Party in My Mind: The Endless Half-Lives of IDM
At the outset, it needs to be said that “Intelligent Dance Music” is—ironically—kind of a stupid name. By this point, possibly even the folks who coined the term back in 1993—members of an online mailing list mainly consisting of Aphex Twin obsessives—have misgivings about it.
For as a guiding concept, IDM raises way more issues than it settles. What exactly is “intelligence” as manifested in music? Is it an inherent property of certain genres, or more about a mode of listening to any and all music? After all, it’s possible to listen to and write about “stupid” forms of music with scintillating intellect. Equally, millions listen to “smart” sounds like jazz or classical in a mentally inert way, using it as a background ambience of sophistication or uplifting loftiness. Right from the start, IDM was freighted with some problematic assumptions. The equation of complexity with cleverness, for instance—what you might call the prog fallacy. And the notion that abandoning the functional, party-igniting aspect of dance somehow liberated the music and the listener: a privileging of head over body that reinforced biases ingrained from over 2,000 years of Western civilization, from Plato through St. Paul and Descartes to more recent cyber-utopians who dream of abandoning the “meat” and becoming pure spirit.
And yet, and yet... Dubious as the banner was (and is), under that aegis, some of the most fabulous electronic music of our era came into being. You could even dance to some of it! And while its peak has long since passed, IDM’s half-lives echo on around us still, often in the unlikeliest of places: avant-R&B tunes like Travis Scott’s “Goosebumps,” tracks like “Real Friends” on The Life of Pablo, even moments on “The Young Pope” soundtrack.
You could say that the prehistory of IDM was the ambient chill-out fad of the first years of the ’90s, along with certain ethereal and poignant tracks made by Detroit producers like Carl Craig. But really, it all kicks off in 1992 with Warp’s first Artificial Intelligence compilation and its attendant concept of “electronic listening music,” along with that same year’s Aphex Twin album Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (released on Apollo, the ambient imprint of R&S Records). Warp swiftly followed up the compilation with the Artificial Intelligence series of long-players by Black Dog Productions, Autechre, Richard D. James (operating under his Polygon Window alias, rather than as Aphex), and others. Smaller labels contributed to the nascent network, such as Rephlex (co-founded by James) and GPR (which released records by The Black Dog, Plaid, Beaumont Hannant). But it was Warp that ultimately opened up the space—as a niche market as much as a zone of sonic endeavor—for electronic music that retained the formal features of track-oriented, rave floor-targeted dance but oriented itself towards albums and home listening. ELM, as Warp dubbed it—IDM, as it came to be known—was private and introspective, rather than public and collective.
Phase 2 of IDM came when other artists and labels rushed in to supply the demand, the taste market, that Warp had stirred into existence. Among the key labels of this second phase were Skam, Schematic, Mille Plateaux, Morr, and Planet Mu. The latter was the brainchild of Mike Paradinas, aka μ-Ziq— one of the original Big Four IDM artists, alongside Aphex, Autechre, and Black Dog. (Or the Big Six, if you count Squarepusher and Luke Vibert, aka Wagon Christ/Plug). Most of these artists knew each other socially and sometimes collaborated. All were British.
The two stages of IDM correlate roughly with a shift in mood. First-phase intelligent tended to be strong on melody, atmosphere, and emotion; the beats, while modeled on house and techno, lacked the “oomph” required by DJs, the physical force that would cause a raver to enthuse about a tune as bangin’ or slammin’. Largely in response to the emergence of jungle, with its complex but physically coercive rhythmic innovations, Phase 2 IDM tended to be far more imposing and inventive with its drums; at the same time, the mood switched from misty-eyed reverie towards antic excess or whimsy. Often approaching a caricature of jungle, IDM tunes were still unlikely to get dropped in a main-room DJ’s set. But by now, the genre had spawned its own circuit of “eclectronica” clubs on both sides of the Atlantic, while the biggest artists could tour as concert acts.
You could talk about a Phase 3 stage of IDM, when the music—not content with borrowing rhythmic tricks from post-rave styles like jungle—actually moved to assimilate the rudeboy spirit of rave itself: the original Stupid Dance Music whose cheesy ‘n’ mental fervor was the very thing that IDM defined itself again. This early 2000s phase resulted in styles like breakcore and glitchcore; these had an international following and, for the first time in IDM’s history, a strong creative basis in the United States. Drawing on an array of street musics from gangsta to gabba, upstart mischief-makers like Kid606 and Lesser made fun of first-wave IDM’s chronic Anglophilia, releasing tracks with titles like “Luke Vibert Can Kiss My Indie-Punk Whiteboy Ass” and “Markus Popp Can Kiss My Redneck Ass.” Around this time, IDM pulled off its peak achievement of mainstream penetration when Radiohead released Kid A—an album for which Thom Yorke prepared by buying the entire Warp back catalog.
Seventeen years after that (albeit indirect) crossover triumph, the original IDM crew continues to release sporadically inspired work. Autechre’s discography is quite the feat of immaculate sustain, Richard D. James unexpectedly returned to delightful relevance after a long silence, Boards of Canada remain a treasure. Label-wise, there’s Planet Mu, who appear to be unstoppable, hurling out releases in a dozen different micro-styles. Overall, though, you’d have to say that IDM as a scene and a sound doesn’t really exist anymore. But its spectral traces can be tracked all across contemporary music, from genius producers like Actress and Oneohtrix Point Never, to the abstruse end of post-dubstep, to Arca’s smeared, gender-fluid texturology. Its reach goes way further: I’m constantly hearing IDM-like sounds on Power FM, the big commercial rap/R&B station here in L.A. At the end of the day, stupid name though it may be, IDM has given the world a stupefying immensity of fantastic music. And its reverberations have yet to dim.
Simon Reynolds is the author of the techno-rave history Energy Flash and, most recently, the glam chronicle Shock and Awe.
Jason Forrest: The Unrelenting Songs of the 1979 Post Disco Crash (2004)
It’s unusual to find glam-rock in the genealogy of an IDM album but, with The Unrelenting Songs of the 1979 Post Disco Crash, breakcore artist and disco DJ Jason Forrest exuberantly weaves together samples from the likes of Elton John and Starship. It’s sort of a loving tribute but, while the odd bombastic drum solo or Beatles sample is left whole enough to be recognizable, these snippets of sonic excess combine into something singular and otherworldly. The sounds themselves are familiar, but they’re arranged in wild forms, the compositions often twisting in directions that are disconcertingly abstract.
Tracks like “180 Mar Ton,” with its frenetic chopped-up guitars and shout-along interludes, summon an infectious kind of hyperactivity, which can just as quickly give way to the noisy disintegration of “Big Outrageous Sound Club” or the blown-out psychedelia of “An Event (helicopter_passing—(edit)—251001.mp3).” Elegant it’s not, but Unrelenting makes for an energizing listen. –Thea Ballard
Listen: Jason Forrest: “180 Mar Ton”
Kid606: Down With the Scene (2000)
Whether it was his young energy (he was 21 when Down With the Scene was released), his San Diego upbringing, or, more likely, all of that combined with his own omnivorous curiosity, Kid606 helped upend IDM’s stereotype of bloodless astringency. Everything from noise-rock blasts to hip-hop’s world-conquering bravado to jungle’s hyperspeed breakbeats fed into his chaotic, fragmentary, and compelling collages—works of experimentalism utterly unafraid to laugh at themselves and the world.
*Down With the Scene *is a kaleidoscopic effort and a half. There’s smooth swagger on “GQ on the EQ” and gentle sweetness with “For When Yr Just Happy To Be Alive” slamming up against frenetic compositions like “Punkshit” and “Two Fingers in the Air Anarchy Style.” As for the scene in question, titling the second song “Luke Vibert Can Kiss My Indie-Punk Whiteboy Ass” and throwing in samples from CB4, among other sources, creates its own perverse salute. –Ned Raggett
Listen: Kid606: “Two Fingers in the Air Anarchy Style”
Blectum from Blechdom: Haus de Snaus (2001)
Blectum from Blechdom’s impulsive, glitchy electronic music is simultaneously challenging and unpretentious—fun, even. Kristin Erickson and Bevin Kelley, aka Kevin Blechdom and Bevin Blectum, met at Mills College in the late 1990s, and Haus de Snaus collects two of the women’s first releases, 1999’s Snauses and Mallards and 2000’s De Snaunted Haus. It charts an evolving—or maybe unraveling—sound built from a healthy dose of unhinged theatrics and fairly rudimentary software. (In an interview with Tara Rodgers in the book Pink Noises, Kelley recalls using a free, early version of ProTools that limited the number of times you could “undo.”)
