did i not get the memo on idm?

Don't get me started on this topic. There has been such a pervasive reactionary "announcement" that IDM is dead/over/tired/critically superceded, and it just seems premature to say the least, if not way out of line. I'm glad people have already mentioned how totally killer Team Doyobi's last one was, and I would just point out also:

the new Wasteland album "October" (DJ Scud and I-Sound's fucking monster of a record); the Apendix Shuffle EP on Proptronix; the 09 record on Schematic; the last DAT Politics album; the new Otto von Schirach album on Schematic; Jimmy Edgar's work on Warp; disgusting breakcore from Subjex and Doormouse; Mochipet's frenzied, funny tracks . . . the show ain't over folks. I guess some of the tourists and Looky Loos have gone home, but just because indie kids are done snacking between meals on electronic tid-bits does not mean that an entire genre is just "over".

True enough, re: the bad ratio of cloney records to innovative ones. (though in a way what I loved best about the 09 record on Schematic was precisely what "classic" IDM it was; I have the same feeling about Claro Intelecto, it's slightly "out of time", but not in a stale way, just in a deliberately un-trendy way) It's also true that ripping off Fourtet is not somehow better than ripping off Autechre (ie. the imitators don't realize that sampled stringed instruments don't make you progressive or human just off the bat, just as clackety snare patterns don't make you funky just off the bat). But all the same, my affection for the music that gets called IDM remains (just as my hostility to "IDM" as a phrase/slogan/genre title remains intact).

Frankly, a lot of the critically accaimed "good" IDM is lukewarm at best. I think the problem is that if you aren't an IDM specialist, the stuff just isn't that interesting. There was a point in the late 90's early 00's where there was enough creative momentum to make the genre unignorable, but millions of lame net zines, funkless cubase gentle melodies und crunchy beats breaktracks, pointless net labels with nothing new to say, and empty gigs attended by handful of genuine dorks has pretty much killed any curiosity most people had in the genre. Even if there are a few good records coming out of the genre, the idea of IDM just seems pretty lame right now.

You obviously have a different perspective, but how much time have you invested to pull the handful of records you like out of the idm deluge? How many times can you expect a casual listener to keep up without the rewards?

a fantastic net label release. as if your feeble human mind has recovered from thinner/autoplate already...

"The Noise And The City was born during the summer of 2003. The roots of the project are to be found in a fascination for urban zones, as places of concentrated architecture, population, exchange and life : exciting and creative spaces. On the other hand, creative processes have always been at stake for us, and the following interrogation in particular : through what ways does a piece come to life?

The starting idea was to bind those questionings in order to think about the connexions between environment and creation in the scope of the city and electronic music.

Through the platform that is net label Autres Directions In Music, we suggested musicians from all over the world to revisit their daily environment (urban and sound) : record sounds inside their city, then reprocess the material as much as they like (without adding any kind of rhythm or music), in order to compose a personal piece that should also remind of their original discography.

In order to make it more of a play process, and to materialize the idea of a journey through music, we imagined a route through the world, a return journey around Nantes (France), where our label is based : a wandering throughout various countries with naturally diverse urban environments. We thus contacted numbers of artists that we like, beyond the frontiers of our old Europe.

They also enriched their aerial computer work on melodies and rhythm with a picture (of a space in their city that they like for its acoustic value) and a text (on the genesis of their piece).

When we invited Alejandra & Aeron, we got to know the project/exhibition Invisible Cities lead by the label Fällt : "field recordings" of various cities, presented to the public as an exhibition and put at disposal as mp3's on the Irish website http://www.fallt.com/invisiblecities. The contributors (designers, musicians, producers, media...) Works, which are different from those of the noise and the city (the purpose was different), also need attention. Our lack of knowledge of these kinds of projects induces us to indicate that many more must have been carried out with more or less common fields with ours must have been done. In fact, adding urban sounds to music is not a new idea. Here, everything we can hear comes from cities, though we might sometimes not notice it when we listening.

Apart from the tracks, a complete artwork is free to download (the creation of a package, a gathering of all the texts and photos and also a sound map of the journey).

