If it were ever undertaken to rank every genre label from most to least pretentious, “intelligent dance music” would almost certainly top the list. Other names were thrown around in the genre’s early years, but intelligent dance music, or IDM, was the one that stuck. The name can, of course, be forgiven when analyzing the rich and compelling scope of the genre’s output, innovation, and contribution to the world of popular music.
At the point of its inception, IDM was a UK phenomenon. Inspired in equal parts by the house revolution in America, and mid twentieth century avant-garde composers like Stockhausen, the many and varied artists that came to fall under its banner incorporated alien sounds, rhythms, and musical aesthetics. Ultimately, the one thing that stylistically united IDM artists was their unconventional approach to the production of electronic music.
To understand the importance of a musical genre, it’s useful to be aware of the music and culture that surrounded its birth. The IDM aesthetic was, in some sense, a response to European rave culture; acid house being the prevailing form of electronic music in England in the late eighties. In another sense, IDM was a response to popular mainstream music as a whole, a sort of anti-Britpop. It was music for an entirely different landscape than the one that the popular guitar bands of the day were representing. Richard King, speaking about seminal IDM label Warp’s first release in his book How Soon is Now? The Madmen & Mavericks Who Made Independent Music 1975-2005 writes “[Forgemasters’ “Track With No Name”] was an evocation of the nocturnal energy of an industrial city [Sheffield] in decline, whose empty, industrial spaces were being turned into illegal and autonomous party zones.” In other words, IDM became the backbone for its own party scene, one altogether more free of inhibition about what was acceptable rave music.
It’s worth mentioning that IDM was joined at the hip with the internet from the very beginning. It got its infamous name from an internet newsgroup called “The IDM List”. Started in August of 1993, it was a forum for the discussion of the burgeoning genre that had so far failed to obtain a popular label. It had a previous run of names including “art techno”. Aphex Twin would later suggest the term“braindance”, and Warp Records dubbed it “electronic listening music”. None of these names stuck, and for better or worse, Intelligent Dance Music remains the prevailing label. The genre’s connection to the internet went deeper than just its name; its fans gathered in internet forums like The IDM List to discuss artists and releases. In a move that almost certainly helped cement the genre’s reputation as elitist, one of the IDM List’s first posts was titled “Can Dumb People Enjoy IDM, Too?”.
Perhaps the most telling way to communicate the revolutionary nature of IDM is to compare the content of some of its most important records to the music that ruled the charts and the clubs at the time of their release. Note that this comparison is not an attempt to argue that the prevailing music in England during the rise of IDM was in any way vacuous or devoid of artistic merit; IDM was simply a compelling reaction to the ubiquity of those genres.
The late 1980s and early to mid 1990s were a time of resurgence for sixties guitar music revivalism in England. During the period that some of IDM’s most revered records were released, bands like Oasis, Blur, Pulp, and Suede were dominating the English popular music space. Each band had their own style, but the common undercurrent was a practically neck-breaking nod to the sixties. Oasis had The Beatles, Blur had The Kinks, Suede channeled Bowie, and Pulp was some sort of amalgam of the three.
Equally important to understanding the context of IDM’s birth was acid house and its inseparable connection with rave culture. By the time that the records discussed in this paper were released, acid house had largely run its course as an all encompassing cultural phenomenon. These albums, however, have much in common with their predecessors created in the shadow of the rave scene. By the mid nineties, the cultural movement centered around the resurgence of British art known as “Cool Britannia” and the Britpop juggernauts that kept it alive were all the music press or tabloids were interested in. It was to a backdrop of ecstasy and acid house fueled raves, and songs like Oasis’s “Live Forever” and Blur’s “Girls & Boys” that the following records were conceived, recorded, and released.
If the music community at large was tasked with assigning each genre a spokesperson, IDM’s would be Richard D. James, most popularly known as Aphex Twin. His vivid, cerebral, often rewardingly difficult music has become synonymous in the public eye with IDM as a genre. His most famous album is perhaps “Selected Ambient Works Vol. II”. Released in March of 1994, it is a record of ambient, sometimes unsettling textures. It is almost entirely devoid of any sort of percussion, preferring to take the listener on a two and a half hour tour of spacey, evolving, and occasionally very bizarre soundscapes. The process behind the creation of this record, like all three records discussed here, is difficult to pin down. James, in particular, is notoriously coy about his process, but it is known that much of his early material was made on a cheap casio sampler.
An amusing example of Twin’s contrarian nature is the naming scheme for the songs on the album. In its initial release, the tracks on the back of the record were identified by icons instead of titles. Does that sound odd? It gets downright confusing. Take a look at the UK version of the album art below:
Twin’s community website explains it like this: “ Each ‘pie’ symbol is divided into four sections (with the exception of one, which has five), with each section representing a song. One pie actually represents a side of one of the three LPs comprising the LP version of SAWII, with the size of the section of the pie representing the length of the song. Thus the album must come on three LPs with four songs on each side of an LP, except on side 2 of the second LP.” It was this purposely enigmatic attitude toward music that so endeared Twin and his contemporaries to their fans.