The album’s first half is more reserved, establishing a tinny, raw sonic aesthetic and loose improvisational leanings on tracks like “Shithole” and “Cosmic Carwash.” It’s on the Snaunted Haus section, however, that Blectum from Blechdom’s personality comes to the fore in a series of spoken-word skits shot through with impenetrable mythology (with the snauses and mallards as recurring characters). Campy horror-film narratives punctuate the squelching electronics in what feels like gleeful defiance of experimental music’s self-seriousness. “What use is music that revolves only around having ‘chops’ and being ‘good’? Why feel obliged to wrap your body around some anachronistic sound vehicle?” Kelley asks Rodgers in Pink Noises. There’s something both libidinal and liberating in Blectum from Blechdom’s approach. –Thea Ballard
Listen: Blectum from Blechdom: “Cosmic Carwash”
Mira Calix: One on One (2000)
When Chantal Francesca Passamonte’s full-length debut landed, she was 30 years old. That’s creaky by dance standards, yet youthful for institutional art music—in other words, the juncture suited her perfectly. By then, the U.K.-based Passamonte, who was born in South Africa, had already been releasing tracks for almost half a decade under the name Mira Calix, but it wasn’t until One on One that she committed to IDM’s native format: a proper album, the listener’s domain and wallflower’s autonomous zone.
Calix was an employee of Warp, and so she knew IDM’s hallmarks well. But on One on One, she pushes at those tropes. There’s metric play aplenty—like the scattered, anxiously looping “Skin With Me”—but the rhythms of “Routine (the Dancing Bear)” are decidedly un-digital, coming from a children’s metal toy. In the boys’ club of IDM, Calix made her female presence clear on “Ithanga,” mining her voice for tonal resources. Here, you can also peer into her future ambitious sound art, thanks to the infusion of classical instrumentation amid “Sparrow”’s textural irritants. –Marc Weidenbaum
Listen: Mira Calix: “Skin With Me”
Isolée: Rest (2000)
There was a moment, around the turn of the millennium, when IDM-aligned figures like Matthew Herbert started to embrace the slinky sensuality of the house template while weaving in glitches and clicks from the Oval/Fennesz world. The term “microhouse” was yet to be coined in 2000, but this is the undefined zone into which Rest slipped to wow the cognoscenti.
As the name hints, Isolée is a one-man-band, Rajko Müller. A German who spent much of his childhood in a French school in Algeria, his music is suitably cosmopolitan and border-crossing, connecting house and techno with ’80s synthpop and discreet touches of hand-played world music, like the Afro-pop guitar figure that flutters intermittently through “Beau Mot Plage” like a darting-and-dipping hummingbird. Müller’s sound works through the coexistence and interlacing of opposites: spartan and luxuriant, angular and lithe, crispy-dry and wet-look sleek, mechanistic and organic. Sensuous, ear-caressing textures juxtapose with abrasive tones as unyielding and chafing as a pair of Perspex underpants.
“Text,” the absolute highlight, is mystifyingly only available on the original 2000 compact disc. It’s an Op Art catacomb, a network of twisting tunnels, abrupt fissures, and pitch-shifted slopes that’s deliriously disorienting but never loses its dance pulse. Other tracks offer an exquisite blend of delicacy and geometry, like origami made out of graph paper, or echo the Fourth World electro-exotica of Sylvian-Sakamoto and Thomas Leer. We Are Monster, Müller’s 2005 follow-up, was excellent but a little too busy, losing the balance between minimal and maximal. So the debut remains Isolée’s true claim to acclaim, laurels on which Müller could Rest forever. –Simon Reynolds
Listen: Isolée: “Beau Mot Plage”
M:I:5: Maßstab 1:5 (1997)
It’s difficult to name an area of electronic music that Wolfgang Voigt hasn't touched, either via his many production aliases or his hugely influential labels, Profan and Kompakt. His M:I:5 project ran through the mid-’90s, concurrent with his more famous work as Studio 1 and before he began his seminal ambient work as GAS. Maßstab 1:5 collects some earlier EPs and augments them, landing on the edges of the IDM scene largely due to a squiggle factor and textural vagueness not commonly associated with Voigt.
This being Voigt, Maßstab 1:5 still makes many other records on this list sound like New Orleans jazz, so committed it is to small tonal shifts and pinprick percussion. Grainy samples are mangled into new and shifty forms, such that even a sound as short as a snare hit seems to morph three times before it passes. Voigt also subverts techno paradigms by keeping much of his percussion slyly off-grid. This material was a formative text for the minimal techno movement on the horizon, and one wonders if the record’s title—translated “Scale 1:5”—wasn't already prophesying dance music's shrinkage. –Andrew Gaerig
Listen: M:I:5: “Maßstab 1:5 2”
Arovane: Tides (2001)
Germany’s Uwe Zahn made a handful of IDM-leaning records as Arovane, but none were as satisfying or as perfectly formed as this 2000 album. Because of its gently ebbing synths and hip-hop undertones, detractors might argue that Tides owes an obvious debt to Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children—but Zahn’s innovations are significant enough that they don’t quite resemble anything else.
Much of this stems from Zahn’s frequent use of the harpsichord, which gives the music an uncommon, baroque stateliness. Elsewhere, Christian Kleine’s bright and uncomplicated guitar lines move things further away from the early Warp axis of influence by evoking the languid post-rock of Chicago’s Thrill Jockey. Combined with Zahn’s knack for plaintive, keening melodies and Tides’ succinct run time, that inventiveness makes for a low-key gem that’s still as functional and as evocative today as it ever was. –Mark Pytlik
Listen: Arovane: “Theme”
Bola: Soup (1998)
Manchester’s Darrell Fitton has all his IDM bona fides: a track on Warp’s Artificial Intelligence Vol. 2 comp, an assistance credit on Autechre’s debut album, a hand in Gescom’s shadowy productions. But even without that history, his 1998 debut album as Bola puts him in the upper echelons of ’90s electronic music.
Soup hovers somewhere between his mates Autechre’s clanging, mechanized rhythms and the warm reveries conjured by Boards of Canada—which is only fitting, as Bola shared a label with those Scottish brothers. Still there’s something about Fitton’s handiwork here that strikes a different set of nerves: He never pretends to be post-human like the former, and he never sets about conjuring that lost sense of childhood innocence like the latter. Instead, Soup stakes out its own sonic space, at once poignant, bracing, and cinematic. –Andy Beta
Listen: Bola: “Forcasa 1”
The Black Dog: Spanners (1994)
The Black Dog emerged in early 1990s, during the heyday of Aphex Twin, µ-Ziq, and the like: a world ruled by grinning electronic pranksters, jokesters, and clowns. Spanners, the trio’s third album, is their cheekiest entry into the lexicon of dance music, and proposes a scenario for its listeners: What if you entered a club and it was just a never-ending hall of funhouse mirrors?
Throughout Spanners, sounds are in flux, stretching into strange and hilarious shapes without warning or reason. The 10-minute epic “Psil-cosyin” feels like dozens of micro-songs combined as whistling synths morph abruptly, like Flubber flying through through the air haphazardly. Yet amongst all their jokes, the group (which is comprised of Ken Downie, Ed Handley, and Andy Turner) also offers a studied survey of global vernaculars, retrofitting Latin rhythms, Middle Eastern scales, jungle, hip-hop beats, and more into their Rube Goldberg machine. Spanners was the last time they worked in this configuration, and their final brainstorm still teems with rollicking energy. –Kevin Lozano
Listen: The Black Dog: “Psil-cosyin”
Anthony Manning: Islets in Pink Polypropylene (1994)
Before IDM became a nation of Aphex and Autechre cosplayers, the genre was less defined by aesthetics than by a shared ideology. Here was a loosely connected axis of post-rave kids, united by little more than a shared willingness to subvert the tools of their techno idols and create sounds that hadn't previously been imagined.