As different cities as Brest, Reykjavik, Tallinn, Moscow, Daqing, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Vancouver, Barcelona... Are scheduled on this resolutely urban musical trip.

The musicians involved here followed the concept and the rules written higher. They offered their talent for free, thus guaranteeing a little more the whole work's universality. We wish to thank them all once again here for their creativity and kindness."

I know that by stating the above I'm joining the "humanist" camp which claims IDM has no soul. Well, what can I say, sometimes the majority opinion is actually right.

It has always been a ludicrous genre name. Deep house aside, I can't think of a genre title that actually pays a compliment to itself; "intelligent dance music", it's not just arrogant and smug, it's actually totally insulting, as if making good AND functional dance music was easy. So as a name, idm = total dud. (Inadequate Dance Music, anyone?)

But . . .

if we can bracket this bullshit genre name, we can have a wide definition of what counts as "this sort of thing", and I take it to mean rhythmic electronic music that's too crunchy, too noisy, too gappy, too formally capricious, or simply too fast or too slow to work on the dancefloor or rock a party (though often this just amounts to a straw man definition of a house dancefloor that's stuck at 120 bpm, which only exists in the imaginations of IDM snobs at this point anyway). The formal possibilities opened out by this list of "it's too X to work on the dancefloor" opens out onto an incredibly broad terrain, and it's a "negative" definition (ie. it just tells us what something isn't, not what it is) that, in my book, it really *doesn't* have to be shorthand for "lame wannabe-Autechre imitation beats with corny three note pseudo-melodies that repeat over and over through delays and reverbs", though sadly as I think many on this thread know, that IS what IDM amounts to all too often. Just as "indie rock" can mean "any guitar/bass/drums/voice music that is not on a major label" or it can mean "crappy Pavement and Beach Boys Cliffs Notes combined with crybaby confessions from quasi-sensitive white heterosexual undergrads with beards". The cartoonish reduction is tempting but untrue; the broad first definition includes Deerhoof and Lightning Bolt and Sightings and Low, and by that expanded defintion indie rock is alive and well. Ditto for IDM: if it's just a pack of funkless clones snickering at a dancefloor that's pretty fucking interesting these days, then it's a dead duck. If it can apply to Venetian Snares and Wasteland and Team Doyobi and Otto von Schirach and Jimmy Edgar and Carsten Nicolai, then it is alive and well, and making cool records that are worth listening to.

its partly been ditched because of the rush to embrace kompakt

it seems every record is either yet another spazzcore breaks mashup, or a folk'n'glitch thing that sounds different from Moby how exactly?

i dont know, i heard a frog pocket song the other day, that was quite nice, but really, everything all just seems like groundhog day 1999

But . . .

if we can bracket this bullshit genre name, we can have a wide definition of what counts as "this sort of thing", and I take it to mean rhythmic electronic music that's too crunchy, too noisy, too gappy, too formally capricious, or simply too fast or too slow to work on the dancefloor or rock a party (though often this just amounts to a straw man definition of a house dancefloor that's stuck at 120 bpm, which only exists in the imaginations of IDM snobs at this point anyway). The formal possibilities opened out by this list of "it's too X to work on the dancefloor" opens out onto an incredibly broad terrain, and it's a "negative" definition (ie. it just tells us what something isn't, not what it is) that, in my book, it really *doesn't* have to be shorthand for "lame wannabe-Autechre imitation beats with corny three note pseudo-melodies that repeat over and over through delays and reverbs", though sadly as I think many on this thread know, that IS what IDM amounts to all too often. Just as "indie rock" can mean "any guitar/bass/drums/voice music that is not on a major label" or it can mean "crappy Pavement and Beach Boys Cliffs Notes combined with crybaby confessions from quasi-sensitive white heterosexual undergrads with beards". The cartoonish reduction is tempting but untrue; the broad first definition includes Deerhoof and Lightning Bolt and Sightings and Low, and by that expanded defintion indie rock is alive and well. Ditto for IDM: if it's just a pack of funkless clones snickering at a dancefloor that's pretty fucking interesting these days, then it's a dead duck. If it can apply to Venetian Snares and Wasteland and Team Doyobi and Otto von Schirach and Jimmy Edgar and Carsten Nicolai, then it is alive and well, and making cool records that are worth listening to.

