in Toronto Life

“Rancic unpacks electronic music’s Canadian history with the enthusiasm of a gearhead and the thoroughness of a careful journalist.”—Josh O’Kane, The Globe and Mail

“I think tracing the evolving relationship between Canada’s arts scene and capitalism is actually one of the great accomplishments of Rancic’s book. Because while it’s true that Canada has fostered an arts scene that is in some ways separate from the logic of the market, it’s obviously also true that the market still exerts a tremendous amount of pressure on artists here. What I think Rancic does really successfully in his book is trace the changing nature of this pressure over time. What emerges is a story about electronic music that feels less like the slow but inevitable creep of capitalist realism described by Mark Fisher, and more like an ongoing struggle, with its own inflection points and losses, but also—crucially—an articulation of a meaningful path forward.”—Book Man Gets Paid