No record of the era better embodies this find-a-machine-and-freak-it ethos than Islets in Pink Polypropylene, the otherworldly debut by British producer Anthony Manning. Built entirely on a Roland R-8, a chunky digital drum machine then celebrated for its realism, Islets is a meticulously crafted, multitracked flurry of kicks and hi-hats pitch-shifted into unrecognizable bubbles and squelches. For Manning, it was as if rhythm and melody had never been distinct elements to begin with, and his fusion of the two set an early precedent for the digital signal processing abuse that would come to define IDM at the turn of the century. –Andrew Nosnitsky
Listen: Anthony Manning: “Untitled”
Caribou: Start Breaking My Heart (2001)
On his 2001 debut album, Ontario’s Dan Snaith imagined how IDM might sound if its usual iciness and austerity thawed, just a little. Although still a fundamentally cold-weather record, Start Breaking My Heart hums with traces of the same acoustic textures and percussive abandon that Snaith would later dial up on future Caribou outings—and they introduce some much-needed warmth into the genre.
That sense of humanity extends beyond the instrumentation. With personal references in the song titles (“Paul’s Birthday,” “James’ Second Haircut”) and cover art depicting Snaith’s hometown of Dundas, Ontario, the extra-musical aspects of Start Breaking My Heart stand in direct opposition to the computer-generated artwork and hexcode-inspired track names of IDM’s antecedents. To Snaith’s credit, these bright-eyed and confident songs largely resist the urge to wallow in nostalgia, evocative as they are. –Mark Pytlik
Listen: Caribou: “Paul’s Birthday”
Leila: Like Weather (1998)
IDM, for all its love of the obtuse, has produced a number of fabulously esoteric pop songs over the years, from Squarepusher’s “My Red Hot Car” to Aphex Twin’s “Come to Daddy.” Leila’s “Won’t You Be My Baby, Baby,” the penultimate track on Like Weather, is another fine example of this art, the suck of a backward sample rubbing up against sun-shrivelled horns and an admirably lusty soul vocal.
It is this modus operandi that typifies Like Weather, the debut album from the sometime-Björk collaborator Leila Arab. Over 13 tracks, she subjects pop music to the kind of open-minded mangling that sees the excellent “Knew” cut off mid-chorus, the vocal on “Don’t Fall Asleep” pitched and shifted to an eerie whisper, and “Underwaters (One for Keni)” submerged in aquatic filters. Leila’s singular vision makes Like Weather a tough record to classify, falling somewhere between the dusty soul of trip-hop, the sensual elegance of R&B, the sugar rush of pop, and the fiddly experimentalism of IDM. But for the gorgeous swirl of strings and electronics on “Space, Love,” the tortured amen breaks of “So Low… Amen,” the astral synths on “Melodicore,” and the hissing hi hats and curdled chords on “Away,” the album deserves a celebrated place in IDM’s ranks. –Ben Cardew
Listen: Leila: “Underwaters (One for Keni)”
Pan Sonic: Vakio (1995)
IDM often emphasizes complexity over simplicity: tangled textures, intricate details, and convoluted rhythms. Finland’s Pan Sonic (née Panasonic, before the Japanese electronics giant got wind of their name) took the opposite route on their debut album, 1995’s Vakio. They don’t merely eschew software and other digital tools; they even forgo traditional polyphonic synthesizers in favor of rudimentary oscillators, noise generators, and hand-soldered behemoths that crackle with electrical currents and seem to breathe pure fire. Techno’s steady, four-to-the-floor pulse serves as the music’s rhythmic baseline, but the nuanced textures of their syncopated bleeps and sandblasted noise bursts tilt them away from club contexts and toward headphone listening. That said, abandoned meat lockers or frozen Soviet nuclear bunkers might be the most appropriate places to experience their chilling electronic minimalism. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Pan Sonic: “Virhe”
Jon Hopkins: Immunity (2013)
A key slots into a door somewhere in East London. Just as quickly, the door shuts, and all signs of human presence—the trickle of traffic in the background, foreboding footsteps—are sucked into a crisp whirlpool of synthesizer pulses. The interdimensional portal Jon Hopkins opens at the start of Immunity leads to a space that feels and sounds a lot like our world, but it’s darker, more private, and wildly mercurial. His palette of noises was distilled from common domestic objects—the vibration of a piano string, fingers drumming on the side of a desk, the shuffle of salt and pepper shakers. Hopkins applies these found sounds onto commanding analog synths, violent drums, and cold pianos, creating a soundscape both opulent and engulfing.
The arc of Immunity is supposed to resemble a night out, with moments of plaintive rest, anxious activity, and endorphin-fueled release. Hopkins’ hour of music creates a lifelike nocturnal diorama by merging pastoral ambient, backbreaking dance music, and even contemporary classical forms into a new electric world. –Kevin Lozano
Listen: Jon Hopkins: “Open Eye Signal”
Plaid: Not for Threes (1997)
IDM is rich with instrumental counterpoint, so it makes sense that many of its best practitioners come in pairs: two instrumental perspectives heard in tandem, and often at cross purposes. There’s Autechre’s Sean Booth and Rob Brown, Matmos’ Drew Daniel and MC Schmidt—and also Ed Handley and Andy Turner, who as Plaid made their Warp debut in 1997 with 16 tracks of perplexing beats and floral melodies. (The duo began as two-thirds of Black Dog, ceding the name to Ken Downie after becoming Plaid.)
What makes Not for Threes rewarding, even 20 years after its release, is the breadth of Plaid’s references. Sure there’s the Tron-like intro to “Seph” and the dubby techno of “OI,” plus plenty borrowed from hip-hop. But listen as the simulated chamber music of “Milh” gives way to hyper-detailed syncopations, and dig the jazz underpinnings of “Getting.” They can also be chipper: There’s no nihilism, or rose-colored nostalgia, in the delightfully upbeat “Fer.” And while female voices in IDM often surface from inside samplers, Plaid invited actual humans to sing—including Nicolette, on the sultry breakbeat of “Extork,” and Björk, whose “Lilith” set the stage for Vespertine four years later. –Marc Weidenbaum
Listen: Plaid: “Seph”
Jlin: Dark Energy (2015)
The history of IDM is, in part, the transformation of functional dance styles into forms that are weirder and more personal, with some of their rhythmic utility abstracted in the process. Acid, electro, and drum’n’bass are the styles that fueled IDM’s ’90s heyday, but more recent forms like dubstep and footwork have also followed this path. Footwork—a mutation of ghetto house that was born weird and inscrutable, with arrhythmia—was a particularly likely candidate to be put through the IDM blender next.
So arrived Jlin in 2015, a Gary, Indiana, resident isolated from the churn of Chicago’s battles and parties. On Dark Energy, she took a spark she found in 2010—when her track “Erotic Heat” appeared on the seminal Bangs & Works Vol. 2—and let it smolder for a half decade. Here, footwork’s manic template remains, but Jlin has vacuumed out the style’s irreverent roughness and replaced it with something far denser and more severe. *Dark Energy’*s rhythms and architecture mean it’s still recognizable as footwork; it’s everything we don’t recognize that makes it IDM. –Andrew Gaerig
Listen: Jlin: “Guantanamo”
Pole: 1 (1998)
As the story goes, Stefan Betke was working as a mastering engineer and DJ in mid-’90s Germany when he broke a Waldorf 4-pole filter module and liked the sounds that resulted. His 1998 full-length debut as Pole, simply titled 1, had a similar immediate appeal to IDM listeners worldwide. 1, and much of Pole’s initial work that followed, could almost be summed up as “dub meets glitch,” but that’s too reductive: From the opener, “Modul,” 1 feels like an accumulation of layers around careful, pinpoint precision and a dreamy, floating mix of elements that ebb and flow. Tics and crackles (courtesy of said damaged filter) often nervously sit up front in the mix—like a nagging insect, but with a quality that draws you in rather than prompts recoil—while bass tones, keyboard loops, and more emerge at points from swathes of reverb. If there’s an underrated quality to 1, it’s in the album’s sequencing: Consider how “Fragen” feels like a gentle acceleration and rise near 1’s start, or how a song like “Tanzen” in the middle keeps the energy pulsing perfectly. –Ned Raggett
Listen: Pole: “Fragen”
Burger/Ink: [Las Vegas] (1996)
[Las Vegas] marks a moment for IDM in which ideas were coalescing and new conversations were arising. Some of its influence is circumstantial; few predicted the globally prominent rise of Cologne’s dance music and Kompakt Records soon after its release, or that Matador’s issuing of the album in the U.S. two years later would open its indie-rock listeners to electronic beats. Yet it’s also true that the music made by Jörg Burger and Wolfgang Voigt (aka Mike Ink), two of the city’s techno lynchpins, was gorgeous and unlike anything that preceded it.