-- Drew Daniel (mces...), November 8th, 2004.

otm

if we can bracket this bullshit genre name, we can have a wide definition of what counts as "this sort of thing", and I take it to mean rhythmic electronic music that's too crunchy, too noisy, too gappy, too formally capricious, or simply too fast or too slow to work on the dancefloor or rock a party (though often this just amounts to a straw man definition of a house dancefloor that's stuck at 120 bpm, which only exists in the imaginations of IDM snobs at this point anyway). The formal possibilities opened out by this list of "it's too X to work on the dancefloor" opens out onto an incredibly broad terrain, and it's a "negative" definition (ie. it just tells us what something isn't, not what it is) that, in my book, it really *doesn't* have to be shorthand for "lame wannabe-Autechre imitation beats with corny three note pseudo-melodies that repeat over and over through delays and reverbs", though sadly as I think many on this thread know, that IS what IDM amounts to all too often.

I don't want to come off as a defensive cheerleader for IDM, so let me voice my own misgivings too- there is a justifiable accusation of myopia that could be hurled at the scene, ie. okay, now that you're free to not worry about keeping a dancefloor going, what are you actually DOING with your freedom? Where are you going? And I do feel that way, way too much of IDM is stalled on the Island of Half-Assed Electro, ie. quarter-note hi hats keep ticking the time, the Bass and Snare patterns go Boom- Kah- Boom-Boom Kah, it claps along at 133 bpm or so, and hazy melancholic pads simmer along in the background. This is very pleasureable and listenable for a certain set of consumers, and VERY easy to do (neither good nor bad in itself) and I feel as guilty as any one else about enjoying it/making it, but it is not a good use of the wide open possibilities which IDM could conceivably avail itself of. I think IDM that's parasitic on hip hop and electro is massively overdeveloped, and I'm still waiting for IDM-gamelan hybrids, IDM-Africa hybrids, IDM-Brazil hybrids, let alone IDM-radio drama hybrids, IDM-doowop hybrids, IDM-free jazz hybrids, etc. etc. I don't think that IDM-Nashville or IDM-Appalachia hybrids have run their course, but then I would say that wouldn't I?

I also don't think folk-glitch = Moby, sorry. The Books records are amazing; Moby makes pandering rubbish. But the difference is formal, not just at the quality level; the foregrounding of editing as a practice in The Books is what makes them so good, and it ain't happening in Moby.

M, you would probably love the Nathan Michel album "Dear Bicycle" for the same reasons you liked that Max Tundra record: it's got some truly ridiculous curdled Kurzweil synth textures, some really odd and very proggy song structures, no perceptible debt to the typical IDM style templates, and an overall very high charm factor.

you should give a listen to the landau album, thepicompromise.

to those of you complaining that the d is being left out of the formula these days, that's coming back in a pretty big way. in some ways, it never left, it's just been overshadowed by the epileptic dsp fuckery that's been the preferred style. many of the popular tracker collectives, some that actually pre-date the term idm, are still releasing. kahvi comes to mind, and they're still releasing that sort of early warp/a.r.t./likemind style of idm. for free no less! there's also the new narita sub-label of merck, with great releases by yard, arctic hospital, adam johnson, and the aforementioned apendics shuffle. though, his narita stuff is much more focused and 4/4 than his proptronix release. they're actually pushing that sort of "throwback" idm sound. "putting the d back in idm"

http://www.naritarecords.com/

http://s12.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=B0A01A2CF8051F786566077C774E119C

_u/n

i think you got the mia from me... although, i don't really remember. like 7 or 8 got it from me.

I don't know if IDM in general is more conservative. It seems like a lot of the "big" names are. For example, the Mouse on Mars album from this year is a lot less "quirky" than the one before. But the Pan Sonic 4-CD set is as, er, "liberal" as anything released in 2001. I think earlier in this decade, IDM occupied a space similar to what prog did in the early 70s, and just as lots of big-name prog toned down the eccentricity in the latter half of the 70s, so too are some IDM acts now. However, the "movement" itself never completely shifted to a conservative agenda (ha). (One could debate whether or not IDM is a movement, of course.)

