S/D - IDM

listening to some old boards of canada and saw there was no post for this on IDM (plus i cant sleep)

some obvious 's' picks

afx - i care because you do and SAW II (i dont like vol 1)
boc - music has the right to children
autechre - tri repetae (ive not heard this in ages though so maybe it hasnt aged that well)
kid 606 - down with the scene

idm is a terrible lable

regardless of it being accurate or negative or not, its a label that helps me know what sort of music someone is talking about so it works well enough.

s
black dog productions bytes
reload a collection of short stories
bochum welt module 2
first wave skam catalog ska002-008
squarepusher 1996-1999
low res approximate love boat
hrvatski - oiseaux

d
nearly everything on planet mu and tigerbeat6

s: vhs head - trademark ribbons of gold

i believe in braindance.. braindance; braindance

s
Squarepusher - Big Loada
Autechre - Chiastic Slide, Garbage, Draft 7.30,
BOC - Hi Scores, Twoism
Pole - 1, 2, 3
Oval - Systemisch, Ovalcommers, Ovalprozess
Pan Sonic - Osasto EP, Vakio, Kulma, A, Aaltopiiri, etc.
Plenty of small releases on Rephlex, City Center Offices, ~scape, skam
Various Cylob, LFO, Freescha, Plone, Seefeel

d
Most of Tigerbeat6, Merck, Sublight, Planet Mu record labels
Clark
Richard Devine

s

Cockblock Disarster - MunkEbola
1996 - The List-ery Man
Abbleoblleigffle Ung ung ung - Autechre
STFU - Dr Mbutu
Someone Saved My Wife Tonite - Moo-Zeek
It's Floppy - Run Away DMC

hope we see some love for Phoenecia's "BrownOut" and Team Doyobi's "CryptoBurners" and Scratch Pet Land's "Solo Soli IIII" here

search - JEGA

phoenicia rules

i also really like the first two schematic comps ... and i still have a sneaking affection for push button objects, but sadly i think roughly 90% of IDM is destroy

now, does CLEAR count as IDM?

because i am tempted to say stuff like clear, ann aimee, dot records, black dog productions, ai, etc fit better under the "deep techno" banner

richard devine is great?!?

everything by lusine & tadd mullinix & lots of random tracks on ghostly

i really liked nautilus - are you an axolotl that came out on planet-mu yearsss ago

Hey, Nautilis (sic) remixes one of my tracks yonks ago.

Remixed

my friend had a sweet ass mk2 VW golf with a massive sub and stupid blue lights and when we were 17 we'd drive out to the middle of nowhere sit on the bonnet and listen to that record LOUD and get crazy crazy high. good times.

What's with the planet-mu hate itt?

yeh was waiting for your contributions DL

you're the dude on here that used to do stuff with the tefosav lot right?

Yeah man, I started that site off the back of warpcomm, although digitonal soon came along and helped turn it into more than a bunch of links and a free HTML messageboard. Good times - a great community to work with too. Fizzled out around 2004 - I think people had finally got bored of that kind of music. I still dig out the CcommD and Outpt comps time to time - very much wheat and chaff but not without a few diamonds.

there was a great digitonal track with spoken bits and bells and field recordings. it was about 8 minutes long, built to a great climax. also lolz at all the early 65daysofstatic stuff, completely different. they were much better before they went snoozerock.

i think i need to dig out an old hard drive to find a lot of this stuff

jetone used to be a favourite, an early tim hecker project

phoenicia has a new thing out, i think you can find it on bandcamp, it's, um alright.

search: ~BRAINDANCE~
destroy: IDM

lol

it's funny how people slag off idm. when it reality the stuff that got labelled as idm covers like deep techno, dub techno, drum n bass, house music, noise, ambient blah blah blah

i mean to me idm = early internet era electronic music. people getting pirate softwarez + hearing certain key electronic music genres for the first time and making their own approximations. then forming little alliances/labels/groups together. i mean venetian snares is a million miles from funckarma.

I think I hate the term Braindance more than IDM. No one's ever come up with a decent term for this music, but most people online who give a fuck understand what is meant by IDM, so.

Also, getting very bored with every time the term gets used, someone has to pop up saying "so, what, is all other dance music stupid dance music? also I can't dance to it" - this is a direct quote from Mike Paradinas circa 1995 and it's turned into the electronica equivalent of Godwin's Law. Just live with IDM already. It's not as if all other genre labels aren't just as stupid.

I love the term Braindance, just because I associate it with funny Rephlex logos and the foot in the shape of Cornwall stomping on the face of electronic music, forever.

http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ljyth4ZOef1qhhc1qo1_r1_500.jpg

There are about 30 IDM threads already on ILM so it's clearly not a "hated" thing around here. It's a ~thing~ it's just a thing that no one really likes the name for.

Dammit, that's not the right image.

what's the replex/braindance thing with the fireworks samples

that's cool

This is the one but it's gonna give me a massive migraine if I look at it every time I open the thread so I hope this comes out as a link.

http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lijgz0nusO1qiqcrxo1_500.gif

haha, never realised it was supposed to be in the shape of cornwall. that is pretty cool and also massively (typically?) dorky.

feel like "IDM" came along as a genre term a few years after i'd been listening to Aphex and µ-Ziq and Autechre et al so it's always seemed like a clunker of a label

Blevin Blectum counts, right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lHZQB9TTrg

Here are some nice IDM tracks that might've slipped by the radar:

DMX Krew: The Glass Room
Coba: After Dinner (Plaid Mix)
CiM: Skim Two
Joseph Nothing: Disc'O Nostalgia
Mu-Ziq: The Hwicci Song

Is DJ Food IDM, because if so, search Kaleidescope.

DJ Food, AFAICR, describes his work as "Illbient" - yuck!!

or was that DJ Spooky? I haven't heard much by either.

ew. that was def. dj spooky.

search - JEGA

HECK YES. Spectrum is killer. I'll stick up for some Plaid, too, especially Not For Threes. Hmm, let's see, how about Bola: Soup? I haven't listened to much of this stuff for like ten years, so it's hard to reach that far back. Was Jetone: Ultramarin an IDM record? I loved that. Pretty much all Boards of Canada (duh), but I've got a particular soft spot for that early Skam EP, and the In a Beautiful Place... EP.

I dug out Bola Soup the other day. Very nice - kind of ambienty.

Not For Threes was okay, but Restproof Clockwork was even better. The first four tracks on Double Figure are the best they ever did. Spokes took a long time to grow on me, but it's good enough.

They've been a bit slack lately though. Wish they'd stop fucking around with audiovisual installations and film scores and just get on with a new album.

I'm basing this on highly limited anecdotal evidence, I admit, but it seems the used vinyl market for this category is starting to beef up... I saw Plaid's Trainer ($20!) and Jega's Spectrum ($18!) used on my last trip to Academy W-burg, and various other things cropping up here and there. I think I vaguely registered it at the time but didn't realize realize until more recently just how kind of sad and emotionally emaciated a lot of this music is (not really much of the stuff mentioned on this thread)... I mean, is there anything more soul-negating than a rudimentarily skilled drill-and-bass record? IDM at its worst is whimsical in the most aesthetically repugnant sense imaginable.

three rarely discussed gems:
Ethik - Music for Stock Exchange (Mike Ink + Bionaut. just beautiful!)
Tim Tetlow - Beauty Walks a Razor's Edge (early Planet µ)
Velocette - Sonorities by Starlight (US represent!)

Snap, I need to hear Ethik. Is Burger/Ink considered IDM? Las Vegas is an incredible record... But I don't think it qualifies as IDM.

it was theglut of drill'n'bass / glitch imitators that killed this scene dead. sometimes giving everyone access to new technology they can use in their bedrooms is a bad thing.

there's major glut in lotsa other genres too (hello, dubby house and minimal techno?) but the reason that it was particularly barfy in relation to idm was that

1) the premise of "innovation" was being worn on the sleeve- this was supposed to be hey-look-at-my-patterns "complexity", but . . .
2) the basic template was very very narrow in terms of arrangement, song-form, and vocabulary

the recipe: draw some stunted three note minor melodies in matrix edit, build some overly elaborate snare and hi hat patterns that loop at odd points over a very standard boom bap kick pattern, slice n dice some chopped up vocal snippets on top of the grid, set the tempo to either 97 with double time filigrees or set it to around 133 - 150 bpm, get the vocal loops going, add the beats, repeat for three or four minutes, drop out the beats, let the banal melodies run through some delay, et voila! cookie cutter IDM is served!

so what was supposed to be advanced and complex really wasn't

the best work survives and the worm will turn, but really what we see in the longview from the IDM era to today is the way that discourse likes to tie things to particular historical eras so that the preserve of young/new/emergent/"Now"/relevance can get served up every four or five years to a different set of consumers- the rhetoric rides piggyback on the music, and the music is replaceable while the dynamic of distribution networks founded upon having it both ways between popularity and elitism never really stops- the people who loved IDM in the 90s are replaced by the people who love Flying Lotus, Burial, Zomby, Mt. Kimble, Holy Other and Kode 9 today, and the rhetoric with which they are consumed and advocated for demonstrates a basic continuity pretty clearly, I think. Most reviews of the artists I just listed will contain some variant on the sentence "It's like R&B that's gone weird" / "It's like dubstep that has mutated" / "It's like house that has been eviscerated" blah blah blah etc. That's not so different from the same claims being made about the relation of IDM to hip hop and jungle and house in the 90s. Maybe because those relationships are the case, or maybe because it massages the egos of both the artists and the fans, to think that they're like something popular (usually here you can read: "black") but they're a little bit better, a little bit more refined, a little bit more elite (here you can usually read: "White")

^^^ all kinds of otm

except for the "white" and "black" thing, I don't really get that

I was big into IDM in 2004 and nearly stopped listening to it altogether in 2006. To me it sort of resembles those silly "Youtube Poop" videos that come out all the time in that it's a good idea and can work out great but suffers from having too many creators who run out of ideas and just try to make things as random/jarring as possible imploring the listener/viewer to "get on my level" or whatever. Case in point, like 90% of what Venetian Snares does. The first listen to the RDJ album was one of the weirdest experiences of my life, I wonder what I'd think of it now

Terrific post, tune is space. I think that's one reason I can't quite get into Flying Lotus; I get those same sorts of "flexing my sweet programming chops" vibes combined with a sort of emotionally stunted clinicalness that I definitely cannot tolerate the way I used to. Burial and Zomby to me are much more compelling (I actively like both of them a lot). Then again, I tend to think that "atmosphere" and texture are infinitely more mine-able and exploration-worthy than drum-pattern exercises and "challenging" rhythms. And I think so much old IDM is absolutely enfeebled and unsatisfying in the atmosphere/texture departments.

I"m saying that the "intelligence" / "complexity" / elite claim that accompanied a lot of the hype/fandom/discourse around IDM was about coolhunting and borrowing from rhythmic, populist forms that emerged from black communities while also self-consciously condescending to them (or, more charitably, "transcending"/perverting/improving them)

there was something "deracinated" about the bleached fragments of hip hop vocals that stutter but don't speak in a lot of IDM- like found/chopped/screwed black voices were an exciting production fetish because you could have, dissect, caress "blackness" as some kind of signifier while also keeping it at a remove (trip hop was another case in point- you could have cool breaks going on and on without those annoying people talking about their problems on top, and my my isn't that much more relaxing etc.)

obviously this is broad brush observation, there were white creators of rhythmic, populist dance music forms and there were black avant-gardists whose work gets called IDM too, it's not so cut and dry (I would love to know how Titonton Duvante, A Guy Called Gerald, Anthony Shakir, or Theo Parrish feel about this dynamic, or for that matter the black artists on Hyperdub or FlyLo now)

everyone's sensitivity meter about what counts as a racist/racially polarized dynamic is set differently (and, frogbs, given our past disagreements about what does or doesn't constitute homophobia I predict that you'll disagree with my reading here)

I'm also speaking here as a practitioner, I'm not some critic standing above the phenomenon in question, I am/was part of this whole problem

perhaps part of the "problem" was that innovations in dancefloor-oriented musics are driven by a market ethic - making yr sound new, trying to come up with novel production tricks is about making your records stand out, and innovation is judged by "does this shit bump? are people dancing?", whereas the IDM guys were mostly consumed like rock bands - brand loyalty, consumption measured by the album, and so the obsession with innovation had nowhere to go, it was literally pointless and thus doomed to disappoint its fans once a new genre gained cred status

I'm not really sure what's "condescending" about that. This reminds me of how a lot of early hip-hop music would sample Kraftwerk (four white dudes from Germany who didn't really dance) and sort of "pervert" it in its own way. I guess I see what you're getting at but imo it doesn't seem like there's a race issue here unless you want to make one. Like I don't really see "annoying people talking about their problems" as being like a "black thing" or whatever

To me it sort of resembles those silly "Youtube Poop" videos that come out all the time

Don't make me google this.

xp

u don't think there is a clear "black music = dance music = body music = no brains = dumb fun < white music = listening music = head music = scratching my chin digging yr cutting edge" subtext in a vast swathe of rock crit? i mean clearly nobody's gonna convince u if you don't believe it's the case and i'm not saying this is the only thing that happens in rock crit but come on.

i mean our geir may be a caricature but he's a caricature of something pretty freaking common

oh yeah, i know it exists and it's really dumb, but i always thought that rock critics use it so much because they don't really have anything else to say. I'm not really convinced of the connection to IDM. Think of how horrible it would sound if it sampled Radiohead?

I think both frogbs and noodle can be right, in that:

yes, influence travels both ways across racial divisions and one doesn't have to think in terms of race when the subject is production ideas because ideas travel across those racial barriers too

but also . . .

yes, there really are a lot of people whose attitudes resemble the rockist-side-of-IDM-fandom straw man we're talking about, and their attitudes filter through why some records get put in one part of the record store and other records get put elsewhere

so there's a bigger conversation about the relationship of genre to race here which is already implicit whena label is called HyperDub or a software company is called JazzMutant- in each case the formula is ("black" genre name + signifier of advancement/novelty)

I guess it's sorta oversimplifying to talk about race in IDM as black and white without also pointing out the number of brown folks who make it- lots of Asian and Latino and mixed race people come to mind (Edgar Farinas, Romulo del Castillo, Richard Devine, Riaow Arai, Miguel De Pedro, Scott Herren blah blah blah)

"And I think so much old IDM is absolutely enfeebled and unsatisfying in the atmosphere/texture departments."

this is what separates the lasting work from the trash, I think. you can still put on PHoenecia's "BrownOut" or Autechre's "Chiastic Slide" or Lesser's "Gearhound" and hear amazing textures and details, it's not just about the beats

to me one of the most inspiring "graduates" from this early class of IDM is Keith Fullerton Whitman- his work during the drill-and-bass era as Hrvatski was always incredibly distinctive and individual, and he's made good on the rhetoric of complexity that used to attend IDM while completely jettisoning its trappings- his recent analogue modular synth work lives up to all of the hype that used to attend IDM (complex machine music that breathes and flows like an organic living thing) while having nothing, stylistically, to do with IDM whatsoever

i do agree that its become formulatic and predictable, which is exactly what it was trying to get away from in the beginning.

when I first heard the RDJ album, Lunatic Harness, and Hard Normal Daddy, all I could think was "I really want to hear more like this", only to discover there really wasn't any

what's the replex/braindance thing with the fireworks samples

don't see an answer to this yet so: Astrobotnia - Lightworks?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=052M6AW1qGQ

hm, doesn't seem to have aged that well but I remember liking Aleksi Perälä's Ovuca stuff so he gets a free pass from me. now I have rushed in to shout that belatedly I'll go back to reading the thread

i think what keeps me from embracing the tune is space's idea is that i don't think reception or even intention is essential in the work - that's a base type of rockism either way, whether you're coming down on the side of burial or the side of dem 2

like, maybe there *was* a condescending discourse about photek transcending black forms, maybe some people really did think dj krush improved on pete rock because there weren't people bitching about their problems over the top

neither of which make me a bad person for cherishing my photek and dj krush albums more than my rave comps or my Pete rock albums, or say anything in particular about the music itself or my relationship to them

at best it might explain why i've heard the metalheadz blue note night and other late-90s dnb clubs became so empty and boring to clubbers compared to french house, 2 step, etc (shifting the focus from populist club crowd to non-clubbing sophistos) and possibly why trip hop reached a creative dead end (people reacting to new social situations create new forms of expression but trip hop sort of took itself out of that loop by removing a lot of the human aspect in favor of resurrecting the ghost of music past)

wait, what's left over when you subtract intention (the momentum behind why artist x makes what they make) AND reception (the feelings and motivations of the people who buy the records, go to the shows, flock to the merch table, dance- or pointedly don't dance- to the music)? I can see that a too credulous or reductive investment in just one or the other is a problem- in the intention case, it becomes the intentional fallacy and lets artists write their own ticket, in the reception case, it becomes a reductive sort of sociology of audience demographics- but when you get rid of both, what would have left? formalist musicological analysis?