Featuring track titles high on Roxy Music and Americana pop, the trio of prior EPs that were collected as [Las Vegas] offer relaxed, melodic ambiance and warm, dubwise thump. They’re stoned rather than ecstatic, adult without being stuffy. Almost accidentally, the package strikes an LP’s balance and flow. Some tracks seem composed for the home, like the gorgeous “[The] Jealous Guy (From Memphis),” with a downtempo drum-machine pace and emotionally overwrought keyboard lines. Other songs, like the endlessly reverberant and percussive “Twelve Miles High,” are readymade for sunrise trance states. Then there’s “Do the Strand,” which gathers ideas from multiple strains of then-current German dance music (Basic Channel’s dub, Roman Flügel’s minimal house, sometime-partner Jürgen Paape’s disco deconstruction) into a glorious blueprint for Kompakt, the label Voigt would help launch in ’98. –Piotr Orlov
Listen: Burger/Ink: “Twelve Miles High”
SND: Atavism (2009)
When Mark Fell and Mat Steel released Atavism, it was their seventh album as SND, as well as their first in seven years. The hiatus wasn’t one of inactivity, though; their return—largely heralded by the triple-12” 4,5,6—was a blossoming of ideas. What once has been accomplished glitch electronica was now mesmeric, algorithmic shimmering punctuated with crisp percussion. A severe and reduced sound palette zeroed in on rhythms that were sometimes quite erratic, creating a transfixing listening experience.
SND were clearly influenced by house, techno, continental experimental electronics, and a lineage of British post-rave, including Autechre and Warp Records. (They’re from Sheffield, original home of Warp, and have toured with Autechre.) Still, Atavism creates a world that is starkly individual. It’s considered SND’s last album, although they’ve never formally disbanded or retired the group moniker, and Fell has gone on to mine this territory in gorgeous, forensic detail with his solo career. Their imprints are all over a new generation of artists—including Lorenzo Senni, Gábor Lázár, and Fell’s own son Rian Treanor—who have incorporated their reductionism and digital pointillism into their own work. –Lisa Blanning
Listen: SND: “2”
Mouse on Mars: Glam (1998)
Glam is an odd record, even within the catalog of the German electronic experimentalists Mouse on Mars. Initially recorded and rejected as a soundtrack for a Tony Danza comedy of same name, it went largely overlooked upon its initial release in 1998, and was issued only on vinyl in America during the peak era of CD sales. It wasn’t until a 2003 reissue on CD (with three bonus tracks) that Glam finally began to get the broader recognition it deserves.
This loping, sedate record is drastically different from the band’s first records, four beat-driven exercises in wonky, pseudo-dance music; it also sounds less dated and more timeless than anything else they’ve done before or since. The stately, seven-minute opener “Port Dusk” provides a nice thesis for the album’s form and approach, forgoing the group’s usual bouncy, off-kilter rhythms in favor of slow, droning synths laid over over skittish electronic bubbles. “Tankpark” and “Litamin” sound like futuristic takes on Ennio Morricone, while “Tiplet Metal Plate,” “Glim,” and “Hetzchase Nailway” pack a noisier, industrial patina. Glam the film may not have done anything for Tony Danza's legacy, but Glam the album has certainly helped cement Mouse on Mars as one of the most significant acts in the history of IDM. –Benjamin Scheim
Listen: Mouse on Mars: “Litamin”
Seefeel: Succour (1995)
On Seefeel’s 1993 debut album, Quique, the British quartet navigated a course between shoegaze and ambient dub—but by 1995, the electronic undercurrents of their sound had carried them to a very different place. Maybe it was the influence of Aphex Twin, whose remixes had honed in on the clean-lined rhythmic skeleton lurking beneath the group’s atmospheric swirl: The rolling, distorted drums of *Succour’*s “Fracture” and “Vex” are straight out of his playbook, and the beatless, bookending tracks “Meol” and “Utreat” both evoke Selected Ambient Works Vol. II at its most ethereal.
While the album’s textures and titles are often reminiscent of Autechre’s Amber, which came out the year before on Warp, Seefeel never entirely cast off their post-rock roots; squint through the fog of songs like “Extract” and “Cut,” and you can just barely pick out the familiar silhouettes of guitar, bass, drums, and microphone against the murk. Still, there’s no mistaking the common cause they make with the era’s knob-twisters and brain-dancers. Despite the echoes of other touchstones of the time (“Gatha” sounds like Massive Attack being dragged deep into an underwater cavern), it’s a singular album that has no equivalent—a sound so elemental, it’s no wonder the Designers Republic chose the cover they did. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Seefeel: “Utreat”
Carl Craig: More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art (1997)
It might feel counterintuitive to think of a forward-looking, nebulous genre like IDM as having “roots revival music,” but if anyone had the means to make it, it would be a disciple of the Belleville Three. Carl Craig picked up the torch from the Atkins/May/Saunderson founding school of techno and carried it into entirely new territory. A fan of avant-electronic composers like Morton Subotnick and Pauline Oliveros, Craig proves an artist capable of merging multiple subgenres within a single song.
More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art is IDM’s reckoning with techno, and vice versa. On “Televised Green Smoke,” layers of melodic mutation twitch into a Manuel Göttsching-worthy epiphany. On the oscillator-addled “Red Lights,” downtempo foot-drag beats evoke Giorgio Moroder in film-score mode, then get him woozy on ether. The mid-album stretch of “Dreamland,” “Butterfly,” and “At Les” is as cosmic as classic 4/4 techno gets, and the acidic, tension-building braindance of closer “Food and Art (in the Spirit of Revolution)” is the manic punctuation at the end of a stirring manifesto. On a record that treats the phrase “Intelligent Dance Music” as both a hijacking and a redundancy, Craig reclaims its identity on Detroit’s terms. –Nate Patrin
Listen: Carl Craig: “Dreamland”
Jim O’Rourke: I’m Happy, and I’m Singing, and a 1, 2, 3, 4 (2001)
With its screwed-on eyes, button mouth, and metallic thread of a mohawk, the cover star of Jim O’Rourke’s foreboding 2001 glitch excursion is a human simulacra, a choirboy faceplate chanting hymns for the future. The music inside I’m Happy and I’m Singing and a 1, 2, 3, 4 follows suit, with the restless avant journeyman tuning his laptop in search of soul. The three long instrumental pieces that make up the record, which was recorded in the lead-up to Y2K and released months after 9/11, sound like the inner workings of a particularly modern robot. Yes, there is computerized repetition, but there’s also dread and joy and aimlessness and confusion. The record isn’t a warning cry for the incoming robo-pocalypse as much as a view inside a metal mind. Turns out, it’s a tumultuous place, full of synthetic breakdowns and droning despondency—all that noble compliance can be wearying. This is an album that will make you look at your computer—or your air conditioner, or your fridge—in a new light, and maybe feel a little bit bad for it. –Ryan Dombal
Listen: Jim O’Rourke: “And I’m Singing”
µ-Ziq: Lunatic Harness (1997)
Mike Paradinas’s Planet Mu label has discovered and nurtured so many vital artists and scenes over the past 20 years—including Hrvatski, early dubstep producers like Benga, and Chicago footwork at large—that it eclipses Paradinas’ own body of work as μ-Ziq. Hyperactive through much of the ’90s, μ-Ziq’s discography can vacillate wildly, but with Lunatic Harness (his fourth album in five years), μ-Ziq struck the perfect balance between manic drum programming and gorgeous songs.