It's incredibly sad that with all the technology the IDM kids were abusing the shit still sounds the same 3-4 years later. We all thought, myself included, that the music would drive advances in synthesis and interfaces-- either from the musicians themselves (how many times have you heard the Aphex Twin is Quitting Music to Write Software meme?) or just from the market conditions that they would cause.

This also makes it clear that the music is completely bound by its instrument-- the computer-- I know quite a few people that can on first listen determine which environment the musician was using, and if it's bad, which preset. That alone is not such a big deal-- we can do that with 'real instruments' very easily, right, but the problem is that these people have now finger trapped together composition and timbre and can't get them apart. The Reaktor patches generate 'melodic textures,' Reason tacks a shoebox sequencer under its glossy fake rack almost as an afterthought, FruityLoops starts up with a 4-on-the-floor bass pattern-- BY DEFAULT! -- almost begging people to make Super Nintendo wavetable gack with it.

So since 1999 we've only jumped a couple version of Reaktor with more DIY-Monolake patches, Reason became existent and FruityLoops got even easier to use. And every sequencer still shows you a step-time grid which calls out to these poor kids: draw lines on me, draw lines on me.... uuusseee the black keys, uuuseee the black keys. And you can hear this in the music. Do you know who's doing any serious innovation in this field? There are probably ten guys in the US working on something that will change the way interesting music sounds, and fifty in Europe. They aren't musicians. It'll take awhile.

My diagnosis: too much freedom. Way too many emulated synth audiounits, glut of software that all talks to each other and flashes smoke signals, sub-500 pro audio hardware, 250 GB hard drives standard, Garageband, Ableton etc. So instead of being constrained by money (who buys software, right), blisters or bordeom these guys don't know what to do! You can make any sound in the world with these things. And if you don't like the sound it has, write your own sounds! Just make up some numbers! For every 44,100 #s you guess you get one delicious second of Super Music.

So they get scared! Where do you begin! They open up the example folder and start changing the tempo, putting preverb on the snares. Or maybe they'll be good at it and carefully emulate (perhaps without knowing) their favorite record at the time, which will be Bola or Ms. Mandible or 55__aaa or the "New Organic" scenesters Wild Harvest (they use hiss put through Karplus-Strong, sounds just like Oval 94!)

So we need more guys like Nick / Drew+Martin who have the right idea. They are not Computer People and could care less, they'll see it as a tool rather than a composition environment. They have a sound in their head with a story and will just make it happen, whereas the dregs we make fun of did it the other way around: serendipitous noodling on the openGL knobs. Drew's obviously OTM when he talks about IDM+hiphop, even though he can do it well. Perhaps if IDM changed its name and more people started exploring non 16th-quantized versions of it. Perhaps if I went and ripped all the black keys out of their MIDI controllers with tweezers.

But I will say for now that IDM is hurting. Can we start encouraging more "experimental electronic"?

Freeform, man. Simon Pyke has been tinkering with this combo for a while now. went as far as recording traditional musics on a trek through South Asia. i think he really nailed it on Human; haven't heard the newer EP.

IDM-Africa hybrids
half-jokey answer: Mira Calix

Frederic Galliano owns this territory
what about that Frikyiwa project?

let alone IDM-radio drama hybrids

Single Cell Orchestra - Dead Vent 7

IDM-free jazz hybrids

Ticklish (Phil Durrant's beat-impregnated e-a improv project)
Crank
some of Phthalocyanine's stuff

IDM-doowop hybrids

now this would be something.

now this is the shit that I hate!!! WHY DO PEOPLE SAY THESE THINGS

"Yes, I am making idm, SIGH, but-- but wait! I am really a real classically trained musician! Don't worry!"

Ahh yeah sorry didn't make the connection.

re: helios
people say that for good reason. there's a diference between the meticolously and carefully crafted melodies on the helios album and your typical floaty-idm fare. velius probably wasn't the best example though. i should have posted some of the piano tracks. there's a really nice satie feel sometimes.