the long-term legacy of different branches of idm is kind of a headfuck for me if I delve into it too deeply

the race current running through a few posts and through actual musical divisions kind of makes me wish kodwo eshun was still writing as heavily on music as he was in the mid-90s. his was/is a different kind of formalism of theory, and his social and academic connection to the kode9 & hyperdub side of things would be interesting to hear spelled out and analyzed.

the fallout of the drill-and-bass spectrum mostly makes me shake my head. venetian snares isn't completely bad, the hrvatski work that drew mentioned is excellent but sometimes too formal for my tastes, and today's nearest descendent of the more obnoxious side of this is, to me, the chainsaw bassline crap that the more formative group of dubstep producers dabbled in but has become its own thing

the entire "braindance" thing was a backlash where musicians decided they didn't like what writers and the public had started calling a group of music, and it always seemed kind of goofy and artificial to me. it really reminds me of reading about the 60s/70s science fiction writers who loathed the term "sci-fi" to the point where they would say "SF" or "speculative fiction" instead of "science fiction" because they were afraid it would lead to that loathed abbreviation. I just read a delany interview where he seemed to not really care at this point and found the whole thing a silly diversion, which seems to the point.

nowadays the artist whose sound design / palette / production style most strongly resembles IDM is . . . . Britney Spears

check the breakdown in the Femme Fatale remix of "Till the World Ends" - it's eerie how much it sounds like Otto von Schirach at 3:33 - 3:45

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knh86LvF20U

i don't know if this is means idm won or lost, perhaps the takeaway here is that sound design techniques are portable / promiscuous / nomadic and can't be saddled with progressive ideology regardless of the agendas of both their users and their aficionados

i also often get idm flashbacks when listening to pop radio tunes

in the intention case, it becomes the intentional fallacy and lets artists write their own ticket, in the reception case, it becomes a reductive sort of sociology of audience demographics- but when you get rid of both, what would have left? formalist musicological analysis?

you have two options, one is harder than the other but both are tough

formalist musicological analysis, technical analysis, talking about the sound and what you *hear* in the music ... it can get hard to think of new ways to talk about sound and as a shorthand develops this can reduce down to the bullet list approach of record stores ("stomping tech tool dj house w/ killer extended breakdown ... bside is the one for me ... TIP!!!") but i think at this point talking about sound - however poorly - beats poor sociology

the harder option would be a sort of reflective hermeneutics where a critic engages in careful reflection on their own feelings an relationship to the music ... obv for ILM'ers talking about feelings much harder than pop sociology but ultimately more rewarding (i assure you)

it can get hard to think of new ways to talk about sound

I don't know, the guys writing record descriptions at boomkat seem to have an endless well of hilarity

on the other hand, hardwax is pretty much the ultimate in concise TIP!!-style summarization

self included in those comments of course

it can get hard to think of *good* new ways to talk about sound, how bout that?

i will say this for boomkat, though - they make me want to listen to their clips a lot more effectively than just about any other online store

does ken ishii's FLARE project count as IDM?

velocette is a great suggestion ... on a related note i always enjoyed spacetime continuum's eMit eCaps + rEmit rEcaps remix album as well as subtropic's shot at jungle

i sometimes think of sabres of paradise "haunted dancehall" as a prototype for a post-rock rooted IDM that maybe culminated in that first "difficult" autechre album or maybe fennesz

i forgot, i also wanted to rep for astrobotnia (the last drill'n'bass i ever repped for)

to me one of the most inspiring "graduates" from this early class of IDM is Keith Fullerton Whitman- his work during the drill-and-bass era as Hrvatski was always incredibly distinctive and individual, and he's made good on the rhetoric of complexity that used to attend IDM while completely jettisoning its trappings- his recent analogue modular synth work lives up to all of the hype that used to attend IDM (complex machine music that breathes and flows like an organic living thing) while having nothing, stylistically, to do with IDM whatsoever

― the tune is space, Friday, July 29, 2011 10:55 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

indeed, Disingenuity / Disingenuousness is a great record.

the trouble with the family tree of IDM: you don't see Max Tundra or Mouse on Mars on people's lists in this thread even though there's a lot of overlap and provenance there and it's obviously present in the sound design- perhaps because when people also do a something else (sing, play guitar, live drums etc.) then that is somehow enough to get them off the hook- (I guess my band (Matmos) has benefited from this personally, we were lumped in a lot with IDM but have survived more or less without it because we were always also doing other things, drawing on a different tradition). As time went by, the very term IDM became pejorative, a tarbaby, something to avoid or be ashamed of (so, for example, there was no real mention in press or reviews of the IDM-ish-ness of the production on The Knife when that project took off, I guess because hipsters by then weren't supposed to like that sort of thing anymore)

the relation of IDM to 4/4, house and tech-house is also at issue here- I would regard Mannequin Lung, Sutekh, Herbert/Wish Mountain, Kit Clayton and most of the Circus Company stuff as part of this extended family of "IDM as broad church" but lots of dancefloor heads who pick things up from the dancefloor handle wouldn't, and would say that IDM is strictly about people making overly elaborate variants on jungle, d n b (the army of Squarepusher wannabes) or electro (the army of Autechre clones)

the eventual issue is that unless something has an explicit return to minimalism or some sort of retro overture, pretty much any electronic music with reasonable production has overtones of some sort of branch of idm now.

also i wonder if the advent of ableton etc has made it easier to pull off production moves that code as idm-ish

what really seems to have been written out of history completely is all the "hardcore" stuff, the kind of shit that would show up on mille plateaux comps and/or had as many links w/ avant-rock and noise and new composition as it did with '90s dance. maybe because there was no umbrella for this stuff, so it doesnt even have a subgenre tag people can be nostalgic for or dismissive of? i cant imagine having the time/money to go back and see if it's a crime or a good thing that 99 percent of this stuff's been seemingly forgotten, but at the time i considered farmers manual as much "idm" as the latest dnb knockoff, even if there were no beats it all seemed part of the same wider push.

tune r u dru?

yeah, I'm Drew

and yeah Ableton has lots of features that basically de-skill IDM-ish production tricks that used to take hours of editing time to accomplish . . . now anyone who buys Ableton can put on the "Beat Repeat" effect (with settings called AIrPusher and Brain Dance, for fuck's sake!) and sound like IDM- or, if they have MAX for LIVE can instantly drop a file into, say, the BufferShuffler instrument and, ta-da, ultra-complex backflipping vocal slices with randomization are dropped like croutons into your mix- it's cool in some ways and sad in other ways to watch this kind of labor-saving shift in sensibility- just when it gets easier than ever to do this kind of laser precise digital work, people want to go back to modular synths and cassettes in search of something that feels more "real"

i'm proud to do all my slicing & dicing through countless manual mouse-clicks

search: proswell, ilkae (blows the rest of the merck crap out of the water; i did really like the visual aesthetic of merck, though)

ableton, fruityloops, reason, reaktor, VST's, etc all have plugins built in that "IDM-ify" your sound-- sometimes even calling it out by name
i.e, reason 1.0 already had aphex-named patches, and later versions had "IDM pad" or "IDM keys" patches.
Then came dblue glitch, a VST which pretty much destroyed the premise of drill and bass and glitch music-- sub genres which were idolized more for being inaccessible and painstaking to produce than for their content-- because with the VST you could pull off a pretty convincing ripoff.

The base of idm nerds (which I associate with the WATMM, xltronic, and planet-mu message boards) started moving at this point to Acid House and analog fetishism (music that is hard to "authentically" produce due to how esoteric or expensive the equipment can be)... i feel like the Analord releases were mostly responsible for this direction, but that the proliferation of software (making the 'idm' aesthetic accessible) was responsible for this sudden shift.

it's funny the kind of "dignity of labour" idea (hey, a human league album title) that goes on in the rhetoric of electronic production- like people make heavy weather out of the fact that Burial doesn't loop with sequencers but cuts and places every piece of his beats through onscreen audio edits, bar by bar- the point is that it's more work but has more feel even if it is digital- while other people make heavy weather out of still using the old ways of MIDI (cf. "Too Much MIdi" as a song title on the Ford/Lopatin record)- where the point is that one isn't using soft synths but real gear that has problems and gets overwhelmed by too much information at some points in the sequence- or the ongoing return to Analog with Analords et al but . . . whatever you do, it should be *hard work* otherwise you aren't *real*, it's like Andy Warhol never happened or something- that's what I kinda liked about the actual hardcore aesthetic- wasn't there a rave tune actually called "Made in Five Minutes"? Why should harder to do = better art? Authenticity rhetoric never died, I guess?

what really seems to have been written out of history completely is all the "hardcore" stuff, the kind of shit that would show up on mille plateaux comps and/or had as many links w/ avant-rock and noise and new composition as it did with '90s dance.

That's really the stuff I used to love the most in this broader field... Ryoji Ikeda, Alva Noto, Oval, etc. I dunno, I think my initial reaction of distaste for the genre applies only to a very limited section of what has probably at one time or another been thought of / marketed / discussed as IDM. I mean, was Gas ever considered IDM? Luomo / Vladislav Delay? Pluramon? Thomas Brinkmann? I love all of those guys...

this is what separates the lasting work from the trash, I think. you can still put on PHoenecia's "BrownOut" or Autechre's "Chiastic Slide" or Lesser's "Gearhound" and hear amazing textures and details, it's not just about the beats

I'd forgotten about Phoenicia (liked them), and I think Autechre are mostly unfuckwithable and always have... I agree with you here.

I watched an entertaining Facebook conversation between a friend and his musician friends about how awesome they felt it was that Mark Fell mentioned in an interview that he hadn't listened to one of his tracks completely until he went to master it. That's kind of a hilarious end-run of the algorithmic/generative end of things like Supercollider.

Dr3w, regarding your "hard work" post, I don't know if I agree that works are praised more highly *because* they were the product of hard work... My hunch that people noticed that certain things sounded and felt different, and once they started digging and asking questions, they realized the methods were different and that that had to explain some of the difference in feel. I mean, Burial is super-secretive, right, so I wouldn't imagine he went around bragging to everyone about how he handcuts his beats; someone surely noticed it felt/sounded different and asked him about his methods. (I'm just guessing here.) Of course, learning that, people then say "oh it's BECAUSE of the labor-intensive methods that his music is so good" which then leads some to believe that by COPYING the methods they can produce something of substance and merit. Which is totally missing the point, but it doesn't undercut the fact that the methods *are* different and that that comes through in the music on some level. (Am I remembering correctly that Drexciya did something unorthodox in terms of "live-ness" in their production?)

One of the things that's always bugged me about down-the-middle "IDM" is how obsessively micromanaged it all sounds, and I think the absolute control the composer has over the piece can lend it an air of inertness and suffocatedness. One of the reasons someone like Lopatin (as Oneohtrix in particular) connects with so many people I think is just the glorious sound of his Juno, the little unpredictable rough edges and melty parts and snags (forgive me; I'll stop before I delve further into analogue synth clicheland) giving the sense that he and his instrument are guiding this music into existence together, rather than that he's just completely dominating this piece of obedient machinery.

I mean, was Gas ever considered IDM? Luomo / Vladislav Delay? Pluramon? Thomas Brinkmann?

fwiw, all this stuff, including Luomo, got love on i✧✧@hyperr✧✧✧.o✧✧ back in the day (I think I unsubscribed 2001)

Loved tune is space's big post above.

Perhaps a less vexed way to talk about a lot of these issues is to focus on the words drew identifies in descriptions: "gone weird" / "eviscerated" / "mutated". Especially the last. Strictly speaking, "mutation" happens constantly, one way to define it would be the random generation of difference within an interrelated (and breeding) subset. The strong use of the word in these kinds of reviews suggests mutation to the point of producing a new species, one that can no longer be absorbed within the group from which it emerged.

One thing I think about a lot in music is the idea of rule-breaking vs rule-making. I think the difficulty with IDM and its descendants is that while each foregrounds an aesthetic (or even ethic) of rule-breaking, IRL that always implies its opposite. Drill & Bass's hyper-fiddly drum programming (leaving aside its social position vis a vis jungle or the attitudes of its creators and audience) objectively manifested as a rhythmic matrix liberated from the constraints of regularity, danceability, predictability. But I suspect that these very contraventions don't merely settle into replicable formulas very quickly; further, they actively begin to be perceived as formulas more quickly than do more cautious negotiations between rule-breaking and rule-making.

Maybe it's just a perspective trick that makes dem 2 etc. playing around within a series of rules seem more interesting to me than burial actively breaking them: it's not so much about intentionality or audience, rather the way my mind categorises the music's compliance with or breaches of a series of rules. The former seems more invested in establishing a kind of sonic code to live by, one in communication with that which is outside it in a manner that is not merely framing but also active and living and thinking "we have to live together."

Which may seem like I'm just trying to import my knowledge of the makers' positions as scene-leaders vs lone auteurs onto the music.

But then I think of an example like The Black Dog, who I've been listening to a lot again recently; and who really were at least as auteurist as Burial. Still, I feel like there was, circa 1993/94, in tunes like "Psil-Cosyin" and "Barbola Work" and "Close, Up, Over" and "Cost II", a real effort to establish a kind of techno that observed pre-existing rules but did so in ways that felt like the rules were always being stretched or even renegotiated. And maybe this is why Vahid says they should be called "deep techno" rather than IDM, I dunno. But perversely the effect of that is listening today your sonic eye still goes straight to the unexpected qualities of the music, rather than trying to pick out the formula, because the unexpected emerges against and within a backdrop of rule-observance.

Interestingly I find that moment in the Black Dog's development more compelling than the musician's other eras - not just later Black Dog or Plaid which you might expect based on the above, but also most of the more dance-music invested stuff compiled on Trainer and Book of Dogma. It's like, what is compelling is a very precise moment in the stretching of their relationship to the dancefloor, when 2-way communication is still possible but involves a lot of translation.

But I suspect that these very contraventions don't merely settle into replicable formulas very quickly; further, they actively begin to be perceived as formulas more quickly than do more cautious negotiations between rule-breaking and rule-making.

Fascinating point, and it rings very true for me... It obliquely reminds me of a bit of discussion on the John Maus thread in which someone mentioned that Maus himself feels like he's making potentially hit songs and singing over them, whereas it comes across on record like (to paraphrase Marcello) "a solo live Peter Murphy record from 1988 or something"... Did any of the IDM guys (I'm thinking particularly of the drill-and-bass subset here) think of themselves as just making ripping club tunes or proper jungle or what not? In other words, how much of their perceived "outsiderness" has been mapped onto them by us, the commentators and creators/sustainers of discourse?

Perhaps the truly fatal moment in IDM was the rise of the US Tigerbeat punk-ish aesthetic, which I think was maybe the moment of confirmation that the outsiderness that had already been mapped onto IDM was embraced and reabsorbed into the very lifeblood of the music. Before that you had individuals making stuff that would never work on a dancefloor (the whole time of course - way back to the first intelligent techno) and being proud of it, but this kinda strikes me as the moment when that it became undeniable that this had become a defining truth of IDM generally.

And, of course, what coincides with this is the rise of a number musical contexts where one could make IDM-ish music that was explicitly engaged with dancefloors.

Tim, would you consider Luomo's Vocalcity (one of my favorite records of all time to this day) to be "IDM-ish music that was explicitly engaged with dancefloors" or something else entirely? I really hated the punk aesthetic of that school of US IDM, which was hugely popular and dominant when I was involved in college radio back in the first few years of the decade... I think that really killed my interest in the genre as a whole. I never understood how anyone could get off on that stuff, which always felt completely simplistic and antiquated (like punk was at the time!) in its presentation of "confrontationalism" and aggressiveness/spazziness.

Yeah the funny thing was that my memory of Luomo's treatment back in 2000-2001 (which was really IDM's last gasp - back then everyone seemed really into Warp albums still and clicks + cuts and ~scape etc as well as Tigerbeat etc.) is that a lot of people just categorised it as IDM playing with house. It doesn't feel that way now, perhaps because of the way dance music itself absorbed a lot of the rhetoric surrounding e.g. clicks & cuts and reproduced it (eventually as minimal).

This goes to Lukas' point above.