Lunatic Harness gobbles up the beats of the day—jungle’s chaotic drums, hip-hop’s beatboxing brio, the cerebral spasms of “braindance”—and weds it to lullaby-like melodicism. It’s a mix that only Paradinas’s good friend Richard D. James had previously attained, though Lunatic Harness is arguably the stronger, more sustained album that Aphex Twin never bothered to make. –Andy Beta
Listen: μ-Ziq: “Hasty Boom Alert”
Polygon Window: Surfing on Sine Waves (1993)
It’s tough to discuss the music of Richard D. James without also mentioning the more puckish elements of his persona. The man best known as Aphex Twin wasn’t merely one of the great electronic musicians of his generation; he also owned tanks and spun sandpaper records and trolled journalists and purposely snuck his music to market under a bevy of bizarre aliases. But he adopted the Polygon Window alter ego for a more utilitarian reason: a contractual workaround that enabled a move from the Belgian techno imprint R&S to the more adventurous British label Warp.
Surfing on Sine Waves is an appropriately transitional record in James’ discography. He had already begun to zoom in on the peripheral genre elements that he would later explode—acid squelches, crunchy hardcore kicks, synth washes, echoed-out whispers—but he seemed uninterested in any intentional stylistic deconstructions, let alone grand pranks. He was just knocking out some intuitively warped and melodically rich ambient techno because that’s what he did best. These days, Surfing doesn’t get mentioned as often as the louder, more ambitious, “proper” Aphex records that would follow, but it’s easily as refined on a technical level—and maybe even more emotionally rewarding. There’s something to be said for catching a genius in that sweet moment when their skillset is close to fully formed, but their ego is still in its infancy. –Andrew Nosnitsky
Listen: Polygon Window: “Polygon Window”
Venetian Snares: Rossz Csillag Alatt Született (2005)
One of three full-length albums that Aaron Funk released in 2005, Rossz Csillag Alatt Született remains the most powerful and neatly conceptualized work of his career. Conceived while a heartbroken Funk was on tour in Hungary and found himself ruminating on the lives of the pigeons that populated Budapest’s Royal Palace, it is suffused with a very European melancholy. The Winnipeg native scaffolds his hypercomplex drum programming around samples of some of the giants of European composition: Bartok, Stravinsky, Mahler.
This manner of sampling can often feel ephemeral, a way of attaching exotic flavor or false gravitas to a project, but Funk brings a very authentic heaviness of spirit. The title translates to “Born Under a Bad Star,” and Funk embellishes these borrowed string quartets and operatic arias with his own violin and trumpet playing. Two particularly mournful tracks, “Galamb Egyedül” and “Második Galamb,” pay tribute to Budapest’s avian population, while the astonishing “Öngyilkos Vasárnap” (“Gloomy Sunday") is a cover of a 1933 ballad by the Hungarian composer Rezső Seress, and samples a version sung by Billie Holiday. Seress wrote it for his former fiancée, who later killed herself; he, too, ended his life in 1968, and the song is is now nicknamed “The Hungarian Suicide Song.” It is honored properly here: In Funk’s hands, the song and his other breakcore moments are elevated to high art. –Louis Pattison
Listen: Venetian Snares: “Öngyilkos Vasárnap”
Squarepusher: Hard Normal Daddy (1997)
Squarepusher mastermind Tom Jenkinson established himself as a prankster early on, through adventurous stylistic experiments that veered between jazz-tinged opuses and collages inspired by musique concrète. The reputation was cemented by Hard Normal Daddy, an entry in the drill’n’bass subgenre that upped the percussive ante of earlier styles, with some sincerity, too.
In a recent interview, Jenkinson sounded pure enough in his love for vintage, funk-infused scores like Herbie Hancock’s Death Wish soundtrack—which Jenkinson said served as an inspiration for Hard Normal Daddy. His claim holds up under scrutiny: “Cooper’s World” imports a stark and suspenseful two-chord theme ripped from ’70s genre cinema, and supports the riff with jungle-style beats. Toward the end of the lengthy “Papalon,” Squarepusher’s way of drawing out sustained tones over chaotic, clattering rhythms has an audible relationship to Hancock’s “Suite Revenge.”
On other tracks, Squarepusher twists away from the ’70s influence, letting his chords become more severe in their production style. The result isn’t anything that winks at you. Instead, the album feels playful in an innocent manner that is similar to a famed, subsequent experiment by André 3000—an avowed Squarepusher fan. On The Love Below, the rapper-producer adapted John Coltrane’s interpretation of “My Favorite Things” by outfitting it with a drill’n’bass percussion track: a choice that reveals the wide reach of Daddy’s influence. –Seth Colter Walls
Listen: Squarepusher: “Papalon”
Farben: Textstar (2002)
Four-to-the-floor rhythms and IDM tend to be mutually exclusive, but that’s not always the case. In 2002, the year after Jan Jelinek sampled his way through stacks of vintage vinyl to create Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records, he applied a similar aesthetic to the first album released under his Farben alias. “Farben” is German for “colors,” but here, in shadowy tracks sourced from scraps of soul and mottled with digital grit, it’s the textures you notice first: dusty, sticky, slick as graphite, lumpy as a frog’s back. House music’s steady pulse runs through nearly every track, but it’s what he does around that taut guy-wire that makes the music tick: Tiny fizzing and clicking sounds flex and sigh in loose, elliptical rhythms, and soft, squishy synth tones lend a sense of elasticity to the quartz timekeeping. The references in a number of track titles—“Live at the Sahara Tahoe, 1973,” “Farben Says: Love to Love You Baby”—only add to the music’s mystery. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Farben: “Live at the Sahara Tahoe, 1973”
Two Lone Swordsmen: Stay Down (1999)
Two Lone Swordsmen’s Andrew Weatherall can be credited with bringing electronic music to the mainstream in the 1990s, first with his transformative production on Primal Scream’s classic Screamadelica (which, in hindsight, sounds as much like his music as it does that band’s) and then with his remix work for My Bloody Valentine, Björk, and New Order. But it’s Weatherall’s late-’90s output with Two Lone Swordsmen that most impacted IDM. While his previous efforts as the Sabres of Paradise drew largely from acid house and dub, Two Lone Swordsmen created fluid, genreless compositions that mixed synthesizers, live instruments, and samples in a way that teased the many directions that experimental electronic composition could take.