I'm no gearhead, but I do know that programming new synth patches takes a lot of time, and some people don't bother to put in that effort.

otm, sticking with a main program or two and learning it as you go along has helped me immensely when making music. the more experience gained using a program the less it dictates or shapes how the song will turn out.

"idm" is no longer that aesthetically interesting to me except stuff like claro intelecto, but i'm a groove junkie.

i do like stuff that sits on the periphery of "idm": raster-noton, ryoji ikeda, staubgold, anything e. ehlers or stephan mathieu do, weirdo cologne techno like frank martiniq, portable, jan jelinek, etc.

i wonder what the next autechre album will sound like.

So the real $499 question is now: why did we tolerate such crap from IDM? We would never pay $13.99 at OM for a record of some kid who just bought a guitar and 20 efx boxes and cycled through each preset playing a D-minor arpeggio through a DI box into a multitrack. Was it really that the computers / synths were making a sound we never heard before? We all knew in our hearts that this music was [heavy quote time] "easy," not exactly "intelligent" and that the composers behind it were not exactly "classically trained" (hah!) but we bought it up anyway. And IDM is an interesting one because all the fans were music snobs, not average consumers who don't care for 'quality.' Were WE being duped by style, US, is it possible? Did those Designer Republic covers and dot-com bloated paychecks have an affinity for one another?

I am happy that IDM is thinning a bit out, cutting some of the fat off. I like that the average IDM show where I live brings 20 people, max, but Mouse on Mars packed the house. I like that quality is winning, effort and novelty finally seem to be paying off.

also

So the real $499 question is now: why did we tolerate such crap from IDM? We would never pay $13.99 at OM for a record of some kid who just bought a guitar and 20 efx boxes and cycled through each preset playing a D-minor arpeggio through a DI box into a multitrack.

really? why not? what if it was actually good?

But the question "what if it was actually good" is the thing I'm trying to figure out.

However, I do think it's better to have a sound in your head and to figure out how to use the technology to get that sound rather than the other way around.

That said, I owe a lot of my props to coming up with a new vocal sound using PC jiggery pokery (Nico's Needles off Secret Moves at the Midnight Chess Club) which was previously untried, so I guess I owe the tech-race a bit.

Here have a listen
http://www.shirokuma.co.uk/albuminfo/002.mp3

I wish I had some of my music up here right now, but it probably won't be for another week.

Unfair? Maybe. I mean, no one expects the White Stripes to rewrite the rock book, but the rules are different for established genres, and maybe we expect too much out of the cutting edge. How long can it truly remain cutting edge?

re: idm doowop hybrid

jamie lidell would be the one to go to, no?

which, by the way, where is new jamie lidell material PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEASE?!?!?!

It's like a large bunch of artists were commisioned to use found-materials in their paintings, and all of them came up with the near identical tasteful minimalism, each using slightly different base materials.

It's an experiment which unfortunately proves a majority of electronic artists can't stand the idea of experimenting (playing around, making mistakes, trying new things).

I see how you're reading the name (and I know people who used it that way, "it's deep, man"), but I think it's more descriptive of the sound/songs than self-congratulatory. It's like Black Box vs. Murk, one isn't necessarily better than the other, but Murk records certainly sounded "deeper", as in more submerged sonically, and also more introspective lyrically.

Before the term IDM was coined, the genre used to be called "intelligent techno". And if I remember correctly, there was also "intelligent jungle". Actually, the prefix "intelligent" was used quite a lot in the mid-nineties. I guess they wanted to distance themselves from "stupid rave"...

But yeah, I also suspect that people like me have been seduced by the sonic developments in house & techno over the last five years or so. The role that Aphex Twin/Black Dog etc. played in the mid-nineties is rather handily filled by something like Jan Jelenik's "Ifs & Ands & Buts".

I've now got two tunes on the website if anyone is interested. Only the first could be considered at all idm-y, though.

Good lord, that's a perfect Spencer genre if ever there was one.

more exciting and original than

(current) Mouse On Mars (IDM) the new album stinks :(