There was an IDM/outrock/avant store in Melbourne I used to go to sometimes called Synthaesia which in 2001 had all the Force Tracks / Kompakt / etc. releases that you wouldn't have found in the actual house/techno vinyl stores. The section got smaller in 2002 and then suddenly in 2003 there was like this simultaneous switch where all this music disappeared from Synthaesia, and reappeared in a pride-of-place position in the dance vinyl stores, and the house DJs who manned the stores would try to put you onto Immer and Alcachofa with great enthusiasm.

Of course the underlying music on Vocalcity never changed and was always very housey in a way that owes as much to Parrish and Moodymann as anything else, but it's the shifts in discursive treatment that I find interesting here.

What I found interesting about the above is how the shift was mutual: just as the store Rhythm & Soul (to use one example) sensed a connection being formed with microhouse etc. Synthaesia felt a similar connection on the other side being broken.

Perhaps Synthaesia were just making a market-positioning decision not to stock stuff you could as easily get elsewhere, I dunno.

yeah exactly. at the time i thought "finally! all the attention to detail of idm applied to house music!"

(and still ... god ... so lush.)

xpost

Definitely... Tim, you say "It's like, what is compelling is a very precise moment in the stretching of their relationship to the dancefloor, when 2-way communication is still possible but involves a lot of translation." To me, this is kind of exactly what Vocalcity accomplishes. It is that elusive perfect amount of distance/"otherness" from a more established genre that not only sounds but *feels* enough like it to enable that sort of dialogue you mention, and ultimately leads the more established genre to mutate a bit in its diretion. It's a sensuous and beguiling record that begs engagement. Not too many records come along like that, do they? Burial at his best feels to me like that, but I understand people's gripes with him as well.

but it's the shifts in discursive treatment that I find interesting here.

this is pretty key

all this latter day dubstep + post-dilla stuff is IDM. flying lotus is big time IDM

The main distinction with Burial in that regard is more that his music was in conversation with the past.

But I only mentioned Burial before because him vs Dem 2 was the dichotomy Vahid was querying.

all this latter day dubstep + post-dilla stuff is IDM. flying lotus is big time IDM

yeah, and again so much of the focus is on rule-breaking, the quantizing of the beats and so on, which then of course looks like its own set of rules. It's totally unfair but in this sense I always find when I'm listening to Flying Lotus or Nosaj Thing or whatevs it's like I'm mentally ticking off all the "mutational" features I expect to hear. Whereas I'd never listen to a house record and think "oh yeah, there's the hi-hat, just as expected."

tim is totally otm here. i remember back in 2000 and 2001 finding things like the total comps and vocalcity at the local indie/avant store, and all the philly house/techno stores (well, all like two of them) only selling the sort of thing you'd "expect" around the turn of the millennium. but isn't the shift in discourse down at least in part to: a.) the avant-techno kids losing their fear/resistance to straight dance, b.) many of those same people becoming djs and playing these sorts of records, and finally c.) some of those born again djs become tastemaking enough to start influencing the bigger jocks.

it does seem like in four years though we went from having to explain why stuff like immer *was* dance music (even to certain people on ilm!) to digweed playing kompakt records.

actually i'm pretty sure i bought vocalcity in a barnes and noble. because i keep it real like that.

I remember there being the clicks + cuts series which was seen as a kind of odd idm variant, and then all of the sudden there was "microhouse" and a portion of it was back in the house tent and that was the way things kind of shifted for a while. Obviously that tent grew to not always have the glitch component, but it was part of the original definition.

xxpost Yeah absolutely! This stuff was probably a big gateway drug for a lot of people.

I think though that it wasn't just about former IDM kids invading house and techno.

One of the things I remembered about Rhythm & Soul (in part because two of the DJ dudes who worked there were super good looking and they could always break me into buying at least one record just by smiling at me so enthusiastically) is this time I was in there, this must have been the end of 2002, and one of the DJs put on Immer and said "do you know this? This is the best deep house DJ mix ever made, if you don't have it put down what you're holding and just buy this." and I said "yeah that's Immer."

The way he was talking about it, though, was as straight deep house (not even techno at all). His background was, i think he would have said, "deep and soulful", MAW and Kerri Chandler and the like, and he had just undergone this massive conversion to German microhouse/tech-house/pre-minimal etc, but really saw it as the latest wave of deep house (I suspect he would have conceded that the "soulful" tag wouldn't apply, at least in its ordinary usage).

And of course this makes sense perhaps more obviously in the context of stuff like The Button Down Mind of Dan Bell and non-isolee Playhouse and the like. But it strikes me that at that point you could have the same record being characterised in entirely opposed, almost mutually exclusive terms by different camps who would normally consider themselves to have little if any common ground.

And the way this contradiction was resolved is that the tribes had to redefine who they were and what they were into - Synthaesia stopped stocking this stuff and cut itself off from the dancefloor completely (though I suspect they stock Flying Lotus etc now!), Rhythm & Soul started, and by doing so absorbed an element of IDM within itself (not just the sonics but the people who stopped shopping at stores like Synthaesia, and their attitudes and discursive manoeuvres, such that 5 years later you'd get "dance fans" talking about Villalobos et al in language that's like a hybrid of IDM auteurism and detroit techno purism).

This is all quite off-topic but it's useful to me because it's a reminder that what seems like monolithic slabs of discourse from a distance - the status of Autechre et. al. in the late 90s etc - is actually much more nuanced and complicated close up.

my own probably rather typical IDM conversion narrative would go like this: i loved hardcore and punk at 15, then from that got into industrial music (TG, Coil, NWW, Neubauten) at 16 and then from that go into just "Noise" (Merzbow) and then from there into musique-concrete and academic avant-garde music at 18 and right around that time heard techno and rave (808 State's "Cubik"). I was specifically turned on by the way that super cut up breakbeat techno was somehow "like" musique-concrete because of the aggressive editing that made the music and that the most distorted techno that I had heard (the most distorted Aphex tracks, basically) were somehow "like" the Esplendor Geometrico and Merzbow records that I liked- so the point was that cut-up syntax and harshly distorted textures were what brought me in the door by way of a love of nihilism, noise as an expression of hostility and power dynamics, the obsessive control of sound (yeah, yeah, corny I know . . . ) and the idea of audio-"harshness". I had no relationship with dancing, groups, happiness, or celebration (I was a suicidal nerd closet case who hated everyone around me at the time). No relation to house music or disco at all. No sense that this stuff was supposed to be about functional obligations to DJs who were trying to create joy, ecstatic communal anything. Which made me a good example of the kind of IDM musician with a punk rock/hardcore background with no real allegiance to making crowds of dancing people happy, and instead made me the sort of person who thought that the point was to be "dark"/"difficult"/"obnoxious"/etc. so maybe it's no wonder that I was part of the Tigerbeat6 crew that some people (understandably, I now see) found so irritating, or so clueless about the dancefloor. Philosophically, I never liked the optimism of rave culture, it struck me as hippy-ish basically, and I had the kneejerk hostility to that culture that most people who come up from punk and hardcore do. (The deeper roots via Crass and peacepunks are there but often go under-recognized, especially when you're still a teenager). So it makes sense to me now when people complain about IDM as bedroom control freak music by nerdy Aspie types who snicker at the idea of actual dancing. The reality is that people are all over the spectrum when it comes to dance music, from wanting to fit into it but not knowing how on to deliberately wanting to ruin the groove out of wilfull perversity.

personally i never found the tigerbeat stuff irritating! but then again i was also a punk/hardcore kid who first connected with dance music via jungle/dnb because of the "aggression" so.

for one, tigerbeat6 stands out amongst 00s idm for not just being boring autechre clonage

i don't know how cloned autechre in particular have been? i've had to skip thru a lot of this thread that's happened while i've been out but i think DD pointed out that especially later Autechre is dripping with texture and a solidity of sound that i don't associate with any of the meat and potatoes IDM folks

I didn't find tigerbeat6 and etc. irritating (though I never got into a huge amount of it beyond some kid606, some lesser and, um, matmos) - my point upthread was more about it seeming to codify what had been true in part all along (IDM's separation from the dancefloor).

The reality is that people are all over the spectrum when it comes to dance music, from wanting to fit into it but not knowing how on to deliberately wanting to ruin the groove out of wilfull perversity.

yeah I think it's very easy to want to turn a lot of these discussions into "are you for or against the dancefloor y/n?"

Whereas it's not like this straight sliding scale from functionalism to perversity: one of the effects of perversity, properly contextualised and perhaps constrained, can be to make you want to dance. Which brings us back to the rule-making vs rule-breaking point I was making upthread.

a lot of stuff that seemed unthinkable to the dancefloor in the 90s sounds properly great if you mix it in the right spot now

I feel like from a distance it's easy to conflate Autechre with late 90s nu-electro (which of course they were part of to some extent) generally, and assume therefore that there was this much more massive craze for Autechre clonage than perhaps, strictly speaking, there was.

This doesn't seem fair to either Autechre or electro-revivalism, though I suspect Vahid will have the definitive word on this topic.

i guess what's perhaps too obvious to need pointing out is a recognition of how much a childhood of listening to hip hop's evolution made the templates available for this music- i mean circa 86-92 you couldn't turn on the radio and not be aware of sample heavy production techniques, a lot of what was called IDM was just a particularly baroque over-elaboration of the techniques and tricks that hip hop production put into the bloodstream of culture at large: building beats out of cut-up fragments of sound. The hip hop DNA of Autechre is really basic to everything they do, no matter how abstracted.

And when Timbaland showed up it made a lot of the IDM dudes gag because they couldn't claim to be somehow "ahead" of that music, and that triggered a kind of game of catchup in which the supposedly experimental folks on the fringes sounded pretty tired. What is that in poker or bridge- a "call"? A stock market "correction" ensued.

I will confess to a soft spot for a few blatantly Autechre-clone-ish records that are just very very listenable and rad. Bannlust "Digital Tensions"and 09 "Church of the Ghetto PC" are both fabulous examples of IDM which is hugely indebted to Ae but which is eminently worth your time. There are many lame Ae clones but I'm not going to name names and point fingers here.

http://www.mic.gr/dbimages/14276_2.jpg

Patterson – Freedom Now (Meditation)
Attica Blues – Contemplating Jazz
Awunsound – Symmetrical Jazz (Flapper Till 5AM Mix)
Nightmares On Wax – Stars
La Funk Mob – Ravers Suck Our Sound
M.F. Outa 'National – Miles Out Of Time (Astrocentric Mix 'N' Beats)
R.P.M.* – The Inside
Autechre – Lowride
Olde Scottish – Wildstyle - The Krush Handshake
DJ Shadow – Lost And Found (S.F.L.)
Skull – Destroy All Monsters
Deflon Sallahr – ..... Don't Fake It
R.P.M.* – 2000
Slipper Suite
Palm Skin Productions – I) Jeremy's Velvet Slippers
Palm Skin Productions – II) Moonrakers
Palm Skin Productions – III) Unspeakable Acts
U.N.K.L.E.* Vs. Major Force Orchestra, The* – The Time Has Come
Howie B. Inc.* – Head West - Gun Fight At The O.K. Corrall
Tranquility Bass – They Came In Peace
DJ. Shadow* – In-Flux (Alternative Interlude '93 Version)

http://www.discogs.com/Various-Headz-A-Soundtrack-Of-Experimental-Beathead-Jams/master/79355

i think Nightmares on Wax was one of the only key Warp acts that i couldn't get into in the 90s cos i felt like they were too straight, now i enjoy them as much as anybody on the label

i don't know how cloned autechre in particular have been? i've had to skip thru a lot of this thread that's happened while i've been out but i think DD pointed out that especially later Autechre is dripping with texture and a solidity of sound that i don't associate with any of the meat and potatoes IDM folks

― i'm sorry for whatever (Noodle Vague), Saturday, 30 July 2011 01:59 (2 minutes ago)

very much so -- they may have legions of imitators but the textural density alone makes autechre pretty hard to actively plagiarize, even before you consider the structure, the eldritch flourishes, the hongroesque melodic sense, the chill beats (etc)

yeah not talking about later autechre. i listened to tri repitae again recently and was kind of blown away at how much it seemed like the blueprint for a significant proportion of the idm i was listening to in the 00s.

post lp5 is a whole nother thing, obviously

i realised after i typed that yeah the namby easy-listening Ae probly inspired a bunch of hangers. and i like the namby easy-listening Ae but i enjoy a good sneer at the peeps who jumped off-bus once they got properly classic

here's a link to a blog that put up the Bannlust "Digital Tensions" record if y'all wanna check it out

http://sickness-still-abounds.blogspot.com/2010/01/bannlust-digital-tensions.html

the tune is space otm

dunno if anybody knows Arovane but i quite like their stuff altho there is a big chunk of Autechre in their pie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwr8z7Sn-MM&feature=related

i havent heard the last few autechre releases but circa 2000 to 2003 they really seemed like they were moving more purely toward the sound design arena. (i remember d. toop including thrm in that article in the wire about "generative" electronic musicians, wjich seems to be the precise opposite of anything structured enough in advance to play for a dancefloor.) this was the way i actually found "in" to enjoying them.

basically, yeah

i myself have a real soft spot for the shimmery hongroesque rips
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWdm9e6HhRA

Perfect artist name! 'I like Ae' indeed...

did this thread die already? I find it interesting how IDM's status as a less dancefloor take on electronic music, poaching from different genres, enabled it to pretty much swallow other genres whole, only for them to be reclaimed as nothing to do with IDM after it became uncool

sort of understandable with new styles, e.g. Vocalcity being clamed for IDM rather than house or techno until "microhouse" was coined, but it also happened with long-standing genres like electro - if the records put out by, say, Lowfish or Legowelt circa 2000 came out today I don't think they'd get called anything except "electro", but I was definitely reading about them mainly under the IDM umbrella a decade ago

(when even Drexciya seemed to get the IDM tag despite their long electro pedigree, or their increased "realness" as black people from Detroit - not to buy into the whole dichotomy of authentic, soulful, spontaneous black street music vs clever, intricate, ironically-removed white music, which is obviously a bullshitty take on anything, but it's hard to talk about IDM without acknowledging the perception)

admittedly this may just be my distorted perception, since I spent that time on the idm list and slsk and not, uh, wherever people who were talking about house or techno or electro were hanging out

xxxxxposts, but: destroy Clark? I haven't heard much of his stuff after dropping his first name, but come on, this is great:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meP7QincviY

that diesel raven beat sounds lifted from a chiastic slide track. sweet melody, timbres etc.
search microstoria records.. def more 'unhinged' type of music, but very rich/warm with texture and feeling.

1st Chris Clark album is terrific. 12 tracks in 35 minutes or something like that which is pretty economical for an idm album

I listened to the first microstoria album the other week and yeah it's so gorgeous.

Ceramics Is The Bomb is another high quality Clark release

To build on a passing spacecadet's post, I think Rephlex stands out for having balls-out idm like bogdan raczynski, cylob, etc but also pure electro like dynamix ii, weird shit like bodenstandig 2000, gentle people, black devil. It's kind of a broad, curatorial thing.

Search: squarepusher theme. He should've stopped there.

dunno if it falls under this umbrella, but the monolith (rephlex) stuff is real good, tuss-like stuff. waiting for a full length from this dude. it feels like a direct rip off of the tuss, and it's well done.