On Stay Down, the band’s apex, the music moves from the delicate, melodious, vibraphone-driven “Ivy and Lead,” to industrial spy music (“As Worldly Pleasures Wave Goodbye...”), to what might be considered more traditional IDM (“Alpha School,” “Mr. Paris’s Monsters”). Stay Down showcases a group exploding with ideas that feel only loosely grouped together by taste, sensibility, and Weatherall’s love of the deep low end. –Benjamin Scheim
22. Listen: Two Lone Swordsmen: “Ivy and Lead”
Various Artists: Clicks + Cuts (2000)
If terms like “IDM” and “glitch” seemed to be shrugworthy jokes or overused PR buzzwords by the turn of the millennium, Mille Plateaux’s remarkable 2000 double-disc compilation Clicks + Cuts made a great case for such experimental electronic music’s necessity. Sascha Kösch’s liner notes frame the release as exploring a new kind of minimalism, and the theme as such is of deep focus, centered around rhythms that don’t pound so much as pulse, throb, and skip. It’s music for both computer speaker setups and portable listening; within that framework, there’s astonishing breadth, from hyperactive activity to cool contemplation. The roll call of artists, and the quality of their contributions, is a master class in getting the right people at the right moment in time: Pole, Vladislav Delay, Pan Sonic, Kid606, Alva Noto, Reinhard Voigt, Farben, Sutekh, and more. Other striking moments: Dettinger’s “Strange Fruit,” with its early Kompakt label aesthetic; Neina’s beautifully hazy “Clairvoyance”; and Thomas Meinecke’s Framus Waikiki’s nervous, jittery “Rechanneled from Stereo.” –Ned Raggett
Listen: Neina: “Clairvoyance”
Urban Tribe: The Collapse of Modern Culture (1998)
Nineteen years after its release, too few people know The Collapse of Modern Culture. Even when it was new, the debut album by Detroit’s Sherard Ingram (best known today as the electro-leaning DJ Stingray) and a handful of the Motor City’s finest—Anthony Shakir, Carl Craig, and Kenny Dixon Jr., aka Moodymann—was too unusual a proposition to find a wide audience. It seemed too slow to be techno, too broken to be hip-hop, too electronic and vocal-free for most to recognize it as soul music. And the majority of the long-defunct Mo Wax label’s catalog never made its way to streaming services, which means this sumptuous, prescient slab of beat music has been relegated to the rarities bins. The drum programming and sampled breaks bridge boom-bap, Detroit’s slow-paced “beatdown” style, and the snapping grooves of Warp artists like Boards of Canada and Autechre; the mood throughout is melancholy and elegiac, with lyrical synthesizers poking through rumbling percussion like green saplings pushing through the rubble of a dead city. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Urban Tribe: “Decades of Silicon”
Matmos: A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure (2001)
Matmos are nearly unrivaled at creating conceptual, genre-transcendent albums that signpost whatever is happening in their personal lives. A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure is one of their finest, thanks to its unlikely core element: samples of biological and surgical processes, including hearing tests and, on “Ur Tchun Tan Tse Qi,” crackles and rhythms derived from galvanic tests on member M.C. Schmidt’s own skin. But rather than a shrieking pain-fest of body horror, A Chance to Cut is a downright swinging affair, starting with the burbling “Lipostudio… And So On” that, indeed, samples liposuction surgery.
It’s almost the inverse of Kraftwerk’s man-become-machine chill and pulse. Instead, songs like the vocabularic disruption of “Spondee,” the clattering bone-created funk of “Memento Mori,” and the closer “California Rhinoplasty” feel like the robots want to see what all the softness and fluids of organic matter is about. If there is a moment of melancholy, it’s “For Felix (And All the Rats),” played on the cage of a deceased pet of that name, which feels like an alien string-and-percussion salute tinged with a playful sweetness. –Ned Raggett
Listen: Matmos: “California Rhinoplasty”
Mouse on Mars: Autoditacker (1997)
On Autoditacker, Dusseldorf’s Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma brought a dazzling, formal inventiveness to IDM that, to a certain strand of self-serious diehards, must have felt like getting slapped upside the head with a wet fish. In stark contrast to much of the genre in the late ’90s, their record was soft, squishy, verging on absurdist, and somehow able to bounce around the stereo channel with the zeal of a Muppet.
But don’t let the synth squiggles and oddball sound effects fool you into thinking of this as a novelty album. From the effervescent opener of the breakneck “Sui Shop,” to the krautrock-influenced motorik of “Tamagnocchi,” to the proto-microhouse of “Schnick Schnack Meltmade,” Autoditacker is expertly constructed music made by skilled musicians with a serious goal. It just so happens that goal is to not take everything so seriously. –Mark Pytlik
Listen: Mouse on Mars: “Tamagnocchi”
Clark: Body Riddle (2006)
When Chris Clark’s debut Clarence Park dropped on Warp in 2001, it was received by critics as pleasantly listenable but derivative, a heavily Aphex Twin- and Squarepusher-indebted ode released as IDM was already on the decline. But with his third album, Body Riddle, Clark—now rebranded without his first name—proved himself a forward-thinking composer in his own right, and produced a work to rival that of his label’s more famous forebearers.
From the beginning of his career, Clark had demonstrated dueling interests in both crashing, drill-heavy beats and icy, pastoral synthesizers; on Body Riddle, he finally merges them. “Vengeance Drools” begins with a pounding drum and keyboard program that quickly decays into a quiet, spooked moment of creepy ambience (the kind Clark has favored heavily since). “Herr Barr” and “Ted” offer beats that smash and crackle like nothing else he’d produced before. Best of all is the closing diptych of “Night Knuckles” and “The Autumnal Crush”; the former shows Clark’s skill in crafting beautiful, effervescent melodies and the latter demonstrates his deftness with impressionistic, slowly unfolding composition. The economical 42 minutes of Body Riddle provide a filler-free effort that still sounds as fresh today as it did 10 years ago, when it served as beacon that the genre of IDM was far from dead. –Benjamin Scheim
Listen: Clark: “Herr Barr”
Autechre: Amber (1994)
A few years ago, when Autechre held a Q&A session on the IDM fan message board WATMM, one user asked the duo about how their music predicted the rise of dubstep. Member Sean Booth responded, “Big deal, I invent 15 genres a week.” He then hedged the claim with a “j/k,” but arguably didn’t need to. For more than two decades, he and production partner Rob Brown have been amongst the driving forces in electronic music innovation, synthesizing styles from out of thin air, then quickly leaving them for less worthy practitioners to chew on.
Amber, their second album, was one of their earliest such innovations. Though later efforts would favor the abrasive and mechanical, Amber at least feigns some measure of humanity, running down fluttering melodies by way of lush FM synthesis. But for all its textural richness, the album’s true power comes from the way it moves—in deceptively complex, gradually evolving glacial shifts that provide a complete, multilateral genre blueprint in under an hour. Sometimes, it seems like the question of whether a record qualifies as IDM boils down to how closely it resembles Amber. –Andrew Nosnitsky
Listen: Autechre: “Foil”
Prefuse 73: One Word Extinguisher (2003)
The hyphenate genre “glitch-hop” was already in the air by 2003, but Scott Herren’s second album as Prefuse 73 helped it stick around for the rest of the decade. That achievement wasn’t merely possible due to the occasional presence of guest MCs from the rap underground (including Def Jux family member Mr. Lif). Instead, the hybrid sound was created at the micro-level of Herren’s production.
The opening overture, titled “The Wrong Side of Reflection (Intro),” gurgles with sampled group “ahhhs” that would have sounded at home in De La Soul’s “U Can Do (Life).” But Herren’s samples cut off more sharply, trading space with morsels of vibraphone, found-sound applause, and keyboard progressions (and, sure, a glitch or two). The high energy “The End of Biters - International” mines the tradition of turntablism, adding a hyper-precise, manically digital method of cutting that takes the style to a new, emotional place: the breakup album.
One Word Extinguisher’s furious pace, and its range of genre references, keeps it from ever becoming boring. This heedless churning of ideas also works as a sonic analogue for a mind in crisis. Some track titles suggest standard-issue bro laments (“Female Demands”), while others give voice to more alarming reactions (“Choking You”). But the passages of bluster and rage are all fleeting, appearing as cover stories that mask a core emotional uncertainty. And those postures can’t be held forever, a reality Herren acknowledges with “Styles That Fade Away with a Collonade Reprise,” the album's last, resigned track. –Seth Colter Walls
Listen: Prefuse 73: “Female Demands”
Flying Lotus: Los Angeles (2008)
Los Angeles was a breakthrough for a movement that, as of 2008, was still emerging: a braintrust of abstract beat music that let IDM’s glitchier, noisier tendencies seep into hip-hop’s structure. The result was one of the most exciting stretches of cross-pollination either genre has seen. Flying Lotus gathered up a grip of his cohorts from his L.A. “producer’s lounge,” Low End Theory—which included the Gaslamp Killer, Gonjasufi, Samiyam, and Matthewdavid—and conjured a roadmap that led from his familial ties to his future as an abstract-jazz auteur. “Auntie’s Harp” channels the cosmic glimmer of his aunt Alice Coltrane’s “Galaxy in Turyia,” and the glowing drone of leadoff cut “Brainfeeder” shared a name with the label he’d launch that year.
