How much did late-90s IDM define today's music

Maybe you're right though, the fractured DSP stuff is definitely linked to current dance music (clicks and cuts became plips and plops, it's all a much of a muchness), whereas Drill'n'Bass is only being pioneered by Venetian Snares and a few others any more and sounds pretty stale if not put to the best use. What about Plaid etc?

Timbaland may not listen to Autechre, but Outkast definitely listened to Photek.

re: "Rico's Helly" - Weatherall was always ahead of the curve, no matter what he was doing. the guy's career plays like a future broadcast beamed in from 2-3 years on.

i have a couple hip hop questions for you later, if you have any spare time

I don't believe IDM is actually very influential at all right now, and any sonic similarities are due to the available technology, the evolution of the available software over the last five or so years etc. I don't believe Jona is actually sitting down going "ooh, I'll do something that sounds just like Plaid" or whatever.

flaming lips sound like billy ray cyrus

this thread inspired me to go and check that supa dupa fly will be ten in 2007.

exactly what i was thinking as i was composing my post.

i was also thinking of the tortoise box that came out this year. as in, there is probably a way to connect the dots from experimental british dance music through tortoise to something happening now (i got to wilco and stereolab and stopped). the actual path is probably from british dance music through basic channel to luomo/m.r.i/force tracks on to aaliyah. there's probably some obscure split 12" on clear that ties it all together.

ooh, i'll have to check and see if i can't mix them. Tewe I thought always sounded a bit like late-90s R'n'B.

Absolutely. And it became a huge millstone because each new record was supposed to show radical progress, and IDM became this arms race of "newness" that nobody could really keep up.

IMO part of the appeal of the first selected ambient works is that it sounded old upon release.

sounds a lot like d&b too!

Agreed ... I'm sure I've made this point on other threads, but IDM prided itself on being electronic music made by and for people who preferred hearing music in their bedrooms. Techno for people who figured themselves too cool for going out dancing. Blame the Artificial Intelligence comps for helping to popularize this attitude.

IDM had a short shelf life because hanging out in your bedroom and refusing to go out dancing is, uh, fucking lame.

No, it just became unfashionable to indie rockers (as will dancing soon enough, hopefully)

This wasn't the original intention though - RDJ/Squarepusher/Black Dog were definitely dancefloor oriented until all the lamers decided that dancing was bad and stupid.

i don't think tortoise where very influenced by experimental british dance music at all! they did have a few percussive, trackier moments like a simple way to go faster than light that does not work and almost always is nearly enough, but it sounds much more like a herbie hancock / neu / techno fetish to me.

i don't know this track. does the title refer to drugs?

claude von stroke sounds like villalobos?

7-8 years ago nobody sounded like villalobos? wouldn't that rule out villalobos as an influence? how fast does influence move? maybe villalobos was influenced by the same people as other modern producers? (atom heart??)

"Of course there are OTHER important influences on the current sound of electronic dance, but that doesn't negate the fact that IDM probably IS an influence of some significance."

hedge a little?

please argue me out of my corner jacob ...

i just think if you want to talk about the influence of IDM on current dance music microhouse is a weird way to go about it. i always thought of microhouse as the sound of early IDM dudes (like the voigts and the whole clicks + cuts axis) coming to grips w/ lusher deep house / chicago house sounds.

to me, villalobos is like all about the strong influence that proper house exerted on IDM, not the other way around!!

i always thought that was the influence on 1950s musiqe concrete

but hey, i've never owned any musique concrete records, so what do i know?

I think the main influence of IDM on current sounds is the use of self-consciously non-musical sounds to substitute for traditional elements of a track.

i always thought that was the influence of 1950s musique concrete. but hey, i've never owned any musique concrete records, so what do i know?

i feel too shitty to do this today.

Yes! Which is the same thing as saying there are elements of IDM in modern dance music! Doesn't matter who came first or who influenced who, just that the influences are there. Obviously it's retarded to claim that IDM was the single forerunner of everything played in clubs in 2006 but it is fairly likely to have had some influence given its popularity 10 years ago.

What IDM did was explore the tools first and the tools created the sonic vernacular of the last few years.

Microhouse wasn't Villalobos or whoever "coming to terms" with IDM or house, it was house guys looking for a way to make records cheap and easy like the IDM guys.