I went back and listened to all the analord stuff this weekend. So damn good.

rephlex searches:

philosophy of sound & machine - rephlex on the ball enough to be the 3rd label to license kdg, coming just after b12 and carl craig and just edging out r&s. but again, is it early IDM or golden-era deep techno?

caustic window - laying the foundation for acts like jega and squarepusher here ... interesting to ask what makes this sort of overdriven breakbeat techno read as idm as opposed to "deep" techno?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9HYjesSpTs

lisa carbon trio - sick 1994 ambient latin bleep from when uwe schmidt hadn't yet turned into a herbert-esque joke

mike & rich - mike & rich make fart noises sound scarier than most ghost box albums

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thg0ucNEHJ4

kiyoshi izumi - "effect rainbow" came in an octagonal jewel case

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl6JbrlKaIA

k-rock new deal - if you listen carefully this actually sounds less like proto-post-dubstep like dj maxximus or uk garage and a lot more like the acidic breakbeat techno dudes like stasis and 4th wave were making

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbBvW86MygM

REPHLEX DESTROY

dmx krew - the act that killed rephlex. everything after dmx krew happened is either a) reissue b) rehash or c) schlock. often b and c go together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG7d-Rjwl7s&feature=related

sometimes the schlock could be unbearably bad!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnNO5lsrkyg

the rehashes could be really, really great

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly-zCm41-iw

i guess it was always rehashes, sort of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbzC8222ODk&feature=related

feeling monolith as well

no way, that bodenstanding 2000 record is the nuts!
i always expected more zappa "jazz from hell" from "IDM". never got it.
the aleatoric devices & talking about xenakis mostly seemed to result in stuttery things which loped along in one key with one rhythm for a whole track. i have nothing against "the groove" but it's always so predictable regardless of stammering / de-tuned / re-tuned synths. "IDM" groove arrangements seemingly at best ABABmiddle8AB.
always felt that farmers manual transcended that somehow - ineffably tho' ( couldn't explain why i feel like that ) - hardly fill a dance floor.
honourable mention:
all vibert; autechre's stereolab remix; RDJ, natch ( although i thought the analords were by and large dull ); FX Randomiz was enormous for me. blevin blectum's corscrewing perpetual motion thing is always breathtaking.
also, you have a virtually unlimited way of arranging sound, so how shall we proceed with new track X? drums, bass, melody, pads. yawn!
i think the books put "IDM" production techniques to good use.
hecker's "acid in the style of david tudor" didn't really live up to the schlocky title (signifier in the style of supposedly contrary signifier - sounds like bad ad copy or a TV review - i fell for it - more fool me !)
where do we draw the line, though - i want to shout out for anthony manning but i don't think many would consider that there is enough of a "dance" quotient for his work to qualify here.

Can I just give a shout to Spooky's Found Sound, a seemingly ignored and forgotten masterpiece. It starts off around the idea of percussion-as-melody - e.g. there's a quite a Gamelan feel to some of the tracks. But as it goes on we get more fat synths and vocal samples to enrich the atmosphere. It's certainly not "drums, bass, melody, pads. yawn!" but neither is it reliant on Autechre-like eldritch sounds dragged from the depths of Max/MSP; most of the sound palette here is very concrete and real, from basic chimes and bells to more anarchic experiments in the junkyard. The whole thing is very tactile. No youtube clips to post but it is on Spotify.

yeh i liked the "clank" ep despite its regular patterns "we heard steve reich"ism & lack of development. strong melodies. sounded like fictional depeche mode instrumentals. the album i felt fell uncomfortably between 4/4 "we sampled kitchen utensils" & dull as ditchwater orbitalisms. y'know IMO, of course ! i was always looking for stuff in "IDM" that wasn't there - let down by my own expectations !

ALways loved Anthony Manning's "Islets in Pink Polypropylene" EP, it brought a smile to my face when Demdike Stare dropped that into a mix. I do feel like there are underrated IDM classics out there (Benge, Germ's "Gone" and "Parrot" albums from 1994-95, etc.). But when Lexaunculpt and Funkstorung came along, then the slick, shiny, stuttery hip hop chassis just kept rolling off the assembly line, one after the other, until nobody cared.

I guess the question of what the framework/yardstick is for being "intelligent" or "experimental" is a big part of the hype/substance ratio in IDM production and arrangement- like if the point is that "My composition is intelligent and experimental relative to 2 Unlimited" then the bar is set way too low. But if you were only half the time listening to IDM and the other half listening to Nurse With Wound, Magma, Saariaho, Ferneyhough, G*Park or Tazartes then most IDM seems pretty pallid and tame.

I've been wanting to contribute to this thread, but obviously it's become very long indeed.

Way I see it, before the genre became a "genre" you had artists like Aphex and Autechre who really were invested in the dance seen. Aphex especially, grew up spinning his own brand of hardcore to ravers, and comps like Artificial Intelligence were released around the same time as bleep-techno tracks like LFO/Tricky Disco etc. When I first heard of Squarepusher, he was being mentioned in the same sentences as Goldie, Dilinja, etc - there wasn't a huge distinction between what he was doing and other d'n'b of the time. And then you had Sabres of Paradise/2LS who were largely comprised of ex-ravers who'd become disillusioned with the commercialisation of the post-CJB dance scene.

So there didn't seem to be an "IDM" thing till about 1995/6 when albums like I Care Because You Do and Tri Repetae came out - before that it was probably just seen as another brand of ambient of techno or whatnot.

And even by this point, it was about playing with dance's parameters. I used to love ICBYD because it was like a collection of speculative short stories with a twist in the tale - the best IDM stuff for me worked like a collection of "What ifs?" - "What if I make a techno tune that sounds like an asthma attack?" "What if I change the time signature?" "What if I slow it right down?" "What if I make it sound like Bjork" "What if I make a whole album out of a bird cage" etc. Quite a lot of artists were good at this. My own band Autofire tried to live by the rule we'd never make the same track twice, and our naivety at the time (we started when we were 17 and didn't listen to a lot of dance) helped with that. I made tracks out of ripped up paper, sampled lightbulbs smashing etc. There was a real spirit of invention here and I was always looking forward to hearing what my favourite acts would throw at me next.

In a way drill'n'bass started as just one of these parameter experiments - a sort of culmination of sounds being played around with by AFX, Plug and Mu-Ziq.

The tipping point came when rather than continuing with this spirit of experimentation, it started solidifying into a sound - something altogether separate from the dancefloor created by second and third generation artists. Squarepusher was influenced by jungle and Miles Davis, but by 1999 the newer generation of artists were being influenced by Squarepusher, Autechre, Aphex etc - and it was these artists locking themselves in their rooms trying to make increasingly complex glitchydrillbeats. It became a kind of pure form of IDM but at the same time, missed the point entirely.

seen = scene, obv

When I first heard of Squarepusher, he was being mentioned in the same sentences as Goldie, Dilinja, etc - there wasn't a huge distinction between what he was doing and other d'n'b of the time.

not saying this wasn't the case BUT I think it would've really depended on who you were talking to here

Well, I was 15 at the time. I'm sure more discerning junglists would've known the difference, but wannabe-hip radio/TV media def used to lump these all together under the "drum'n'bass" niche.

What I mean is that Squarepusher wasn't seen (at first) as not being part of the wider d'n'b scene.

If anything, he was put in the "intelligent jungle" sub-category that included Photek and was still considered dance music.

uh, no

iirc first major wire article on the drill'n'bass crew was pretty much based on the claim that they'd evolved away from dance music

not least helped by the artists own rhetoric but whatever

Warp Records (and to a lesser extent rephlex) was a label run by ravers for ravers and until Rob Mitchell died that was its beating heart, even after they'd stopped releasing rave music. Tigerbeat6, CCO, schematic, merck etc were bedroom labels run by bedroom boffins for bedroom boffins influenced by the Warp/rephlex sound.
That's roughly how I identify the old skool vs nu skool, not that the latter labels didn't release great music.
I'm certain Aphex has always considered most of his music as dance music. Autechre still think of theirs as breaks/hiphop. Etc

xp well that's the Wire, who don't cover anything unless they can claim it's evolved away from something

on the one hand, I didn't hear of Squarepusher until after Hard Normal Daddy was out and he'd played some stuff from Rotted One Note live and he was rumoured to be "going a bit jazz", "wicked double bassist, man, like he can really play", and other rockist selling points, including fetishisation of his otherness from the d&b scene.

on the other, a couple of years before that and long before I remember the Wire giving any "drill'n'bass crew" more than the occasional review, magazines like Trance Europe Express or even the predominantly indie Select were covering a variety of electronic music without feeling the need to flag up the degrees of separation from the dancefloor.

when I first got into electronic music, Aphex Twin was sold to me in much the same way as more nominally dancing-oriented electronic music: it was all written up as an amazing rapidly-evolving rush into the future. the great divides seemed to come a couple of years later. maybe that was me missing out on the nuances as a newcomer, maybe the walls were put up when raves turned into clubs, maybe it was the feedback loop of influence that dog latin mentions, or maybe all three

It's good to remind people that this barrier/distinction wasn't all that hard and fast back in the day. I'm 40 and I recall being at a rave called Prism in Oxfordshire where the DJ played "Analogue Bubblebath" to a big crowd of ravers and people fucking loved it, it wasn't just the source of confusion and alienation, and it wasn't just/always/only consumed as "ambient" or in a headnodding situation. I recall buying the "Alroy Road Tracks" 12" (Squarepusher under another name) in 1995 from a vinyl only UK dancefloor record shop that had that record right next to Remarc and jump up stuff, it wasn't so cut and dried about what was dancefloor oriented and what was IDM for home listening- the right DJ could put that record in context at a party and it would go off. People could go dance to weird shit at a rave and come home and listen to weirder stuff at home and they were still the same person. It wasn't always dancefloor populists in one corner and experimentalists in the other- but Tim and others are right to point out that there was a moment of tension in which you could speak to a few different communities, and then a kind of self-conscious parting the demographic and centrifugal separation of music-makers / listeners / fans in the wake of that.

There's definitely a U.S./UK schism in a way, since rave never really got mainstream in the u.s. mid-90s u.s. "electronica" buzz (big beat etc), while ostensibly party music, was definitely marketed as this cool fresh new electronic thing that was ok for rockers to like. That MTV show amp is the kind of what I'm talking about. The "dance" element of this stuff was not really emphasized. Music to zone out to. Cue artificial intelligence sleeve art.

Lol tune is space kind of negated that argument. I'm ten years younger so obviously I don't have as much of a fix on this.

When I moderated TEFOSAV you could pretty much hear a clean distinction between uk and us artists. It was definitely the us artists going for more "out there" noises whereas the uk was comparatively linear/dance oriented. the US guys were the ones first dropping terms like 'glitch-hop' and 'drill' which felt a bit faddy to me in that these were whole genres dedicated to the study of one artist or even one track. That said, I would have been the first to admit half my tunes were exercises in others' styles, but I preferred to just call it electronic music.

Something about this distinction, or perhaps just his sound approach led me to believe, for a long time, that Max Tundra was from the US.

I feel like my nose is always trying to sniff out little Zeitgeisty drippings, and so it was very interesting to pick up a really pristine LP copy of Kit Clayton's Nek Sanalet at the record stores a little while ago... It's sounding delicious. BUT IS IT IDM?! I swear this era of stuff has been popping up a lot lately.

tom jenkinson - 1994

-- releases on unknown uk gabba label
-- self-released track on "nothing's clear" label, sounds more like a straight rip of caustic window ... caustic window was compiled and reissued in 1994, btw
-- no mixtape appearences

rupert parkes - 1994

-- dolphin tune / aquatic slays the LTJ bukem crowd, invents a genre
-- truper released on street beats alongside peshay, source direct, flytronix, astral vibes
-- natural born killa on metalheadz guarantees at least one photek track on every intelligent d'n'b (consciousness, the rain) or downtempo (into the 90s) mix in the world

tom jenkinson - 1995

-- release on spymania
-- no mixtape appearences

rupert parkes - 1995

-- mixtape play from the entire metalheadz crew, bukem, mickey finn, grooverider, slipmatt, ray keith, aphrodite, 4 hero, cool hand flex, etc
-- releases on source direct's label
-- releases on basement records alongside dj mayhem, alex reece, wax doctor
-- compiled alongside dj rap, krome & time, dillinja, q project, marvelous cain, noise factory, etc on jumpin n pumpin
-- metalheadz classic releases

tom jenkinson - 1996

-- releases on worm interface ... alongside freeform's "heterarchy" and the "alt.frequencies" comp alongside david kristian, gescom, aphelion and richard norris of psychic tv
-- releases tracks on rephlex with comedy names ("fried pizza") alongside vulva, seefeel, cylob, mike & rich ... and, yes, analogue bubblebath 5
-- releases on warp alongisde aphex twin, mike paradinas, red snapper, jimi tenor, mira calix, autechre, nightmares on wax, move d, mike ink and mark broom
-- remixes on ninja tune alongside fila brazilia, MLO, matthew herbert, funkstorung, autechre, luke vibert, ashley beedle, neotropic and .. lemon D

rupert parkes - 1996

-- mostly lays low, getting together his label and deal with astralwerks
-- remixes for bjork, EBTG, roni size, etc
-- releases on mo'wax / op-art as well as trad jungle labels (metalheadz, etc)

thomas jenkinson - 1997 to future

-- births drill and bass
-- turns very noodly
-- displays occasional acid tendencies

rupert parkes - 1997 to future

-- lays low for a while, producing extremely spare stuff
-- flirts with house
-- special forces stuff in 98 signals return to d'n'b dancefloor
-- turns into living skull, starts producing shitty post dubstep

lol moonship

i have no idea how you could stand beside this statement

What I mean is that Squarepusher wasn't seen (at first) as not being part of the wider d'n'b scene.

― Post-Manpat Music (dog latin), Monday, August 1, 2011 4:18 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

If anything, he was put in the "intelligent jungle" sub-category that included Photek and was still considered dance music.

― Post-Manpat Music (dog latin), Monday, August 1, 2011 4:23 PM Bookmark

notwithstanding the fact that at one time clueless dilettante clerks were filing squarepusher in d'n'b, and that your buddy may or may not have played "didgeridoo" at a flat party right after a leftfield track, it's pretty clear that *from the start* squarepusher had absolutely fuck all to do with jungle or photek

just because it makes a good talking point on ILM doesn't mean you guys get to rewrite history

I think a lot of people's memories of "what I thought when I was first getting into this stuff" may be shaped by the crossover effect: IMO throughout the 90s a lot of people less steeped in dance music were likely to be into Aphex Twin and The Chemical Bros and The Prodigy and Daft Punk and Orbital and Leftfield and Goldie and Squarepusher because, although stylistically each of these were very different, they shared the advantage of being promoted as important album artists distinct from any scene they might belong to. This was my experience during my first investigation of dance music at 14. I definitely wasn't distinguishing between IDM and other dance music because to all intents and purposes the "faceless" world of functional dance music 12s didn't really exist for me. It was "just" techno etc. But this was a misunderstanding on my part, facilitated by the media's desire for marketable multi-album artists, not expressive of some essential truth about how dance music was operating. Like, at that point I don't think I even really understood fully that there was a distinction between house and techno (if you're considering saying "I still don't understand the distinction!"... please don't), it was just "what is the particular style of this amazing artist."

I definitely remember when I first decided I should investigate jungle thinking "I should get a Squarepusher album" because he was the guy I'd read about as being really on the edge of what drum & bass could do etc etc, but crucially I was reading that in magazines (including dance music magazines) which still hadn't gotten their heads around jungle/d&b. The lumping in of Squarepusher (and etc) with jungle/d&b can be attributed, I think, to a lot of people outside the scene not having a clear handle on what the latter was for quite a while.

By the end of the 90s, with drum & bass settled into its newly simplified orthodoxy, such a move would of course have seemed preposterous.

This is what I'm getting at, although Squarepusher was probably a bad example. Tom Jenkinson's always been a bit of a weirdo recluse, but for a short time in the music press / wider media (UK here), it was all just drum'n'bass and I don't think people really preoccupied themselves any more than "hey, this is pretty crazy for d'n'b". IDM hadn't really formulated into a "thing", these were just dance artists with a stupid sense of humour and a renegade attitude. They weren't "against dance" necessarily, although Squarepusher definitely showed signs of taking the piss out the dance seen with 'Red Hot Car''s garage pastiche.

I think the point though dog latin is that the above, inclusive criticism was coming from people who didn't actually understand any of the underlying scenes they were talking about. The scenes didn't actually operate that way.

Of course people do the same thing today with emergent scenes: look at the amount of people who think that "uk funky" means Bok Bok, Jam City, Braiden etc.

just ordered rinse 15!

I hear it's pretty boring, soz.

i don't think people really preoccupied themselves any more than "hey, this is pretty crazy for d'n'b"

i am surprised to hear that these deeply uninformed types were running around in charge of magazines

a friend of p sherburns, who contributed many terse gems to allmusic's early electronic coverage, and who edited an online magazine, and worked at a record at berkeley, sneered at me when i asked him if he had copies of artcore 2 at his store, and made me buy the techsteppin' comp instead

i do recall people talking about t.power's "mutant jazz" like it was an anthem and having trouble understanding how

the original not the trace mix

when i finally heard the original it was a pretty weird letdown

anyway if IIRC correctly, dog latin is right

it wasn't so much a difference between dance and not dance as it was a difference between those who lead, and those who follow

i am actually pretty sure it was one of the first ... twenty (?) jungle tracks i ever heard, so admittedly for a long while it did loom big in my imagination

first time i heard basic channel i convinced myself there were huge warehouse raves in germany where people swayed in circles to it

have we done a jungle tracks poll yet? i figure there's at least four of us would vote.

a difference between those who lead, and those who follow

see what i did there?

