In electronic dance music (EDM), melody, harmony, and rhythm are often indistinguishable, hence are inadequate as descriptive categories. The timbres of EDM are equally elusive: describing this music in terms of its sources (synthesizers, computers...) tells us little about the sounds themselves. Overall, the experience of listening to EDM is difficult to characterize. Perhaps this descriptive evasiveness is, in part, what drives analysts to deem EDM an aesthetic failure outside the dance club. This article proposes that EDM succeeds as music for close listening, not only for dancing. I investigate the possibility that sound object analysis, a listening technique which I designed to address “avant-garde” music, might also help listeners to describe and discuss EDM in ways that address not just its cultural contexts, but the sounds of the music itself. Variously defined and utilized by electronic musicians, the term “sound object” may refer to anything from a sound free of referential connotations, to a broadly defined sonic unit, to a sampled sound or a unitary combination of sound and gesture. Sound object analysis is the identification and description of sound objects and how they function in music. I apply sound object analysis to Yasushi Miura’s track ““Capricious””, attempting to demonstrate that sound object analysis may offer a specific and telling vocabulary for EDM. Connections between sound object analysis and vital materialism – the theory that any phenomenon with the ability to affect other phenomena constitutes a material body – suggest that listening is, as much as dancing, an encounter between material bodies and an embodied form of dialogue. Thus, listening and dancing may be more alike than they at first appear.