"My son makes Intelligent Dance Music"....

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So, when it was called "Jungle" it assumed that it was mainly black music, right?

Then it became "Drum and Bass" which meant it was more inclusive and quite right too.

Now it's called "Intelligent Dance Music" or IDM for short, is it something you can tell your folks like you're at university doing a degree about it?

Or has this question been done to death?

― mark grout (mark grout), Thursday, 28 April 2005 13:07 (twenty-one years ago)

isn't drum & bass still called drum & bass? and i don't think of drum & bass when i see the letters IDM.

― scott seward (scott seward), Thursday, 28 April 2005 13:11 (twenty-one years ago)

i dunno, i think of IDm as being like warp-type 'post-techno' type stuff, which existed at the same time as dnb, and is different from it.

― N_RQ, Thursday, 28 April 2005 13:11 (twenty-one years ago)

http://www.wernhamhogg.eclipse.co.uk/armando/screenshots/hellohugh.jpg

"You took her to a junglist mash-up. It wasn't called drum and bass back then, you see?"

― Dom Passantino (Dom Passantino), Thursday, 28 April 2005 13:12 (twenty-one years ago)

I know I did link it up there, I didn't mean to (really).

It's more about choosing a label for the stuff you might do.

Like "New Wave" was seen as an acceptable form of "Punk", even though "Power Pop" had been tried and discarded for being pathetic...

― mark grout (mark grout), Thursday, 28 April 2005 13:13 (twenty-one years ago)

Or has this question been done to death?

the question is just wrong.

― jed_ (jed), Thursday, 28 April 2005 13:14 (twenty-one years ago)

is it still wrong, given that's an xpost?

― mark grout (mark grout), Thursday, 28 April 2005 13:16 (twenty-one years ago)

I thought this was going to Drew talking about how his mom introduces him now.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Thursday, 28 April 2005 13:34 (twenty-one years ago)

Going to BE Drew, etc.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Thursday, 28 April 2005 13:34 (twenty-one years ago)

Heh, I have a friend who IS doing her degree on this.

― Sundar (sundar), Thursday, 28 April 2005 13:38 (twenty-one years ago)

If you want a good laugh, go sit in the IDM room on Soulseek and watch the chatter.

― Brooker Buckingham (Brooker B), Thursday, 28 April 2005 13:41 (twenty-one years ago)

My mom's preferred term to reference what Martin and I are doing has always been: "noise freakies"

as in

"You two are a couple of noise freakies, aren't you?"

― Drew Daniel (Drew Daniel), Friday, 29 April 2005 15:52 (twenty-one years ago)

mark, can you cc me on the memo where drum and bass got renamed idm? and maybe also the one where post-punk got renamed grunge?

― mark p (Mark P), Friday, 29 April 2005 16:05 (twenty-one years ago)

Moms should come up with all genre names.

― n/a (Nick A.), Friday, 29 April 2005 16:09 (twenty-one years ago)

What, like "that bloody racket" or "thaT FUNNY NOISE"?

― Pashmina (Pashmina), Friday, 29 April 2005 16:14 (twenty-one years ago)

Or has this question been done to death

Well it has been asked before.

― Billy Dods (Billy Dods), Friday, 29 April 2005 16:17 (twenty-one years ago)

my friend thinks his mom came up with 'nervous jazz', i guess referring to free jazz of the brotzmann sort

― ken taylrr (ken taylrr), Friday, 29 April 2005 16:18 (twenty-one years ago)

IDM predated jungle, did it not? your chronology is all fucked.

― cutty (mcutt), Friday, 29 April 2005 16:21 (twenty-one years ago)

One of my friends introduced me at a party as being into "NOISE TECHNO"

― Open your eyes; you can fly! (ex machina), Friday, 29 April 2005 16:23 (twenty-one years ago)

My son makes Intelligent Dance Music

― weasel diesel (K1l14n), Friday, 29 April 2005 16:26 (twenty-one years ago)

I hate this cliche of people hating on the term IDM. It's a genre name, like all the others. They're all stupid. Gothic music has little to do with the original meaning. You don't listen to Garage in a Garage, and you listne to House in a club, not your house.

― dog latin (dog latin), Friday, 29 April 2005 16:46 (twenty-one years ago)

Understand, though, that it's the word "intelligent" (and the implication that all other forms of dance music are stupid) that makes for the funny.

― brianiac (briania), Friday, 29 April 2005 16:53 (twenty-one years ago)

you are supposed to sit in a chair and "listen" to IDM

― cutty (mcutt), Friday, 29 April 2005 16:54 (twenty-one years ago)

this particular genre name sort of plays up the more unpleasant aspects of the music and it's fans i think, d.latin. i agree its no big deal though.