LOL dinosaurs

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lnzfq3oFn71qztoauo1_400.jpg

Okay I thought I saw what you did there but now I'm not so sure.

i thought it was a very subliminal squarepusher diss

Yeah, but where do the dinosaurs come in?

Would totally be up for a jungle tracks poll but the inner circle would need to ensure that everyone heard the other's top 5 before voting, so many amazing tracks slip under the radar by virtue of not being heard widely enough. No doubt "The Angels Fell" will do just fine but I fear for the fate of my beloved "What Is Love (VIP Mix)".

I remember that lead/follow comment from SR's takedown of Squarepusher but also have a vague memory of someone claiming this was a misquote and the original statement wasn't quite so offensive? Can anyone remember and verify what happened?

first time i heard basic channel i convinced myself there were huge warehouse raves in germany where people swayed in circles to it

Hahaha, I thought the exact same thing! It's a beautiful image.

hmm tim i think the wire article it's from is still up...let me check.

xpost

Yeah I totally tried to process both Basic Channel and (even more bizarrely) Chain Reaction tracks as dance music when I first got into it.

It's funny how when you're investigating a lot of this stuff for the first time you simply don't know what you don't know; later on you can categorise and infer the music's function and audience (e.g. "this is for them Boomkat somethings") without even thinking.

"There's no conflict. It's more to do with my record or Luke Vibert's being reviewed in the Jungle pages of a magazine: suddenly we're Jungle. But we're not. I don't have any lifestyle. Jungle isn't something I have anything to do with. There's room for both, because that's the nature of people and society. It revolves around people who pioneer and lead, and people who form groups."

http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/159/?pageno=2

Having not read that until now, I thought you guys were referring to the fact that others were pioneers and led in the jungle/experimental space and Squarepusher was the one being referred to as a follower.

Having read it in context, now I'm all o_O

Yeah that's right: "form groups" rather than "follow".

But given he self-describes as "people who pioneer and lead" IMO the same meaning is implied. What a dick.

Oh wow, was Rob Young heading for an sb when he wrote that article:

"Drum 'n' bass has many claimants to the mantle of lion-king, shadowy figures given shamanic status by their devotees in the temples of boom. Yet such claims become irrelevant when a culture goes public-domain, and those who remain at its centre can end up producing the least challenging work, having the greater vested interest in consolidating territory that has often been fiercely marked out. As ever, it's the nomadic outsiders without a stake in the lifestyle who are freest to roam and pillage, stretching out the edges, expanding the frontiers as they go."

haha yeah but that's also kind of the wire philosophy in easy to swallow paragraph form, isn't it?

True.

I think what he gets wrong - apart from the whole attitude in general - is the idea that Aphex/Squarepusher/Paradinas/Vibert themselves did not constitute a "lifestyle" in which they all had a stake. Just on a sonic level it seems to me that they are all much closer to one another than were No-U-Turn, Ganja Kru, Reprazent, Metalheadz, Looking Good to each other in mid-96.

Not to be Cap'n save-a-pusher, as the Squarepusher quote is dickheadish when it's framed and cropped and presented in that way, but . . . maybe in context it was about giving space to Jungle to be its own thing and being reluctant to be given more credit for "belonging" to a scene that he didn't feel he could honestly call his own- people sweated him really hard at the time and maybe it was just an attempt to not get conscripted into some kind of false "scene leader" role- journalists do show up and try to hang preset narratives onto artists in interviews, and maybe that's the context? Or maybe he's being dickheadish about his obvious debt to a scene that preceded him and didn't need him. I dunno. By contrast the Rob Young quote seems like kind of a fair assessment of the hostility to genre allegiance felt by marginal types all the time, in most situations- it doesn't offend me all that much, maybe I already drank the WIRE kool aid a while ago, but I don't relate to obsessions with essences, purity, realness or authenticity that seem to dog discussions of electronic genres (or music genres really). We aren't talking about some musical table of elements, with d n b records which only contain atoms of d n b and electro records that only contain atoms of electro, etc. we aren't talking about facts which are self-evident and which can be huffily declared as if they had some foundational empirical basis. Aesthetic taxonomies are elastic, arguable, subject to change, right?

To be honest, I've never seen Rob Young interview anyone but there's definitely a certain interview vibe amongst some writers, The Wire at the front, to try to engage in kind of an academic contextualizing exercise. When it works well with the interviewees it results in a more fluid article, but otherwise it's down to the point where you can see both sides of the interview kind of working at cross purposes.

disclosure: subscriber to the magazine, like Squarepusher's more bass-noodly works for the most part, but think there's just as much interesting material in followers/groups

xpost:

Sure, but that doesn't change the fact that:

1) Young proceeds from a top-down assumption - scenes in the public domain can't innovate - which is neither correct as a general statement nor correct in this particular case; and

2) Moreover, he assumes that certain kinds of scenes are not in fact "scenes" for the purpose of (1), but rather loose confederacies of individual nomadic innovators. Again, this is neither correct as a general statement nor correct in this particular case.

This is nothing to do with "obsessions with essences, purity, realness or authenticity". It's about accuracy and consistency and knowing what you're talking about before you pass judgment. I'm not saying scenes are automatically better than individuals working alone, rather:

1) where the individual auteur stops and the scene begins is always hazy, and it's dangerous to assume that a given artist belongs to one category or the other; and

2) one has to proceed from a bottom-up perspective: look at the music being made and how it relates to other similar or related music (socially or sonically).

If anything, it is Young who ascribes the "essence" of the experimental auteur to the subjects of his article.

Looking at things from a relational and differential perspective focused on the music as produced, it's clear that jungle the "scene" was actually much more elastic and diverse at that point in time than all the artists profiled considered as an aggregate, all of whom were sufficiently correlated (both sonically and socially) to constitute a scene in their own right.

no they're not, drew

What about the entire "jungle" versus "drum and ('n) bass" thing? Wasn't that another snag in classification, or did one term just fall out of vogue?

one term just fell out of vogue.

alright, sorry if I was stating things in such general ways here- I guess the problem is that that RY quote can look like one local version of a problem that bugs people about the selectivity of the journalistic star system- it runs upon, and thus has a need for, exceptional geniuses (cover star material) who transcend scenes (so that the cultural capital of coolness can reify the tough loner at the expense of the extended community, who become a "herd"/"mass" and thus, implicitly, dumb / backwards / reactionary). But given the sensitivity to community and context in, say, his Electric Eden book, I don't know that this really sticks to RY in general. Full disclosure: he's a friend, so I"m giving him the benefit of the doubt here.

I do get the problem, and Tim's point that there really was a scene, and a coherent one at that, around these so-called exceptional people, while the genre in question was *already self-differential* (if I can put it that way) slips by un-noticed in that article

I'm torn about the reality of scenes vs. the hype/imaginary side that press can fabricate, because I felt during the IDM era that I was being lumped in with people because we were on the same label when our music really didn't sound all that similar- it was easier to imagine that there was some kind of style committee about these things, rather than people who are friends with each other socially but who, in the studio and through the headphones, aren't necessarily up to the same thing.

this thread has encouraged me to listen again to lots of things and not just IDM- time to put on some Foul Play

Good idea! I have been meaning to do a poll of Foul Play's best productions for some time.

I'm torn about the reality of scenes vs. the hype/imaginary side that press can fabricate, because I felt during the IDM era that I was being lumped in with people because we were on the same label when our music really didn't sound all that similar- it was easier to imagine that there was some kind of style committee about these things, rather than people who are friends with each other socially but who, in the studio and through the headphones, aren't necessarily up to the same thing.

Yeah I'm sympathetic to this too. But your reference to (perhaps?) intra-differentiation is a useful one: without wanting to get all Thatcherite about it, really any "scene" as such is a reference less to an existing thing than to the speaker's way of grouping together disparate artifacts by reference to sonic/social/imaginary factors.

I have a bias towards writing about stuff within genre or scene context - how does this function as R&B? how does this function as uk funky? etc. - but I think any nuanced relational approach to such issues involves a double-movement of contextualisation and differentiation, capturing how the music is both an expression of genre and an expression of something unique.

Foul Play are a good example of this actually: no-one would think to categorise them as anything other than jungle, and yet so many things that they did strike me as perhaps unique, unsurpassed and/or unrepeated.

this thread is like god punishing me for reading ilm

er, why?

s: Lithops

Also, after not having listened to Autechre for a few years, this blew me away:
http://www.percussionlab.com/sets/autechre/live_at_flex_-_vienna_1996
So incredible in the context of 1996

xpost AFAICT Lamp hates this kind of discussion. He said the following in the Weeknd thread which I imagine he would apply with minor modification here:

"well i feel like on ilm theres this way of seeing this divide i guess first of all as a divide & the second of all abt a bunch of contextual or extramusical things (dancing vs not-dancing, indie vs pop, communal vs personal, labels vs blogs) when i think its at root something abt the emotional content of the music itself & the structural/mechanical techniques that are used to 'get at' these emotions."

and

"i think there are constellations of 'values' that link artists & scenes & ideas & 'taste' together and i can see the value in trying to map those constellations, to unravelling the complex interplay btw social forces that help bind those constellations together, give them shape and force. i mean its interesting to look at the aesthetic & social throughlines that connect the weeknd not just to 'indie' but to like type records ambient records or contemp photography or movements in modern design &c &c &c. and then to find how these connections in turn shape the audience for this music, how it helps determine who & how the music is heard

or i guess put another way: im deeply interested in the sort of 'emotional connection' that music seeks to make w/ a listener. its p much the only thing i post abt srsly on ilm. & often critics on ilm seem interested in talking abt the connections that exist btw music & other music or larger social trends or w/e. both of these are interesting but sometimes i feel like you guys ignore the basic f(n) of music to play this why x and not y game."

I'm quoting the above. because I think it's a useful counterweight to the discussion here.

I think that where Lamp maybe misreads me, or draws too-strong inferences from a limited number of ILX threads (perhaps it's arrogant to asusme that many of his interventions are aimed at me, but he's called me out enough times), is that it appears he thinks I think the first set of things ("contextual, extramusical things") are determinative, whereas really I tend to think what's necessary is to recognise the first set of things for what they are so that you can then actually talk about the second set of things (emotional content, structural/mechanical techniques for achieving it).

This is what I mean about "the double-movement of contextualisation and differentiation". It's not "oh, these guys are jungle because they are on X label and Y people listen to them." It's about perceiving the music both as part of a language (sonically/socially/emotionally) and a unique statement. This occurs mostly on the emotional/structural/mechanical level but can only work if you can clear away the false assumptions caused by a misreading of social context (e.g. Squarepusher as nomad).

I think most of my writing tends to focus on the sensations of the records that I'm into and how these are provoked by the way the music is assembled.

my take on this is p relational and disaffected i feel like a schizophrenic trying to communicate the to me simple nuances of the grand global conspiracy that hovers always just out of sight but the men in the black hats they never show up when you need them to do they...

my 'problem' w/ this thread was really with the tune is spaces first few posts but w/e im not old/cool/foreign enough to have a real stake in this. also because its more a kneejerk dislike of an (imagined? perceived?) lack of empathy for idm & its discontents (hmmm) this whole whos the real sophisticate stuff when people are just making use of whatever was in range, both what was closest and what was furthest away...

Most people in this thread have been talking pretty positively about IDM??

I mean again I don't think any people itt are saying "Oh, that IDM, twas never as exciting or as experimental as the real dance music it leeched off like a parasite."

But that doesn't make squarepusher/young's statements in that article any less silly, and I thought your resistance to over-focus on social/scene positioning would have led you to agree. (also I've read heaps of excellent stuff by young so I consider this a lapse not indicative of his general approach)

The line I've been pushing is that wherever you start from (an intellgent/experiemntal/outsider vantage point or within a scene, or within a scene structured around ideas of the former) you have a theoretically equivalent capacity to make boundary pushing music. I would have thought this was uncontroversial?

On a sonic level I would say that the IDM I've tended to enjoy most has been the stuff that seemed to wrestle with the notion of danceability - results not necessarily being danceable, of course. Which is why I was talking about The Black Dog upthread. SR had a decent take on them along the lines of them making dance music for alien creatures with 5 limbs.

funny that we can't escape the rhetoric of "nomad" here ... we are obsessing about distance?

what could be more *intra-musical* than being in the same DJ mix?

thanks for dropping in Lamp, I don't wanna make you talk about something if you aren't all that interested, but I am curious to know what you object to (or read differently) in relation to my posts- so if you care to take part, go for it. If not, no worries.

I have a dog in this race (but not a dog latin in this race) in that, as half of Matmos, I made some music that got lumped in with this scene, and we certainly benefited from being associated with it initially. That doesn't entitle me to speak for its fans or for other musicians in this scene, and I don't want to be misunderstood as presuming to speak for others in that way (nor do I like blathering about Matmos on ilm, posts on this thread to the contrary). I posted on the idm list for a while, usually in a quixotic manner about gender, women and/or queers in electronic music,because I felt that the scene was very much a boy's club in a bad way, but honestly haven't thought about this scene in quite a while (trying to get tenure will distract you).

I have mingled fondness and disdain for idm. Insofar as ridiculous hype and exaggeration was a part of this scene (not to mention the atrocious name obviously), I have disdain for it. I'm glad that people finally stopped saying "If Beethoven were alive today he would make music like the RDJ album" or whatever- that kind of overblown reaction was embarrassingly common. Insofar as some very great recordings were made under this banner and I had a lot of fun at various parties and gigs and concerts while that banner was flying, I am fond of it, and I'm now old enough to slip into sentimentality about it. I will confess to feeling very giddy when we played our first gig out of the US while on tour with Pole, Oval and Labradford- the gig was in Sheffield, and we were insanely nervous because Tom Squarepusher and Richard H. Kirk from Cabaret Voltaire and Rob from Autechre were *all* in the audience. That was probably the only time that I ever wondered if maybe there really was an IDM "scene" after all. Our show was a disaster. England had defeated someone in the World Cup (Germany?) that day and the audience was drunk as fuck and in no mood for our sampled birdcall electro whatnot. We got heckled big time.

We assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why
have we kept own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make
ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not
ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it's
nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody
knows it's only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where
one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any
importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves.

i think in an ideal world as musicians (artists?), critics, academics, internet historians we have to do our subjects the justice of trying to see the world as they saw it. i think your post was instead of jettisoning the bad idea of 'more sophisticated' setting you up as the arbiter: it seemed implicit to me that part of the problem was that idm didnt deliver on its promise of transcendence. i mean lets say that x is a 'mutant' version of y what value does that carry? can it be both 'good' and 'bad'?

i mean im skeptical of the idea that trip hop served to marginalize the voices of america's urban poor but what moral/aesthetic weight should a ca. 1994 'POO: dummy or ready to die' carry? also obv all the complaints about the rhetoric around idm matters to you, how could it not? but its hard to parse a reaction to something that doesnt for me, exist. all these ideas of how ppl responded to the music seem equally real to me but none of this (not you not r. young) helps me 'hear' the music better. i guess thats my big complaint? like what vah1d said upthread about the two approaches...

we have to do our subjects the justice of trying to see the world as they saw it.

how do you think the artists in question see the world lamp?

I would have thought the above approach was the basis of drew's position anyway?

search

scsi bear - the riot grrl attcks on the hardcore junglist massive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwz2cQfrDMs

tim this is ill

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epI6D8NG4VE

lol.

That groove is great too.

I'm such a lamer, my favourite Kid 606 album is "PS I Love You".

http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/174s/10693373.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWeJNExNttE&feature=related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT797Sw6L6Y

cross-reference w/ "jungle w/ lovers on top"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Aa450jKjFo

The hyper drill & bass refix really was the dubstep refix of its day, eh.

can i just?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuERCAOgE_Y&feature=related

go hard or go home

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZmsIdnKZSI&feature=related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWJP17esBlI&feature=related

nice diva moans at 4:00 ish

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6dFKhGFa7o

so lovely
that's how we like to do it
in the 90s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9KKakCP1Fc&feature=related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJW96UMXmqE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQEmaj9C6ko

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-eV_Mo0UIM

LOL 2002

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cyQ9rghxec

...when i was skinny(er)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DXRmapglJM

first heard this on one of the ATP compilation discs from when Autechre curated. mind->blown

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DHbsNUM_LY&feature=related

So . . . what kind of response would make one hear this song “better”?