Even after successive albums refined FlyLo’s vision, Los Angeles remains stunning. It takes full advantage of his tendency to lay down off-kilter liquid drums and bass kicks so thick you could wear them like a coat, and highlights his ability to find euphoria in chord progressions and noisy, surreal distortion. FlyLo would go on to collaborate with Thom Yorke and Kendrick Lamar, and Los Angeles was the album that let him get to that point—and made those partnerships feel completely natural when they arrived. –Nate Patrin
Listen: Flying Lotus: “Auntie’s Harp”
Aphex Twin: ...I Care Because You Do (1995)
Aphex Twin followed the pastoral whisper of Selected Ambient Works Volume II with an industrial scream: the single “Ventolin,” which opens on an indelible dental-drill screech and never stops. That song became a central track on Richard D. James’ next full length, ...I Care Because You Do, which arrived a year after SAWII.
If I Care’s quiet moments brought to mind SAWII’s pulsing miasmas, its beats were something else entirely. “Come on You Slags!” earned the exclamation point with pachinko percussion and laser-battle grace notes; “Wet Tip Hen Ax” slowed the pace in favor of tangibly slurpy burbles, and was one of many anagram song titles. “Icct Hedral” set film-music synth strings against raspy pounding and nearly sub-aural bass. (Philip Glass would re-arrange the strings of “Icct Hedral” for a version on the Donkey Rhubarb EP later that year, underscoring Aphex Twin’s connection with classical minimalism.) Throughout, I Care codifies and denies its formal constraints: There’s also broken Caribbean beach music and haunted-house theatrics. And while its flummoxing cadences provided a model for many beatmakers to come, no one has come close to the elegiac pop phrasing of “Alberto Balsalm.” –Marc Weidenbaum
Listen: Aphex Twin: “Icct Hedral”
Boards of Canada: In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country EP (2000)
Released in 2000, between Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children and their follow-up Geogaddi, the EP In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country runs the risk of being seen as a mere stylistic stopping-off point between the band’s classic studio releases. And while there may be an element of truth to this—In a Beautiful Place has shades of the bucolic, chord-washed bliss of Music Has the Right, married to the eerie, minor-tone shades of Geogaddi—this four-song release stands as its own beast, the pinnacle of the Scottish duo’s ability to soundtrack the moment when ecstasy succumbs to doubt. The title track invites the listener to “Come out and live in a religious community/In a beautiful place out in the country” in an undulating vocoder whisper that is both hugely inviting and utterly haunting, the sound of your childhood memories dissolved in hypnotic dread. It seems appropriate that another of the songs borrows its name from Amo Bishop Roden, widow of a rival to David Koresh. Here, four tracks feel right; a whole album of such disquieting beauty would have been too much for the listener’s fragile nerves. –Ben Cardew
Listen: Boards of Canada: “Amo Bishop Roden”
Drexciya: Harnessed the Storm (2002)
For most of their decade-long run, the Detroit duo Drexciya (Gerald Donald and James Stinson, whose death in 2002 brought the end of the group) favored EPs and 12" singles. Their short blasts of dynamic electro built upon the innovations of pioneers like Cybotron, reconfiguring the so-stiff-it’s-funky music to fit their intricate Afrofuturist mythology. When working at album length, which they didn’t do often, Drexciya were able to experiment even more, straying further from the rigid structures of dance music.
Harnessed the Storm wasn’t completely in sync with what was happening in IDM at the time of its release—for one thing, Donald and Stinson preferred old-school synths and sequencers to computers. But its adventurous spirit, disorienting layers of rhythm, and sheer beauty make it a natural fit with the other albums on this list. “Mission to Ociya Syndor and Back” sits at one extreme of their sound, with its impossibly deep, depth charge bass and squawking lead synths, and at the other is “Under Sea Disturbances,” a gentle, almost pastoral soundtrack that feels like an invitation to enter another, better world. –Mark Richardson
Listen: Drexciya: “Mission to Ociya Syndor and Back”
Various Artists: Artificial Intelligence (1992)
The origins of most musical genres are steeped in legend, obfuscation, and mystery. With IDM, however, the starting point is easy to finger: It emerged from Artificial Intelligence, a compilation album released by Sheffield’s Warp Records in 1992 that promised—on its cover, no less—“electronic listening music.” That might not sound like a revolutionary idea today but, at the time, the notion that you might sit down and listen to “rave” (as it was still widely known) was novel.
Luckily, Warp had the goods to back up its concept. The compilation’s 10 tracks endure as a virtual who’s-who of IDM, including music from Aphex Twin (as the Dice Man), Autechre, the Black Dog (as I.A.O.), and B12 (as Musicology), alongside Richie Hawtin (as UP!), Speedy J, and the Orb’s Dr. Alex Paterson. In the years that followed, these artists would spin their own idiosyncratic electronic webs, but Artificial Intelligence saw them unite in the service of otherworldly melody, mechanical beats that reach beyond the demands of the dance floor, and waves of chilling ambience and production skills that nod to Detroit techno without resorting to slavish reproduction. In the 25 years since, these values have served IDM very well. –Ben Cardew
Listen: Speedy J: “De-Orbit”
Squarepusher: Big Loada (1997)
Big Loada is the most fun of Squarepusher’s early forays into drum’n’bass. The EP was also a stopgap between Tom Jenkinson’s Warp Records debut Hard Normal Daddy and his detour into jazz fusion and musique concrète on Music Is Rotted One Note.
Amen break drum solos rain down like cartoon mallets, limber fingers pluck out impossible bass funk lines, and brief snippets of ragga MCs fight their way out of the maelstrom. Running parallel to Jenkinson’s infatuation with jungle is a fascination for the timbres and tunes of video game soundtracks, and this collision produces some of Squarepusher’s most enduring melodies. The misty gloaming of “Massif (Stay Strong)” creates a rustic raver vibe. Meanwhile, “A Journey to Reedham (7.AM Mix)”—to this day, a Squarepusher live favorite—hooks optimistic synth burble to testy plumes of creaky-door drum’n’bass, and appears determined to wring every permutation of rhythm out of its six-and-a-half minutes. A 1998 US reissue on Trent Reznor’s Nothing Records added the Port Rhombus EP and two tracks from the “Vic Acid” single, making Big Loada the definitive document of Squarepusher’s first phase. –Louis Pattison
Listen: Squarepusher: “Massif (Stay Strong)”
Autechre: LP5 (1998)
If you’re going to classify albums by the inscrutable and math-obsessed Autechre, why not plot them as points on a graph? Let’s imagine two axes, the x representing some mix of density and complexity, the y representing a combination of conventional musicality (discernible tune, chord structure) and accessibility. In this schematic, LP5, relative to any other record in Autechre’s catalog, would exist at the upper-right edge of the first quadrant. It has a disorienting, slipped-gear approach to rhythm (“777,” “Arch Carrier”), but these tracks still bang, bearing traces of their electro roots, and there are tunes with ear-catching melodies (“Melve,” “Fold4, Wrap 5”). Their earlier music was easier and more often what the person on the street would describe as “beautiful,” and the raft of music they released later would up the difficulty quotient considerably, but 1998’s LP5, heavy with both qualities, is a certain peak. –Mark Richardson
Listen: Autechre: “Melve”
Jan Jelinek: Loop-finding-jazz-records (2001)
This German musician’s first album under his own name employs a “loop finding modulation wheel,” a source of much online fixation by IDM fans; we won’t try to parse the science of that invention, but suffice to say, his softly pulsing minimal house is the result of meticulous technique. For this record, Jelinek—an avid record collector before he became a producer—works with samples from jazz records from the ’60s and ’70s. But the sounds’ origins are barely perceptible in their newly abbreviated, processed, and collaged forms. Murky bass and lingering washes of melody are peppered with crackles and pops that suggest a sort of organic spaciousness. Two of the tracks’ titles nod to moiré, a pattern in which a rippled effect is created through layers of lines, an apt metaphor for the way Jelinek builds a dimensional quality into his compositions. Subdued and always tasteful, it’s the kind of music that doesn’t mind fading into the background, but if one considers IDM in terms of studied home listening, this record offers serious rewards to those with the time to sit down and pay close attention. –Thea Ballard
Listen: Jan Jelinek: “Tendency”
Four Tet: Rounds (2003)
As Four Tet, Kieran Hebden has made many musical pivots over the last two decades. Some have seemed drastic—“folktronica” skipping into electronic jazz into global trance—while others played with contexts. Rounds did a bit of both, accentuating hip-hop’s collage approach in the production and placing new emphasis in its steady grooves. The album was a new taste of a cut-and-paste universe, pushing IDM into a whole new space.
