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.

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.