Model One: First, there’s the kind of subjective phenomenology approach: a listener describes how he feels and through a description of subjective emotions thinks he is describing a song- so the song is what it does to a person, until- presto- that person’s private feelings ARE the song, because of authorial fiat. How does this song make me feel? Well, it’s a stew of contrary emotions and affective temperature settings, mostly a mixture of a kind of calm at the slow tempo spiced with a sort of suspense of what is to come in the gradual accumulation of midrange layers, which is retroactively confirmed by the drop that waits a full 2:33 to come in. Explaining what it is about the restraint that I admire in the capacity to make the listener wait so long for a kick and snare like element to enter after the initial keys and pads, I might indulge in a belle-lettristic wash of adjectival description, and this is the standard model for doing justice to one’s own “sensations” when listening. Only slightly sarcastically, I could say that “the majestic stateliness of this languorous yet forward moving groove, with its moist flanging and spray of resonance settings on the synths, recalls Cleopatra’s barge slinking slowly towards her fated suitor in Shakespeare.” Now instead of an Autechre song I”ve got a high cultural metaphor blocking the view, but perhaps “slinking” does some justice to the way that the flanged rolls are a string of tightly wound together musical micro-events that might resemble the coils of a Slinky toy or the ribcage of a cat as it moves up towards its prey. Furthermore, the gendering drag of turning IDM boy-music into something as flagrantly feminine as Cleopatra does some comical detournement to the standard scripting, and helps draw out in a parodic way what was so decorative about IDM as an art of surface ornament. These subjective metaphorical descriptions constitute one way of making this particular IDM song perhaps more interesting, more juicy, more packed with experienced audio, than some other, less inspiring, less Cleopatra’s-barge-esque IDM song. Maybe.

Model Two: Or I could try the “native informant” mode and say: “well, I talked to R0m and J0sh from Phonecia about how much I loved this song and they shared with me that when they were hanging out with R0b and S3an from Ae, the Phonecia guys played the Ae guys some tracks of Glen Velez playing the frame drum, and this song is basically the result of Ae trying to model through synthesis some of the components of frame drum playing that they all liked, so this is what happens when UK guys hang out with Miami guys.” In this case, what I’ve done is put the song into a social category (friends who know each other, musicians whose bloodstream gets influenced by other music and who in turn respond through homage / imitation / response). This puts the musicians into a particular place and time, on the ground, and makes them both passive (they receive an influence from others) and active (they create something in reaction to this stimulus, but also in the process falsify it and make it theirs). Also, I’ve tied the shape of the groove to the material elements that compose actual frame drums, and the human resources behind how a frame drum is played, that puts in sharper contrast the deviations from that implicit in a synthetic resynthesis of human playing- the flanging emerges more strongly as a result of this comparison. But to play this card is also to risk a shut-down- it is reductive. No more Cleopatra’s barge, now it’s all about a playlist and who you know. Is this more or less elitist than model number one?

Model Three: Or, curling my lip into a sneer, I can try out a different critical persona, and say “This Autechre jam, by drawing upon hip hop but numbing it out into a kind of ambient wash, helps overeducated middle class college kids slouch through their workday by giving them just enough of a headnodding groove to keep going but no bothersome vocals about heroin or street crime or racism hogging the midrange of frequencies, which might distract them from fulfilling their duties. Thus this ambientification of hip hop lets people get on with their now expanded postmodern workweek of contract labor by making the world of the digital tools that surround them seem womblike and reassuring rather than ugly, but it also flatters them by letting them believe that there is still something “street” about their sensibility, and this lets off the steam of shame that attends their complicity in being good tasteful bourgeois subjects.” Which doesn’t explain what makes THIS Autechre jam better or worse than that IDM song by generic wannabe X or Y. So it’s useless as a response to one song versus another. But is it therefore useless as such to point out the big picture of listenership, race, and class? Isn’t the cult of the private feeling, the inner sensation all too convenient, politically speaking? (and in relation to the connoisseurship of IDM’s melodic side, why is “childhood” music critic shorthand for nostalgic pleasure rather than, er, the reality of diapers and shame and powerless, impotent tantrums? What sort of comforting fantasy is at work here?)

So if criticism is all and only about the “Thisness” of why “Rsdio” makes me think about Cleopatra’s barge, is that kind of micro-subjective reportage necessarily better than wide angle snark about entire classes of listeners? Or do we really want smoking gun details about artistic biography that will shrink down the scene of creation to something manageably specific, the who/what/when/where of who played what song for whom? Or do we really want to have our political guilt re-enervated through masochistic performances of shame at belonging to a class, a group, a community? I suspect that criticism can and should explore the tensions between these three models, and abide in the space of disjunction that they separately open out in their failure to be integrate, and that criticism that goes unilaterally towards any one of these three models to the exclusion of the others is kinda dishonest.

This concludes my episode of “TL, DR” Theatre . . .

This has been kind of an interesting thread to watch play out, but also kind of frustrating.

The whole genre (or non-genre) is weird for me, because
1) I know that some of the core artists have produced the music which has most enticed and pleased me over the last couple of years
yet
2) Other seemingly core artists have produced music which I have hated like little else, so I get the feeling
that
3) there is probably a lot more music within the umbrella of this term that I have not encountered, and yet would genuinely love
BUT
4) over the years, I have encountered more overt ~hostility~ (both on a personal level and on a general nonspecific level) trying to get into this particular kind of music than *any* other, which has, I'm sorry to say, put me off asking about it - as opposed to just vaguely exploring (and probably getting it wrong in the process.)

So partly it's because I lack the vocabulary to talk about what it is I like and don't like (probably because I'm just not familiar enough with the proto-genres it absorbed and spat out, because I chose the "wrong" option in the mid 90s schism between guitar music and dance music and just stopped paying attention during the time frame it blossomed.)

And I'm afraid of asking the wrong questions or getting the terminology wrong, maybe because it's just so tribal, and maybe because of the aggro-nerd culture which is inherently hostile towards newbies, gurls, lower status nerds etc. (it's kind of off-putting to be told repeatedly that you have no right to listen to this music, or even exist in the space where it is discussed, until it becomes a self reinforcing prohibition)

So! The discussion of the tribal delineations of "IDM was the stuff that was sold in this record shop, not that record shop, and discussed on this mailing list/messageboard, but not that one" is kind of meaningless to me. (Even though I'm aware that music's impact is often so highly dependent on context, so those contexts are meaningful to the people discussing them - analogous to the discussions on the Shoegaze Poll thread, where old-timers like me were trying to say "this band went to Syndrome, hung out with the right people, were on the right record label, ergo they were Shoegaze, while this other band who didn't, weren't, and should not be lumped in with this scene they weren't part of, no matter what the stylistic similarities" - seemingly arbitrary distinctions which made no sense to people who simply found the music 15 years later)

And yet, I'm finding the YouTubes, especially the annotated YouTubes (like in Moonship's post) where people post just an example of the music and delineate where, exactly it started, and ended, and at which point it started to suck very, very helpful. (even though I don't agree with it - I freaking love DMX Crew, I thought he absolutely blew Monolith off the stage at the last Rephresh party, but that might just be me, because I love the sounds of the squelchy, Acid, analogue end of IDM way more than I love the stabby, digitally edited slice'n'dice end)

But then, I refresh this page and there's a huuuuge TTIS post, which reinforces my suspicion that part of what IDM is actually about is about the massive blocks of text. And it reminds me of the joke in The Painted Word, where, in retrospectives of 20th Century Art, the critics' descriptions of the art will be blown up huge on hung on the wall, with little tiny reproductions of the art. And the music which is described as IDM serves as the reproduction, and the archives of the hyperreal mailing list or 20,000 word Wire articles is the actual art.

But what I, personally, really would like more of, is ppl posting YouTubes or Spotify links saying "this is where IDM begins" and "this is where IDM ends and ::genre it devoured and spat out:: begins" and explaining why they think that. I would find that helpful indeed.

So . . . what kind of response would make one hear this song “better”?

420 errry day

A few comments from someone not on this 'inner circle' someone mentioned. I agree with Karen that it sucks that there is this rarefied air of exclusivity, if you are not from some place, friends with such and such, or been into the stuff since whatever year the first 12" was pressed you are not cool enough to participate in the 'scene' but what can you do... Just wanted to say that I love both the massive blocks of critical text and the functional history, so by all means keep writing tune is space because people are reading.

The whole "rarefied air of exclusivity" thing is kind of exaggerated enough to almost be an in-joke in the "idm scene" as is may have been, though! The personalities that tend(ed) to gravitate on things like the idm-list and argue about the topic to the point of exclusivity shouldn't really be seen as defining, just another part of the landscape. It was always especially ridiculous when looking at the number of subscribers to said list that were out there and realizing the most vocal were not necessarily the ones with the most to contribute.

The kind of furrowed-brow overthinking part of it was always presented to me in print as having provided some sort of deep context to the music but that's not really the case. Or necessary when music can stand on its own.

yeah, my hand-wringing and far too long post above is really a meditation upon critical stances as such.

Should critical texts be:

1) reports about how you feel as a recipient of the art object? (not verifiable; either charming or repellent, persuasive or not)
2) reports about the artist's personal context? (verifiable; can be right or wrong relative to some facts, filling in a "story")
3) wide angle accounts of the political and economic landscape in which the art is consumed? (a blend of verifiable and unverifiable, this is mostly about positioning the author and the reader in relation to a struggle on behalf of which you are either mobilized or left inert)

you could ask the same question about film reviews, lit crit, poems, any sort of aesthetic criticism.

There is nothing IDM specific at issue necessarily, except in how each of 1,2, and 3 would get cashed out in this particular case.

i think what you said upthread might go some distance in explaining your alignment to IDM

i agree that any honest, valuable criticism around dance music would integrate all three, though i am heavily biased toward #2, specifically w/r/t who said what and when, probably because that's what i have the most trouble figuring out for myself

what strikes me is that you make so much of the disjunct - there is always also conjunction between those elements and it is valuable to look at that too. i suppose when the disjunct is very strong we start talking about things like auteurs and appropriation and when the conjunct is strong we start talking about scenius and subculture

but what strikes me is that IDM seems to push the disjunctive aspect to the foreground, even when it's ultimately quite reductive and crass as an interest-generating strategy (hence ultraserious ragga jungle meets comedy track titles and fart noises)

i know you are a bona fide critical theorist tho so I'll forgive you your focus on that

Some combination of all three. But the link to the actual song is still the most important part, because although whatever it is you put underneath the song might make me want to *listen* to the song more, it's never going to make me *like* the song if it doesn't hit me.

The problem is, the combination of how I'd want the three combines really changes between your first rendering of examples, and your description of those examples below, to add a whole nother layer of meta.

In the second set, I would ideally want a combination of 1 and 3 - like, I want your instinctive emotional reaction to the song, but I want that placed within a wider cultural landscape. But my first priority is, really, that I wanna know why you like it. And why you think that I (or any other listener) might like it, too.

But in the first, longer examples, I want more of a combination of 1 and 2, because 3 is riddled with snideness and self loathing pretend-distance and you should save your emotional reaction for the personal description of the music instead of snarkiness about the kind of ppl who like that music. And the context of "UK guys hanging out with Miami blokes" is kind of more big picture than that "Sean and Rob said..." gossipy personal anecdotes, and would actually provide the background information needed in 3, but without the snideness.

The problem is, so often speculation about 2 becomes some kind of weird fan fiction, where fans imagine what was going through the creator's head, and the processes and influences, and it just becomes all about projection. And if you want to indulge in that kind of fiction, that's fine, so long as you recognise that it's fiction and it's really in your category 1. But the other option is to fall into a) that kind of name-droppy soup or 2) that list-nerd influence ticking and the quoting of ancient interviews from 1997 as if they were holy texts.

And really, I don't listen to this kind of music for that kind of cult of personality thing (which one very glaring exception) - and actually knowing more about the people responsible for creating it almost diminishes my interest in it, I *want* it to be this weird artifact I discover without knowing the story of the persons behind it, because it's anti-pop, death of the author type stuff. With, of course, the glaring exception of Richard D James, because 1) he is such a pop star, that the whole carefully constructed persona *is* part of the art form itself, and you can't really separate him and his (perceived) personality from his music and the more you find out about him (or what he carefully lets people see) the more it fits together. and 2) because he is currently occupying the role of "the music that is my boyfriend" which is personally unique to me and makes me a freak or something. Yes. But.

I dunno. I brought up the whole Painted Word thing because it does seem to me that the purple prose ppl write about this genre often detracts from the music - for me - and makes me want to hear it less. Or, again, it could just be that my negative experiences of the discussion spaces and some of the attitudes of the ppl in those spaces have so coloured my perception of "ugh, OMG, I do not want to like anything that IDM aggro-nerds have touched in any way shape or form" (and yeah that violates what I said above about not being snarky about "the kind of people who listen to..." above, but this is not cultural criticism, this is discussion of treatment I've received from specific ppl) - but then I hear a piece of music and think "ooh, these interesting sounds and textures, they are like candy for mine ears."

So it's one of those genres, that I just want to hear the music, and know as little as possible about it.

Just a long complicated way of saying "theory is nice but post more choons dammit!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TassmRDbP0w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3X0sNlZ2EC8

How does this song make me feel? Well, it’s a stew of contrary emotions and affective temperature settings, mostly a mixture of a kind of calm at the slow tempo spiced with a sort of suspense of what is to come in the gradual accumulation of midrange layers, which is retroactively confirmed by the drop that waits a full 2:33 to come in.

see, this is great because it's so removed from my reaction. that kick drum coming in at 2:33 is for me just another element in the mix, barely noticed when it arrives. i was never a raver or a dance music fanatic at all so i've never appreciated idm from that perspective, as a mutation of another form. to me it always seemed utterly sui generis - which would obviously enhance its appeal, appreciating (seemingly) special unique music makes one feel like a special unique person (yeah, i guess i really bought into the 'rarefied air of exclusivity'). even now, it's carved such a peculiar place in my consciousness that i find it hard to see its place in a broader context. when i do, does it diminish my feeling for it? i would rather hope my appreciation would expand into wider forms.

and now, a video (this was tucked away in the last epic autechre radio set):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oexaXqyrKPI

that 1996 ae live link posted upthread is THE FUCKING NUTS btw

Thnx for the YouTubes, will listen at work tomorrow.

See, I guess I really really have an instinctive bad reaction to appreciating (seemingly) special unique music makes one feel like a special unique person because it can so easily get turned around to "how dare this not-special, not-unique person listen to or appreciate *our* super special unique music?!!?" and translated into hostility towards people who violate the identity of "people who listen to X are unique and special."

(Aggro-nerds and their "no girls listen to teh IDDEMS!" followed by "Hi, I'm a girl and I really like a lot of teh Iddems" --> harass, bully and intimidate said girl until she gets disgusted and leaves, thus validating the original statement in their eyes. Not that anyone is doing that here on this thread, they're not, it's just so much a thing, elsewhere. I don't want to have yet another thread disintegrate in gender politics, but it is problematic, don't know if a passing spacecadet has had similar experiences, maybe not.)

oh yeah it's not big or clever at all. not unnatural for a callow youth though.

just the first bit i mean. would not go in for hostility to others.

I've been keeping up with this thread as best I can, but work has been busy and I haven't been able to sit down, digest, and contribute like I really want to... So many amazing and incredibly thoughtful and well-stated posts to ruminate upon. Karen, a small anecdote from my own experience of the social dimension of IDM: at the college radio station I worked for for five years ('98 to '03), the two biggest and most vocal IDM fans were both girls! And the most vociferous and knowledgable dance DJ was also a girl (a rabid drum and bass fan). It sucks that your experiences in that realm have been so crappy, and I feel lucky for my experiences with that music to be aligned to positive, happy, non-boys-clubby situations.

On another note, serendipity strikes yet again, and what was waiting for me at the very front of the used CD bin yesterday but a nice copy of Artificial Intelligence! God, I'd forgotten how amazing most of these tracks are...

I have no idea where these aggro nerds are, but it really sounds like another extension of the same insecurity that makes people trash other (sub)genres of music to feed not necessarily their exclusivity, but their tautology that only people like themselves can enjoy the best music, you're not like them, so you can't really enjoy it, etc.

ok no, it's not that.. it's just.. don't ask dumb questions. let me google that for you etc

but yeah electronic people are generally monsters

i've been treated poorly by music fans may times for saying the dumbest shit. i deserved all of it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF5O6FDxiik

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLmeTyfR21c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMTVmVI_mqU&feature=related

is there a rephlex album worse than mood bells? is there an album PERIOD worse than mood bells?

this is where idm began

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPo9m0naJxM

or the delia derbyshire "experimental dance track" that was posted on the bbc web site which sounded like early 90s aphex twin

Also, after not having listened to Autechre for a few years, this blew me away:
http://www.percussionlab.com/sets/autechre/live_at_flex_-_vienna_1996
So incredible in the context of 1996

― pigeonstreet, Tuesday, August 2, 2011 4:11 AM

that 1996 ae live link posted upthread is THE FUCKING NUTS btw

― ledge, Tuesday, August 2, 2011 9:34 PM

It sure is!