― weasel diesel (K1l14n), Friday, 29 April 2005 16:55 (twenty-one years ago)

But so wasn't it kind of the influence of jungle and d'n'b that made Intelligent Dance Music less like dance music? Early IDM has a pretty traditional technoid pulse -- it's just a bit more airy and attenuated, with most of the weirdness coming in on the synth tones. I could be wrong, but it seems like it was around the time that breakbeat hardcore lapsed into jungle that IDM suddenly got all jittery-rhythm in tandem -- i.e., the difference between, like, Selected Ambient Works and the Richard D. James album. Software surely made all the difference here as well, but for some reason that transition to hyper-fast micro-beat programming has turned into the number-one signifier of IDM as a genre.

(Even though IDM has pretty much spent the last decade doing the same thing to every other trend in actual-dance music, kinda jacking up or denaturing or unfunking or spacing-out whatever's going -- Squarepusher doing two-step, Tigerbeat guys messing with hip-hop, etc etc etc. That sounds like a criticism, and sometimes it is, but it's also something I tend to find fascinating about the genre -- the way so much music has to do with performance and authenticity, and yet IDM can be a way to kind of dive into any sonic palette available, even one you can't approach very "authentically," and kind of interact with it on a pure stylistic level without even having to step away from your computer.)

― nabisco (nabisco), Friday, 29 April 2005 18:41 (twenty-one years ago)

.....wait. So THAT's what IDM means? Huh. I had no idea.

― giboyeux (skowly), Friday, 29 April 2005 20:01 (twenty-one years ago)

MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT HOPKINS HIGH....AND HE MAKES INTELLIGENT DANCE MUSIC

― M@tt He1geson (Matt Helgeson), Friday, 29 April 2005 20:12 (twenty-one years ago)

Whither "Active Rock"?

― Myonga Von Bontee (Myonga Von Bontee), Saturday, 30 April 2005 02:37 (twenty years ago)

Moms should come up with all genre names.

My mom calls everything that has remotely loud guitars "acid-rock".

I agree, moms would have done a better job with naming genres.

"What's that music where black men yell at each other?", "Oh, you mean 'rap'?"

― Cunga (Cunga), Saturday, 30 April 2005 02:49 (twenty years ago)

NB I was thinking about what I wrote back up there before, and the one issue with the whole freedom of electronic-music-in-general is that with IDM-in-particular there's a kind of cheat that goes on: basically you take guys who want to deal with a certain kind of music (say, hardass-posturing hip-hop), except there's something about their personality or background that would work against their actually dealing with the people involved in it on a personal level -- plus all that personality/background stuff puts all these "authenticity" anxiety on them, this sense that you're not even going to attempt to try to be taken seriously doing it -- and so IDMifying the genre in question (say, hardass-posturing hip-hop) creates the level of remove that does away with that anxiety; it makes it very clear to everyone that you're kind of looking in on the genre from some eggy-headed overview position and then manipuating it to your own purposes, which you're not entirely claiming to have to do with the genre proper. In some cases this works really well, obviously, but in other cases I can certainly see how it'd bug the hell out of some people; it has the same function as what we've all taken to calling "ironic" engagement with something, though without even the potential to be half-funny.

― nabiscothingy, Saturday, 30 April 2005 02:55 (twenty years ago)

Though for the record that refers only to like the 5% of IDM that actually does that, the same 5% I'm talking about above; no such issues with the bulk of the stuff, much of which just appears to be people who like IDM records and want to make some of their own.

― nabiscothingy, Saturday, 30 April 2005 02:58 (twenty years ago)

MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT HOPKINS HIGH....AND HE MAKES INTELLIGENT DANCE MUSIC

-- M@tt He1geson (matt@game[remove]informer.com), April 29th, 2005.

MY NOIZE KID CAN KICK YOUR IDM STUDENTZ ASS BEZIZZOTCH

― latebloomer: But when the monkey die, people gonna cry. (latebloomer), Saturday, 30 April 2005 03:20 (twenty years ago)

bumper sticker pissing matches r fun

― latebloomer: But when the monkey die, people gonna cry. (latebloomer), Saturday, 30 April 2005 03:21 (twenty years ago)

FAGIT MUSIC U MEEN

― FAT TOG, Saturday, 30 April 2005 22:34 (twenty years ago)

my step mother has no knowledge of music at all. i seriously think she probably hasn't even heard the beatles. in the early 90's i used to do a sunday evening 'ambient' club and her and my dad came along for a couple of hours because they could never get their heads round just what it was i did and wanted to see for themselves (i thought it better that they come to this night rather than the full on 120db bacchanalian drug frenzied techno club i did). after i had finished playing she described the last track i had played (by zoviet france) as 'abstract spatial voodoo trance' which i thought was pretty much spot on.

she now writes for the wire :-)

― stirmonster (stirmonster), Sunday, 1 May 2005 00:57 (twenty years ago)

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