It is all about the TOOLS.

1) list of IDM artists of the 90s
2) list of current genres

then we can start breaking it down.

i am listening to a disjecta album right now AND IT SOUNDS LIKE DUBSTEP OMG

That may or may be true in dance music, I don't really pay enough attention to know, (Hey! What am I doing in this thread!) but it seems to me that there's a genre or two where Roland drum sounds are very much in vogue at the moment.

I think this is otm. Microhouse needed softsynths and vst effects to happen, it did not need IDM's music or structure to happen. When you actually use the programs a lot of the mystery of computer music disappears immediately. I had a friend who was really into Reaktor for awhile(and then he went nuts and went Csound and MaxMSP and then went to Calarts to design networks that could write poetry, but that is a different story...) and he said that as he learned new functions or modules within Reaktor he realized that big IDM artists based whole albums on fucking with one or two modules in that program and the modules did all the work for them.

The reason why Microhouse seemed like a natural outgrowth is because you could not make an entire record with a computer at first. You had limited processor power, AND the established guys already had hardware studios, so the two were kind of integrated for awhile. It is why the first Button Down Mind of Dan Bell is dope and the second one isn't. It is the difference between software and hardware blended and just software. VST synths and hardware reverbs, softsynths bussed as audio through hardware mixers ect... VS just VSTs rendered in the box and sent to the mastering lab as a .wav.

The thing that I *personally* have had such a problem with is that I know how these records are made. Hearing a Someone Else record or whoever is minimal right now doesn't do anything for me because I know the software hoe tactics they are using and I don't think the software sounds good to begin with. The reason dance music went to shit this decade is because electronic music via IDM(and in hindsight I see IDM as having an extremely pernicious long term influence on electronic music in general...)became computer music by default. It did this about 10 years too early. the technology just isn't there yet and it doesn't sound musical yet. Anybody who tries to tell me Clicks and Cuts sounds better than the Instrumental side of We Can Make It by Purple Haze is getting smacked.

The whole repress/comp movement is due to the fact that modern dance music sounds like shit. Everything is made in ableton and sounds like it was mixed and mastered by sosmebody who has extreme hearing damage from club systems. You can't mix it with anything because it is so much louder and harsher than older records. When the technology matures dance music in America will grow again. I suppose I am just randomly bitching now, but I have bought about 6' of dance vinyl this year and about 3" of it are new 21st century releases.

How much of my perception of new music based on objective observation(oxymoron, I know...if we see a color and call it blue, externally the object is likely to have blue characteristics...) and how much of it is just being stuck in a 1990's Detroit timewarp?
I am finding good new music on random old 12"s, the new stuff leaves me cold.

I love Black Replica tho, you all are sleeping on the new Gerald Donald.

There are two opposing directions in dance at the moment. There is the stuff looking backward(CR78, 808 and 727 at the moment although 909 seems passe) and the modern "right now" stuff which sound like .wav samples fired in abelton with impulse. It is funny, but the Roland machine that has seen the most interest lately is the cr78/8000. Broadcast used one on the last album and it is coming back as an 80's new wave throw back ala Jah Wobble's How Much Are They. I guess CR's have gone up to like 500usd in the last few months which is about double what they were worth a year ago. Rock people are using that one a lot right now.

The real change is that people don't want to spend a week doing a re-edit with an akai s3000 and a lexicon when they can do it in an hour with soundforge and ableton live. Computers are cheap and they are real easy to use. Spend a week making music with actual audio instead of data files and you will understand immediately.

I am not trying to hijack this thread with music dorkitude, but the tools have more to do with the development of electronic music than the records themselves do.

All those guys are using MPC's and Motifs at the moment. There is the funny thread from back in the day when ILM's dance intelligensia was having a caucus on hip-hop's use of mentasm stabs and other bread and butter dance sounds and they did not realize that the cross over happened because these 15 year old staple patches are now all presets in the "dance" sections of the flagship romplers at guitar center. The cross over happened when hip hop guys started looking for sounds in the dance folder instead of the hiphop and rnb folders. Timbaland and Lil' John don't dig crates for obscure T99 side-projects, they get the sounds second hand via presets.