And I think the grisly end of IDM looks something like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD8N9tDDQT4

The Flashbulb (Benn Jordan) is a completely independent artist whose disillusionment with the music industry has lead to major innovations. One look at this performance from SXSW and it's easy to understand why he's one of the most downloaded artists out there.

playing a right-handed guitar left-handed adds to his awesomeness
jithinchand 1 month ago 3

Drum and Bass IDM....
Emapsych 2 months ago

Flashbulb's been at it for years - I remember him from the Planet-Mu board back in the early 00's.

Are there any new artists making "IDM" music since, say, 2005 that doesn't fall under the post-dubstep/post-house banner and doesn't just retread old AFX/Ae/BoC territory?

Trust me, it wasn't me saying "let me google that for you" stupidity or ignorance territory, it's just pure policing of fandom boys-club bullying shit, and I do not want to turn this thread into "shitheads of watmm" bitching to give specific examples, but trust me, I know the difference. It's weird, someone said on another thread (I don't remember if it was here or another forum) about how the more "faceless" the form of dance music, inversely, often the higher the female participation, at least in a production and DJ-ing setting. Which makes sense. And I would have thought that applied to the more impersonal end of IDM.

Anyway, thanks for all the YouTubes. I kinda assumed that the origin of IDM = Radiophonic Workshop + Acid House, and then everyone got Max/MSP. The information I'm missing is how Jungle and Drum and Bass got mixed up in it when it became Drill and Bass, because I'm hugely ignorant about the history and boundaries of those genres. Was it just a case of "here's this new technology by which we can make increasingly intricate and fast drum patterns" or was it feeding off (perceived) black genres, and "intellectualising" and whitewashing them as discussed above. I simply don't know, and that's a lack in my musical history which I'd like to rectify.

I dunno, I kinda like Nu-Iddems stuff like acidburp and Mrs Jynx but that might be because I don't know if they're retreads or not, because it's all new(ish) to me.

(Ha, I like the Jega track posted, then realise I actually have it and forgot about it for 10 years.)

re: Boys-club bullying. Firstly, I never really came across it in the days I would go on WATMM/Joyrex/WarpComm/Planet-Mu/TEFOSAV. Things may have changed of course as this was 1999-2003. Still, I think there was a conscious effort to include as many people in discussions as possible - especially girls, many of whom would contribute in very big ways to the TEFOSAV forum at least. Indeed I was adamant TEFOSAV should never become an exclusive boys' club as we were conscious of the fact it could get a bit male-oriented at times. It really was one of the most accepting and embracing communities I've ever come across and anyone displaying aggressive tendencies such as those you describe would be outed as a troll.

It's weird, someone said on another thread (I don't remember if it was here or another forum) about how the more "faceless" the form of dance music, inversely, often the higher the female participation, at least in a production and DJ-ing setting. Which makes sense. And I would have thought that applied to the more impersonal end of IDM.

I'd have thought that post-RDJ album, IDM became increasingly about the many faces and characters behind the music - perhaps even more so than other forms of electronic dance. Or is this what you're saying?

Can you ever just listen to what a woman says, when she says that she has experienced gender-oriented bullying, and accept that it might be true, without qualifying it with a thousand "but WE were never like that!!!" protestations?

Can you not see that actually, telling a woman that her experiences are invalid or somehow atypical is actually also contributing to the overall "chilly climate"?

Anyway, I am going to get off the thread now, because this is completely off topic and I don't want a thousand suggest bans for merely saying that my experiences have been different than what others intended. Please continue to post YouTubes. Thanks. x-post

Anyway, thanks for all the YouTubes. I kinda assumed that the origin of IDM = Radiophonic Workshop + Acid House, and then everyone got Max/MSP. The information I'm missing is how Jungle and Drum and Bass got mixed up in it when it became Drill and Bass, because I'm hugely ignorant about the history and boundaries of those genres. Was it just a case of "here's this new technology by which we can make increasingly intricate and fast drum patterns" or was it feeding off (perceived) black genres, and "intellectualising" and whitewashing them as discussed above. I simply don't know, and that's a lack in my musical history which I'd like to rectify.

I'm still of the opinion that those original pioneers (Aphex, Squarepusher, Black Dog, TLS/Sabres, Vibert) were all spawned from the rave/dance scene and thus intrinsically linked to the dancefloor. Squarepusher dedicates HND to the Chelmsford rave scene and Aphex is now DJing a lot of booming techno not dissimilar to his Analogue Bubblebath through ICBYD material. I see those original forms of IDM as a subversion of techno/drum'n'bass running alongside similar ideas forged by the likes of the the Orb, KLF, Orbital and also industrial music. The idea that they were trying to "intellectualise" or "whiten" black dance forms just doesn't ring true and I think this theory is a by-product of attitudes formed quite a bit later on by people taking the "Intelligent Dance Music" tag a little too literally.

Hey Karen - I'm only saying what my experiences were and that it was a fairly long time ago now. I'm not invalidating your opinions or experiences and in fact I'm sorry you've had to come up against bullshit like that.

Was it just a case of "here's this new technology by which we can make increasingly intricate and fast drum patterns" or was it feeding off (perceived) black genres, and "intellectualising" and whitewashing them as discussed above.

For the most part I think it was the former, though this necessarily involves feeding off genre in the sense that it seems clear that producers didn't arrive at the idea of sped up and chopped up breaks independently. However they felt towards the "scene" (if indeed they felt anything) I think most producers who switched to making drill & bass would have been pretty excited by jungle when they heard it - not just by the technology, but by this idea of a dance music style where the rhythm effectively becomes the melody, if you get me. Not that a foregrounding of intricate rhythms was unprecedented whether in electronic dance music or otherwise, but jungle certainly was flashy about it.

I'd like to think no-one involved consciously set out to intellectualise jungle. For instance the implication of the Squarepusher comment discussed above is much more subtle and less risible than that.

At any rate drill & bass never seemed particularly "intellectual" by any measure, in any of its derivations (e.g. whether first wave stuff like 95-96 AFX, Plug etc or Tigerbeat6, or so on). At most you could say that the music tended to emphasise arrangement prowess.

In fact I'd say there was probably a lot more self-consciously serious and even "intellectual" drum & bass being made within the scene during the mid-to-late 90s. Perhaps the slightly comic quality that characterised so much first wave drill & bass was an implicit acknowledgment of the fact that the serious territory was already staked out; I dunno. Certainly by the time of Tigerbeat etc i think the whole movement was self-sustaining and had little if anything to do with jungle/drum & bass (which, of course, by then sounded very different) except as historical source material and reference point.

What do people reckon to the idea that some of the more jokey aspects of IDM stemmed from a wish to perpetuate rave's more cartoonish tendencies?

RDJ's image as electronica's prankster-genius - the gimmicks he used (porno samples, slapstick beats, irreverent interview style etc) - arose roughly the same time as dance music started getting accepted by the wider UK media. By around 1994/5 the Criminal Justice Act meant a shift from underground raves and free parties to clubs; jungle became drum'n'bass; artists like Roni Size, Chemical Brothers, Orbital etc were releasing "proper albums" for more easy consumption by mainstream audiences and critics, winning awards and prizes etc... Dance music was now an acceptable adult artform, not just the purveyance of teenagers and druggists (and also children - my generation went INSANE for kiddie rave tracks like Sesame's Treat, Charly etc).

I sometimes wonder if it was these IDM pranksters who leapt into this gRave, filling a category for those who wanted a spazzed-out, goofy, punky dance music with scattershot beats and fart samples and shit.

Just a thought while I sit here at work.

If anyone was trying to intellectualise drum'n'bass it was Roni Size, Trent Reznor and their protractors who used to bang on about how d'n'b was "the new jazz" (I mean, fuck off actually). I hated all that "it's drum'n'bass on real instruments" at the time - it sounded so safe and Mondeo-ish compared to the aardkore and jungle I grew up with in my early teens.

What on earth do Roni Size and Trent Reznor have to do with one another in this context?

I think you're reading way too much into a mercury prize anyway. Size/Reprazent did nothing in this regard that Goldie, 4 Hero, Alex Reece, Wax Doctor, T Power, Hidden Agenda, Photek, Peshay and 3 out of 4 artists on Moving Shadow weren't doing at the same time.

Also he was much ruffer about it in a lot of cases:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhlkFEA0azk

Are there any new artists making "IDM" music since, say, 2005 that doesn't fall under the post-dubstep/post-house banner and doesn't just retread old AFX/Ae/BoC territory?

How would you guys classify Kangding Ray?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lI1wUhg1J0

Karen, I certainly wasn't trying to say anything about The Way Things Really Were w/r/t women and IDM back then, just sharing a little of my own experience in the hopes it would be taken in a positive way. I don't think anyone in this thread is challenging whether or not you really experienced those things.

True, but I'm not really talking about a reaction to the regular d'n'b scene, nor its perceived "ruffness", more the lack of zany (childish?) glee that was prevalent in many quarters of the rave scene in the early '90s. The d'n'b people you mention were pretty serious dudes, all praised for their musicality but not really for their humour. There's something quite amusing to me about those amen breaks, ragga vocal samples, police sirens that used to populate the earlier jungle tracks. I do wonder if some of the IDM blokes wanted to reclaim some of the silliness of early jungle and aardkore. They certainly fetishised "Think" and "Amen" loops well after the rest of the dance scene had left those behind.

xpost to tim

(I didn't think you were, Clarke, it was a direct response to DL's post above mine. It was just the supreme irony that at the exact moment DL was telling me that he'd never ever seen such behaviour on watmm, a watmm DM dropped into my inbox, full of exactly the kind of shitty shit I was describing, making me really super-frustrated and angry. But that turned out to be the exact kind of mood that I needed to be in to fully enjoy the Jega albums on Spodify. (Tho I appreciate DL's apology and yr explanation.))

xp anyway, 'm probably talking bollocks again as per, so i'll stop postulating...

i really like Mike Paradinas' more recent attempts to revive/enliven genres like gabba and footwork instead of retreading the same old IDM ground (or trying to live off his back catalogue/non-electronic stuff like Warp have been doing).

I do have to wonder at the perceived silliness / seriousness spectrium WRT earlier rave tracks vs IDM being due to, erm, differences in drugs being taken at the time?

Like, RDJ, I know his whole merry prankster personna is a public image, but also I do think that public image is pretty close to something that is a large aspect of his personality. That yes, maybe he was blowing raspberries at the scene's direction, but also, he *is* (or at least appears to be filtered through media representations) or *was* just like that, a "lying irritating ginger kid from Cornwall" or however he described himself. That he is often just playful and jokey and sometimes bawdy, and that side of him comes out in his music as much as the other ranges of emotion. I believe the electronic prankster was an exaggeration of a natural part of his personality rather than a completely false personna.

But also, someone whose drug of choice is LSD (or pot, or sleep deprivation, or the other chemical "influences" he's mentioned) is going to have a pretty different approach to music, and humour within that music, than someone who is pumped up on the blizzard of cocaine and musical self importance that flooded all aspects of the London music scene in the late 90s? I am just guessing there, though.

xpost FWIW Karen - every web community's got its idiots - I'd be wrong to say such boards were entirely peace'n'love back in the day. It isn't that surprising a forum like WATMM attracts more than its fair share of frustrated teenagers/lonely misanthropes with no social skills and nothing better to do than troll music boards. Don't let the bastards grind you down mate.

SPECTRUM not Spectrium. Though I have to admit, I have a real soft spot for Spectrium's Phonologasm e.p. on Planet Mu.

While I'm getting high and fanciful here, it could be argued that rather than collapsing on itself, IDM became a victim of its own success. It was TLS and DMX Krew (along with acts only just outside the IDM spectrum like I-F and Adult.) who spurned the electro revival in the late '90s that would eventually lead to electroclash and a wider interest in '80s synth sounds. Then of course you had the assimilation of IDM into house music - Luomo etc - and pop music (Britney, the Backstreet Boys and many others were using drill and glitch sounds in their tracks circa 2003). Also - Kid A - if anything helped to at once pedestalise and destroy the genre, it was that record. In that respect, IDM kind of won but as an intrinsically outsider genre, it couldn't really carry on as it had. Warp started looking into other avenues (indie/post-rock/re-release) and other labels either followed suit or flopped. But today you can hear stuff that if released back then might well have been lumped into the IDM category - Ford & Lopatin, lots of chillwave stuff, things like Lone etc...

"It was TLS and DMX Krew (along with acts only just outside the IDM spectrum like I-F and Adult.) who spurned the electro revival in the late '90s that would eventually lead to electroclash and a wider interest in '80s synth sounds"

(i don't know how to do italics)

Not just people in general (including non-"IDM" musicians) having some memory of the 80's, or indeed "electro" then?
I think gary numan, man parrish, egyptian lover, prince, hashim, chris "the glove" taylor, kraftwerk (etc etc you know who) have been drawn on for inspiration just a little more than TLS and DMX Krew ! by "IDM" and non "IDM" artistes !

er is that stuff not literally the IDM of today? i mean, it's mostly stocked by the same shops and on the same labels?

chillwave, not electro

rustie and hud mo could be seen as something like a successor to dmx krew, except theyre much less 'faithfully' retro.

i was just about to post some hudmo

thug anthem 2011

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrsaB0Uune8

best track on the album

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWda7ZUxSWE

it is like a fucked up take on miami bass

this is like if lil jon heard a jega track, or if jega heard ciara's "oh"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xD7YfXufBU

1:00 to 1:30 is so brutal

i picture rolling to this in camron's purple range rover

in a laser strobe light tunnel, made of two concentric layers of semireflective prisms, on LSD

1:30 to 2:10 is actually a better (more functional) amen track than squarepusher ever managed

'fuse' is still his high water mark imo. the hook is so epic and there's no refusing those chords. it sounds great but really works on the strength of the writing, not the production.

xp

i like hud mo better when i feel like he's seriously going for something epic (and i usually end up laughing anyway, in a good way), rather than being intentionally wacky/hilarious

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74QCl8CnMMM

jordan how do you feel about cam'ron?

this is epic AND hilarious

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOHAXsJHPuw

don't know if a passing spacecadet has had similar experiences

yeah, letting slip that I was a girl in IDM chatrooms or electronic-music-making chatrooms would usually result in a first phase of lots of (mostly positive, some outright creepy) attention when I'm fairly sure I would've been ignored outright otherwise, followed by people on the lookout for anything slightly ignorant or uncool in what I said to shout about, but oh well.

I always avoid mentioning being female to start with, but if you're there regularly it gets a bit weird making a big thing of hiding your gender, down to the detail of producing grammatically incorrect but gender-neutral /me statements on irc etc.

Of course the creepiness and nastiness are usually from a small minority and the latter may not actually be sexist, just a natural reaction against the excessive positive reaction.

(I started getting some dude messaging me to go you're not special, you know every time I joined one chatroom for some tracker software, even on my one trip back after a 3-month hiatus. Uh, I know, I never wanted to be fucking special just because of what's between my legs, now will everyone just shut up about it?)

Anyway I guess nobody except KDT and I wanted a Gurlz of IDM Protest chat so uh I'll shut up and post some youtubes later or something.

maybe it deserves its own thread?

xpost amazing video, no?

anyway IDM's not dead ...

you got your urban tribes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsgyBq8uvsY

you got your photeks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH-1P8N3__0

you got your soundmurderer jungle revival types

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1J7_BxBeLw

what does the new rustie album qualify as? it seems totally like IDM gone 80s.

well, it's on WARP RECORDS

...