It made sense that Rounds developed during the years Hebden was rubbing shoulders with Dilla and Madlib, and about to enter a collaboration with Steve Reid. Rounds’ impeccable drums are those of a guy who scoured jazz records and pointed the samples outward. It’s also the sound of someone finessing his compositions, juxtaposing delicately played, almost-emo melodies with thorny electronics and groove. “She Moves She,” “My Angel Rocks Back and Forth” and “As Serious As Your Life” make clear that while Four Tet was using familiar parts and following a recognizable blueprint, the results were far from obvious. –Piotr Orlov
Listen: Four Tet: “She Moves She”
Boards of Canada: Geogaddi (2002)
The expectations that established artists face, from fans and critics alike, can be absurdly demanding. We want them to equal their initial achievements, but differently; to keep changing, but not lose what originally allured us. Boards of Canada brothers Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin might well have felt daunted by the challenge of following up 1998’s Music Has the Right to Children, one of IDM’s greatest albums, but when the Scottish duo returned four years later, they delivered a triumph.
Geogaddi is at once a reiteration, an intensification, and a subtle shift. All their signature features are present: the aching wisps of bittersweet melody, the crumbly synth-tones, the spoken-word samples idyllically evocative of childhood or countryside. Underneath the ghostly, gaseous gorgeousness, breakbeat rhythms still trudge, steadfast and stoic on their lonely journey to nowhere—a million miles in mood from hip-hop’s boombastic feel. Geogaddi also contains fan-pleasers on par with Children’s, such as “1969,” with its sound-swirls that induce a heavy-lidded swoon on a par with prime My Bloody Valentine. “Music Is Math,” another highpoint, features angelic android voices and a recurring soundbite about “the past inside the present” that serves as a miniature BoC manifesto. But there are also darker forays like the ominous, glowing pulses and creepily processed speech of “The Devil Is in the Details.” Alongside its incomparable precursor, Geogaddi remains one of BoC’s twin peaks—an altitude they’re unlikely to scale again. –Simon Reynolds
Listen: Boards of Canada: “Music Is Math”
Aphex Twin: The Richard D. James Album (1996)
This is the closest Aphex Twin has ever come to making a proper pop LP. His real name is right there in the title, evoking a long line of eponymous soul-bearing. And his face is on the front, his eyes looking right at us, inviting empathy. Song names call back to his childhood in rural England, while the addition of strings and original vocals lean on tried-and-true songwriting traditions. There’s even a track called “Beetles.”
Then again, that song isn’t a tribute to John and Paul as much as it’s a tribute to creepy crawlies that live in carpets. And the sampled violins are often offset by drums that trickle, skitter, and blip with a speed and precision that are anything but traditional; the voices are pitch-shifted, singing of dismembered limbs and a lactating milkman’s wife. The album cover looks real yet unreal, like Phil Collins’ evil, illegitimate son. And even the record’s title isn’t exactly what it seems to be: According to the artist’s own myth, it is meant as a kind of ode to his brother, also named Richard James, who was stillborn in 1968. So, this is Aphex Twin’s version of a pop utopia. It's pretty fucking bizarre. –Ryan Dombal
Listen: Aphex Twin: “Beetles”
Autechre: Tri Repetae (1995)
Sean Booth and Rob Brown’s first album as Autechre, 1993’s Incunabula, made the UK charts, meaning the British record-buying public was already prepared and hungry for post-rave electronic music. By the time the duo started working on their third album, Tri Repetae, they were creatively beholden to no one, even Warp Records—and though what they delivered wasn’t a million miles away from their first two albums, something clearly had changed. Tri Repetae sounds more detached, as if it actually could incorporate an artificial intelligence. The electronica warmth and prettiness has dropped away; sounds are crunchier, grittier, with a new and intriguing depth.
While Autechre have always referenced hip-hop and techno in their music—as well as a whole range of electronic experiences—one of Tri Repetae’s most important features is its deep space funk. Whether in the background acid of “Leterel” or the staccato electro of “Rotar,” Autechre achieves experimental machine-precision and funkiness, which is one of the hardest tasks in IDM; the more unintuitive the groove, the better (see “Eutow” or “C/pach”). It might be too challenging for most dance floors, but that’s where this music was born. Tri Repetae doesn’t forget it. –Lisa Blanning
Listen: Autechre: “Leterel”
Boards of Canada: Music Has the Right to Children (1998)
The first studio full-length from the Scottish brothers Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin was of the world of experimental electronic music, but it also transcended it. Music Has the Right to Children has grown to become the album that anyone familiar with this music knows—if you own just a single record from this list, it’s probably this one. Building on the innovations of Aphex Twin, where deceptively complicated programming and arrangements are married to gorgeous tunes, Boards of Canada helped move IDM into the mainstream. Virtually every track that’s not an interlude has a hook or melodic refrain that sticks with you, and there’s an uncanny feeling when listening in which your mind “sings along” as the pieces unfold. (Related: It also happens to be one of the most stoner-friendly albums ever made.) Moods run from the dark and sinister (the ghostly lurch of “An Eagle in Your Mind”) to the twinkly and playful (the laughing children and repetition of “orange” on “Aquarius”), but many of the best tracks convey palpable feelings that are rooted in memory and nostalgia but harder to name (“Turquoise Hexagon Sun”). Ultimately, the record’s runaway success is not hard to fathom: For all its carefully laid beats and fresh, otherworldly electronic textures, Music Has the Right to Children essentially functions as a pop album. –Mark Richardson
Listen: Boards of Canada: “An Eagle in Your Mind”
Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (1992)
IDM takes its name, at least obliquely, from Warp’s Artificial Intelligence compilation, released in July 1992, but there’s a strong case to be made for Aphex Twin’s debut album as the genre’s true founding document. Released in February of the same year, Selected Ambient Works 85-92 isn’t really ambient music, no matter what the title may suggest: Songs such as “Xtal” and “Green Calx,” with their rolling breakbeats and thundering drum programming, are rooted squarely in the era’s rave scene. Other cuts, though—the glinting, almost percussion-free “Tha,” the beatlessly levitating “I”—point in new directions.
In fact, practically any of the album’s tracks could serve as a roadmap for new lines of investigation, and many of them did just that. “Schottkey 7th Path” would inspire the ghostly keening and clanking of Seefeel and Disjecta, along with Aphex Twin’s own “Ventolin.” “Delphium” extended Larry Heard’s mode of deep, melodic house into even more futuristic territory. The sour-toned “Hedphelym” established a template for both industrial techno and microtonal experiments in dance music. “Ageispolis” flipped tricky electro rhythms into the psychedelic blueprint for Boards of Canada. And so on. Beyond the album’s towering influence over everything that followed, its stylistic twists and turns and lyrical sensibility make it an endlessly fascinating and deeply rewarding document. Had Richard D. James called it quits after this, we’d still be lighting candles at his altar. It’s no wonder that he is as driven as he is: This album will always be looming over his shoulder. Until further notice, it’s the gold standard against which everything else in the tradition is measured. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Aphex Twin: “Xtal”
Contributors: Thea Ballard, Andy Beta, Lisa Blanning, Ben Cardew, Ryan Dombal, Andrew Gaerig, Kevin Lozano, Andrew Nosnitsky, Piotr Orlov, Nate Patrin, Louis Pattison, Mark Pytlik, Ned Raggett, Simon Reynolds, Mark Richardson, Benjamin Scheim, Ryan Schreiber, Philip Sherburne, Seth Colter Walls, Marc Weidenbaum