And the current rap/r&b 808 lovefest is descended in one way or another from Miami bass. Most of the hiphop producers that were listening to dahnce music weren't using 808s anyways.

i imagine the same people who were buying GAS records in the early 90s are buying basic replay and rhythm & sound releases. but what about people who listened to aphex, drill+bass, autechre, disjecta, two lone swordsmen and so on? what have they moved on to? dubstep for one, obviously, but what else?

is there any other "cognoscenti" oriented music right now, other than dubstep and microhouse?

Given they'd be in their 30s I imagine a lot of the former IDM enthusiasts probably have devoted themselves to retro concerns - splashing out on dub and krautrock issues etc. A big proportion of that crowd got into indie hip hop too at the beginning of the millenium - via Prefuse 73, Anti-Pop Consortium etc.

I've been listening to lots of dance music for a long time, and as a musician, I have some curiosity about the process behind it, but I've always found it somewhat mysterious as I'm not very skilled with or knowledgeable about the high tech aspects of the music.

Thanks for enlightening me! More please!

breakcore?

I'm a little more forgiving about their unfamiliarity with modern gear because it changes so quickly and there really is very little options for learning about it beyond using it. You can pick up a book on basic music theory or on how to write a pop song, but there are little-to-no readily available resources about making Techno or DnB tracks.

I've played music my whole life and I find learning about electronic gear and composition to be very intimidating.

this is going to turn into "dude you can't say bob dylan is better than eddie van halen if you don't work at guitar center"

I dunno whether the most dance music is made on softsynths and drum machines. I asked one guy (releases on Traum) what kinda synths he uses and he said "Everything is made from really really really high quality samples."

The label Mille Plateaux focuses on concepts like virtuality, noise, machinism and digitality. In the most simple case, digital music simulates something that does not exist as a reality; it generates something new. It is the result of the teamwork of numerous authorities such as the 'musician', the programmer and the authority of the software program. Today, computer digital music can be seen as screen-based music, i.e. sounds become visible and images audible, but one can often forget that there is no mutual correspondence; and that this is simply a mechanism whereby a given program secretly directs the programmer towards significant ways of performing, creating apparently absolute relationships between image and sound. On the other hand, with the increasing complexity of software, the programmer loses insight into internal communication structures. Such complex programs are full of errors and can even act on their own initiative. Programmers and musicians who navigate through today's systems function as designers. But this is less a question of the design of a program's operation surfaces but of the programming of software and the navigation by its logic. One has to discuss the medial conditions of digital music, the more user-friendly the software, the less transparent is the medium itself; i.e. the more transparent the functions of a computer or a synthesizer (say, with the use of preset sounds), the stronger the medium proves to be non-transparent. Digital music is more about opening up given program structures; internal ramifications and program hierarchies are to be discovered.

You want a little case study of a dubstep/IDM geek ?
Why don't we use my musical path.

It goes something like:

Beatles/Nirvana-->Rage Against The Machine--->

Nu-Metal(Deftones)-->Radiohead (Especially Amnesiac)-->

Venetian Snares-->discovering Aphex Twin---->

Getting bored of drill'n'bass ---> Dizzee Rascal-->

Finding Kode 9's site ---> Rephlex Grime Comp--->

Geeking out over Plasticman/Plastician ----->Digital Hardcore--->

Really Geeking out over the Bug ---> Digital Mystikz--->

Wondering where these guys got their ideas from---> Jungle and 2-Step

2-step makes me curious about Garage ---> Larry Levan

The only reason I give a shit about house and techno is because the musicians I idolize idolized Juan Atkins and Larry Fingers.

And Dub is its own reward. (I'm 22 by the way)

Understanding the basics about how the software works is enough. If you watch somebody play guitar then it's easy to understand how the instrument works, it's not like you need to "demo" the guitar in a shop and learn how to play a few chords to open your eyes to the usefulness of the instrument. (this way, we avoid the problem that Vahid mentioned, where discussions tend toward techie shop talk)

I do believe that if a critic chooses to use technical terms or music theory terms or wants to talk about the production in dance music (which is often an important factor), they need to get it right.

Throwing in tech talk to make your criticism sound "smart" is a bad move if you don't know what you are talking about.