(say this in horsemouth's voice)

MACRO DUB INFECTION

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Shtj6deg3Uk&feature=related

these sound nothing alike

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RChbyvTBZnc&playnext=1&list=PLB3938B19108917F2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sYgRe0l7uA&feature=related

hmmm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URzuGO-woIo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9NvORmxDrw&feature=related

Can you not see that actually, telling a woman that her experiences are invalid or somehow atypical is actually also contributing to the overall "chilly climate"?

hold the shit, you were ragging on ILM music discussion for being hostile to women which is wrong; it's hostile to stupidity. i don't know/care what your real life experiences with electronic music fans are.

what about aerial records? a lot of basteroid stuff and all is very much on the crunchy idm sound spectrum

we have to care about each other's real life experiences if we're going to have a discussion with each other- right? i mean, respect for each other as human beings entails a sort of "tell me about . . ." open-ness to the other person, where they're coming from, doesn't it?

at least I think so

the people who loved IDM in the 90s are replaced by the people who love Flying Lotus, Burial, Zomby, Mt. Kimble, Holy Other and Kode 9 today, and the rhetoric with which they are consumed and advocated for demonstrates a basic continuity pretty clearly, I think. Most reviews of the artists I just listed will contain some variant on the sentence "It's like R&B that's gone weird" / "It's like dubstep that has mutated" / "It's like house that has been eviscerated" blah blah blah etc. That's not so different from the same claims being made about the relation of IDM to hip hop and jungle and house in the 90s. Maybe because those relationships are the case, or maybe because it massages the egos of both the artists and the fans, to think that they're like something popular (usually here you can read: "black") but they're a little bit better, a little bit more refined, a little bit more elite (here you can usually read: "White")

this has been bothering me the whole thread. it rings true, but it's so dismissive, and it feels like the lines between the 'real thing' and the arty/ambient/boundary-pushing version are getting increasingly blurry.

I guess I'd just add that the "Maybe because they are" part was sincere- maybe these records really do sound like R&B that's gone weird- straight up. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck it could be a duck. But also- for real- I was including myself in what comes off as snide and dismissive- as in, I'm including myself in the judgment that I"m passing- so it's not about my innocence and other people's guilt. But I have a tendency to equate critical intelligence with masochistic postures, and maybe I overdid it here? I guess it's that criticism can be a caress of the thing you love, or a slap in the face that pulls you out of the pleasurable trance by reminding you of something else that is also going on. I tend towards the latter rather than the former.

It's generally a good idea to acquire basic reading comprehension skills before exhorting others to "hold the shit"

oof.. yeah i realize now that i was interchaning IDM and ILM in yr posts and definitely not reading carefully. also i'm just a pissed off man. sorry, i'm out.

so, basically from reading this thread, my understanding is that the IDM "scene" basically took place on message boards and chat rooms. Any tracks that got played in clubs were mixed with other genres. True? False?

Perhaps the male idm fans were just acting out their jealousy, as they do not have a vagina to put Aphex Twin in.

vah1d, I could kiss you for that sabres of paradise/shackleton juxtaposition. so perfect!

it feels like the lines between the 'real thing' and the arty/ambient/boundary-pushing version are getting increasingly blurry.

Jordan, I feel the same way... I can't help but wonder if this is mainly a function of the fact that there's just been so much electronic music produced and consumed since the heyday of IDM, however. That's to say, it's not so much that the lines that are more blurred now, it's that the entire field of vision is more saturated and thus more difficult to parse out. There's more history to reckon with, and electronic musicians now have hypothetically heard and digested far more electronic music than those 15+ years ago. A kid in his late teens or early 20s making electronic music now could have plausibly spent his entire life listening to electronic music in the main, whereas that wasn't as likely 20 years ago, and I reckon many of the first-wave IDM guys cut their teeth on (as Drew stated upthread) noise, punk, hardcore, etc.

Oh I definitely recall that there were IDM clubs but they were in, like, Towednack or Gwithian or somewhere... ;)

I think it was more that the rise of IDM and the early Internet were so entwined and it was the first new electronic music invented after the nascent Internet so the two things really fed each other. I think the Internet phenomenon was really tied in to IDM - but not because clubbing and "scene" didn't exist IRL.

But that said, listening habits were not that fragmented yet in the early to mid 90s so the music wasn't really niche-ified.

Sometimes I feel like my listening habits have become so fragmented that they've met on the other side of fragmentation and become a big hazy blur. The amount of hypothetical terrain in an average 3-4 hour listening session I cover can look really weird on paper or upon reflection, but it all makes sense and flows at the time. Karen, if you haven't been following it, the "Mutant Slow Techno" thread has some great YouTubes and listening suggestions in the way-dark realm of what I would say qualifies as present-day "IDM": "Mutant slow techno and Kevin Drumm records..." - A thread for Raime, Chasing Voices, Old Apparatus etc.

music played in clubs, that is

Actually I don't know if that was a 90s time thing or a location thing (living in the US rather than the UK) but the idea of going to a club or a night that only played *one* genre of music was just not as prevalent in (my) early to mid 90s as it is now.

X-post cool thanks for the link, I'll check it out when I'm on an Internet connection that can load youtubes!

there was an IDM scene in san francisco. i smoked a cigarette w/ gold chains outside a carsten nicolai show. iirc he had been 86'd cause of being too crunk.

The high point of my IDM scenesterism was roundly trouncing Cex in a freestyle battle in my pals' basement in Williamsburg, VA, after a radio station-sponsored gig. We all ended up partying in our underwear later on and Cex tried to kick it to all the girls.

I almost saw that guy but a friend talked me out of it. Bad call?

I honestly don't remember a single thing from the gig at all! I was pretty drunk. "Colleeeeeeeeeege"

Just caught the Sabres/Shackleton vid comparison, nice! I love Shackleton. His DJ Kicks (all his own stuff) is killer.

I think you mean Fabric mix :D

WHOOPS, indeed

bid for blab:

speaking of queerly deracinated sounds ... it's ironic that pitchfork gave invasion of the killer mysteron sounds better than a 7, while freakytrigger refuses to touch mo'wax's now thing with a ten foot pole.

rockism ... popism ... OR BOTH?!?

Doesn't strike me as ironic at all really.

Now Thing had some great riddims on it (esp. the early Lenky showings) but was so much more of a chore to listen to than it would have been with DJs on top, and given you could have thrown a rock and hit an amazing riddim at that time it couldn't save itself through production quality alone. They should have released a vocals version. As an instrumental release it really has no purpose.

Invasion looks more like a history lesson (jess's statement to the contrary in his review notwithstanding - I assume he simply means it's neither comprehensive nor staid). I still think it wouldn't be the best way to hear most of these productions, but a handy comp for the uninitiated.

but it's got the same music on it!

I didn't notice any overlaps.

In the tracklisting I mean - I haven't listened to Invasion.

it's a bunch of digital instrumental "riddims"

Yeah but with this deliberate transgenre/curatorial approach that makes it "more than" a "bunch of digital instrumental riddims" - clearly the idea is to trace the "virus" or whatevs through these different stylistic and historical manifestations.

Now Thing was like buying an instrumental version of a contemporary Greensleeves comp.

Anyway Pitchfork probably would have been much more sympathetic to Now Thing than FT anyway.

I'm not trying to defend Invasion which I have no particular desire to listen to but I don't think you can totally conflate these two things.

This is not more evidence of the grand conspiracy against Mo'Wax IMO.

c o n spiracy!

i can dispel this conspiracy idea but the explanation would be gauche to publish in a public forum

but even if i had to put on my critic's hat for a minute, i would say the difference is, as tim said, that now thing was a collection of then-current riddims designed to play to the "all electronic beats would be better as deep listening or background music material" and "invasion" is a cross-cultural/cross-decade look at the way dancehall-as-a-rhythmic-idea has impacted various scenes, including a lot of cuts that were instrumental in their original forms.

i'm not saying i want to listen to now thing tonight, just that let's not forget to give it its due as an era's bangs and works

an era's bangs and works

That good, huh?

But it seems a bit of a stretch to give it even that status when widely-distributed dancehall compilations were hardly thin on the ground at the time.

Review by costarizo Oct 09, 2008

referencing Now Thing, 2xLP, Comp, MWR 145LP

Bought that compilation when it was out and realised that if you listen to dancehall without vocals it turns out that it's much more interesting to people into techno/electronic stuff because you realise how forward thinking and technoid the riddims made in jamaica are and you start wondering how these guys manage to stay on the edge and always one step ahead !
makes you (like me ) start collecting the seveninches just for the hot riddims.
I think that this is an essential compilation for someone who is an electronic/techno beathead to get into the dancehall stuff.
(ask hardwax recordshop in berlin who stock the seveninches just for the riddims)
top !

i am actually listening to it tonight. the first track does have a bit of a sabres vibe, but the rest is very ... backgroundy.

the liner notes are very good, and very similar to the mysteron sounds liner notes.

best thing about it is the packaging

agreed

Wait, were you being ironic when you said Shackleton and Sabres of Paradise sounded *nothing* alike?

Or is it just such a commonly made comparison that you're pointing out intra-genre differences and trying to highlight the unique aspects of said artists, rather than obvious stylistic similarities? I'm being really thick here, right? (wait, it's irony and IDGI)

Every time I find and hear a Shackleton thing I always have this "wow, this is gr8" reaction (he did some thing that a train company was promoting? - a kind of live soundtrack to a section of coastal Devon railway that I particularly love (though really the main line to Penzance makes its own freaky bathroom techno music which is way better than any soundtrack could ever be)) but never really investigate him further.

Sabres of Paradise/Two Lone Swordsmen are something that keep floating up into my life through other music genres, which makes complete sense. I recall asking in the mid 90s - on a drone community (can't remember if it was DroneOn or the NoFi boards) - for music which *felt* texturally, like Spacemen 3's more ecstatic moments, and someone told me to check out the Beatless Smokebelch II, and my reaction was "yes, this is *exactly* what I like in dronerock." And again in the R*di*he*d wars around 2000/2001 (again, can't remember if this was on ILX or on proto-ILX Star Chamber) people rather snottily telling me "you shouldn't bother listening to Kid A, you should listen to the ~real~ Autechre" and because I was living with a DJ who had a huge record collection, I was just like "OK, tell me what records I should be listening to, and I'll get them out and put them on" - and I think that was the point that my dislike of Autechre really solidified, because there was *nothing* about (that record, can't remember which one, just that it sounded *awful* to me) which related to anything that I liked about Kid A. But then someone suggested Two Lone Swordsmen next down the list of "things I should be listening to instead" and that clicked with me.

I think what I should have learned at that point, was that genre signifiers are actually kinda meaningless, and that different people respond to such different things in music, that two things which sound ~obviously~ alike to one listener, will sound completely different to another with different expectations - but I guess at that point I think I was so blinkered by the idea of genre fascism.

I'm not sure what this has to do with Shackleton v Sabres of Paradise, given that was my starting point. Talking about this kind of music, I tend to get lost.

ugh. The sound pallette on Hudson Mohawk is just so awful and cheesey and *glassy* sounding, I just can't be doing with that, no matter how skillfull his edits are. Just... no! Beggone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enueVpFbCbc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mJJJuLrJLg

Wait, were you being ironic when you said Shackleton and Sabres of Paradise sounded *nothing* alike?

I thought there were some huge blinking SARCASM tags around that but maybe my ilx browser just has the right extensions installed.

I picked up that Invasions thing on Soul Jazz recently since it was marketed right up my alley, but yes, it's a collection of interesting sounds that may work better with vocalists.

I don't know if I ever listened completely to the old MACRO DUB INFECTION volumes -- I wasn't really listening to things in that space at the time and never caught up -- but it'd be interesting to compare since it's Kevin Martin compiling both.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkELMhZgdME&list=FLjCnJ0_NOwQg&index=433

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XJ3eKWouEk&feature=related

I guess I'm having some kind of Poe's Law effect where I can no longer tell the parody from the real thing.

I've been rather enjoying that Mysterons comp. Lots of riddims I've never heard on their own and there's some lovely things. Especially digging the Pliers "I'm Your Man Dub".

The idea that post-dubstep stuff like Zomby, Hudson Mohwake and stuff = today's IDM is kind of OTM. It's like IDM happening all over again though - dubstep being taken to further and further experimental extremes int he same way techno and d'n'b were back in the day.

it is, but most people dont like that concept. and although ppl like flylo and actress are part of it, it is a very white scene, as dubstep was, which is no doubt some factor in why dubstep has been embraced so much by rock kids/critics.

Yeah - I don't think the post-dubstep generation of artists would necessarily want to be lumped into the same IDM scene that produced Autechre, Kid606 et al (exception is Flying Lotus who of course who came about during IDM's fallow years). But why shouldn't they? I couldn't imagine people dancing to FlyLo or Actress any more than Leafcutter John or whoever, and yet they're all directly or indirectly influenced by dance music.

they wouldnt want to be, and the fans dont want to be labelled with that either. the prob tho is that things like night slugs are all part of it, and theyre danceable so its easy to say 'its all too diff to be labelled accurately' etc. but it does seem odd how much the fans of this stuff and critics are so fiercely opposed to being thought of as being in the idm tradition. is that to do with idms falling stock? or do they barely know about that stuff? idm deserves better actually. i mean, you wouldnt go out dancing to BOC and you wouldnt necess want to hear some banging techno at home either. they have diff functions. same way i love burial, well the 1st album, and really like to hear that at home/in headphones etc but not sure id wanna hear it out on a saturday night. burial was the first nu-IDM producer from/related to dubstep maybe.

IDM had developed such a terrible rap by the early 2000s, yeah. I also wouldn't feel that surprised if Burial hadn't heard that much IDM outside maybe the very big hitters. Again, I think even people like James Blake, Darkstar, Mount Kimbie originally saw themselves as a strain of dubstep - not home listening electronica, even if that's exactly what it is.

by the time dumbstep rolled around (born into creative stasis if you ask me) it had become nowt but a faddish wubwubwub/bzzzzzzzzzzzzzz signifier to be tagged on to whatever muso or non-muso bedroom/attic/basement studio dabblings were getting churned out at that moment. too many coattails. ragga godflesh & its coffee table descendents ! just what we were all missing ;-)
oh yeah radiohead had some numbers that sounded like depeche mode at some point. why anybody got upset about that was always beyond me. i guess those who are always spoiling for a fight will make sure that they are heard.
the ideas of "genre", genre boundaries & genre purism / "authenticity" / "transgression" really don't wash in the 21st century. i reckon the best music will always be that that transcends that tribal NIMBYism fostered by those who like to put things in boxes.

zB: i think i'd have more respect for autechre if instead of yet another hafler trio collaboration ( in 5:1 - cloud cuckoo land ! ) they did an album of respectful willie nelson remixes.

ragga godflesh & its coffee table descendents !

this sounds really good! in a way that most dubstep doesn't, to me. oh well

I like the "NO, real dubstep is this, this, and this" stance. I think some of the stuff I liked a few years ago (Benga album, few other things) adhere more closely to the original dubstep schema, but I don't think there's that much in that space now. I kind of assume any time someone from my region (central US) says "dubstep" it's just going to be horrible wobble bass versions of the horrible dnb they'd have liked a few years ago.

One of the better moments probably three years ago was when a bartender with pretty diverse tastes was playing the first 2562 album at work. The techno crossbreeds of dubstep/dub techno stuff is like the other side of the overlap with idm territory, with much better results, in my opinion.

I think it was more that the rise of IDM and the early Internet were so entwined and it was the first new electronic music invented after the nascent Internet so the two things really fed each other. I think the Internet phenomenon was really tied in to IDM - but not because clubbing and "scene" didn't exist IRL.

this is OTM and to a certain extent explains both the difficulty in defining IDM and differentiating it from uhm... hudson mohawke. who i feel has a more open mind and wider tolerance for "cheese"

i meant to say hudson mohawke and the other post-glitch fucked up beats warp stuff

ragga godflesh & its coffee table descendents !
this sounds really good! in a way that most dubstep doesn't, to me. oh well

― the ascent of nyan (a passing spacecadet), Thursday, 4 August 2011 19:37 (Yesterday) Bookmark

We talking The Bug here, or?

Jackson and his Computer Band, speaking of Warp and later-period releases. Really enjoyable stuff that reviews obviously danced around calling idm just because it seemed like some sort of stigma.

except for that one track that had his daughter or whoever narrating it, god that was the worst.

yes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHgulPj3lVk

no:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU2qIEOYwrU

hah, I misread that and thought you meant it was the worst EXCEPT for that track.

i think karsten plflum totally passed me by, i was kind of burned out on this kind of stuff at the time but this album Idnax from 2006 is really nice:

https://karstenpflum.bandcamp.com/album/idhax

his earlier album tracks has great sktechy rube goldberg-y cover art that depicts the contents well but the melodies are a little too syrupy for me

this new hexalyne record is MASSIVE

https://evel.bandcamp.com/album/xetercyneaal

i know theres a lot of autechre-ey music out there rightnow but this is some hq stuff

That is very autechre. In general I feel that one autechre is more than enough but I'll see how I feel after a few listens.

The new Blawan doesn't sound anything like ae but does the rare thing that they excel at, of making sounds solid and tangible.

That is very autechre

yep, no two ways around it, they like autechre. but it also has this head nodding propulsive quality that a lot of the clones don't have. that's what keeps me going back, anyway.