If Selected Ambient Works was a beatless repudiation of pop music as a project, Autechre’s “Tri Repetae”, released in November 1995, was a glitchy, involving declaration that IDM could be as exhilarating and engaging as any Britpop or vanilla “electronica” track. Not that it’s particularly bright; from its opening cut “Dael”, it’s obvious that the listener is in for a grimy, industrial-sounding, occasionally dissonant dance record. From the distorted, abrasive drums to the oft-minimal, spacious, sometimes even pretty atmospherics filling the spaces within the dense rhythms; this, like so much of the genre, is simultaneously inviting and off-putting. The Quietus’s Gary Suarez comments on the album “those who want noise can go find noise, but the inherent appeal of this beauteous music lies in its ability to make us feel something in spite of the noise.”
Perhaps the most immediately accessible of the three records discussed here, Boards of Canada’s seminal 1998 release “Music Has the Right to Children” is a wash of hypnotic, trippy analog sounds, odd, occasionally groovy vocal samples, and gentle pads. Equally beat-centric and atmospheric, this record is something of a musical blanket. In a sense, it feels like a bridge between “Selected Ambient Works” and “Tri Repetae”. It merges Autechre’s relentless and glitchy drum machines with Aphex Twin’s ear for enveloping, occasionally unsettling atmosphere. It adds something of its own, though; this isn’t just rote stylistic synthesis. Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson writes on the magic and enduring influence of the record: “The first thing to note is that Music Has the Right revealed Boards of Canada to be geniuses with texture, where god is in the details… Every IDM artist since has at least once labored over their modular unit to get a patch that sounds like one of the many brilliant sounds found here.”
Any discussion of the seminal records of early IDM is an exploration of the versatility and unique value these artists brought (and still bring) to the electronic music canon. The IDM movement wasn’t (and isn’t) just a bunch of pretentious artists making deliberately obtuse music (though there’s no doubt that that those people exist), it served as an alternate vision for what electronic music could be.
How, one may wonder, did such seemingly commercially nonviable music get released before the days of Soundcloud and Bandcamp? The IDM phenomenon was supported and distributed by a variety of indie labels built around the genre. Sheffield’s Warp Records is almost certainly the most important. They were home to all three acts previously discussed, and many more influential figures within the scene. It was their 1992 compilation “Artificial Intelligence” that helped codify the genre’s exploratory nature in a way not previously achieved by bringing together many of its foremost artists onto one record. Acts such as Aphex Twin (under the alternate moniker “The Dice Man”), Autechre, and B12 (under the moniker Musicology). It featured a mix of styles, from the driving and fairly conventional techno beats of The Dice Man’s “Polygon Window”, to the hypnotic ambient textures of Dr. Alex Paterson’s “Loving You Live.” That disc did much to launch these artists’ careers.
IDM isn’t just important within the context of insular internet newsgroups and the end of England’s twentieth century. America began producing heavyweight IDM artists in the nineties, and, like in England, various labels sprung up in places like Miami and Chicago. At the turn of the century, IDM was no longer an exclusively UK phenomenon. More recently, its influence can be heard in the production of more experimental hip-hop. Long Beach rapper Vince Staples’ 2017 release “Big Fish Theory” exemplifies a trend in some parts of the genre toward experimentation in sonics and song structure. From its overblown synth bass parts to its almost sudden descents into chaos, it feels right at home next to some of IDM’s more abrasive releases.
Perhaps the two most influential artists to be heavily influenced by the genre are Radiohead and Bjork. In their wake have come hundreds of lesser known artists who are influenced by the genre secondhand. The sounds that came out of the IDM scene in the late 80s and early to mid 90s may seem less startling now that they have been co-opted many times over, but they are just as compelling. The general consensus seems to be this: Very few artists who have attempted to recreate the atmospheres constructed by Aphex Twin, Autechre, Boards of Canada, B12, and the rest have truly succeeded. As is often the case, the original remains the gold standard, even as it paves the way for future exploration.
References & Further Reading:
“The History of Electronic Music Within European Pop: IDM .” EuroPopMusic.eu, www.europopmusic.eu/Newsletters/History_electronic_music_part_8.html.
“ The Intelligent Dance Music Mailing List.” Intelligent Dance Music Mailing List, music.hyperreal.org/lists/idm/.
“IDM Music Genre Overview.” AllMusic, Complex, www.allmusic.com/subgenre/idm-ma0000004477.
Cardew, Ben. “Machines of Loving Grace: How Artificial Intelligence Helped Techno Grow Up.”The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 3 July 2017, www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jul/03/artificial-intelligence-compilation-album-warp-records-idm-intelligent-dance-music.
“The Secret History of Warp Records.” FACT Magazine: Music News, New Music., 28 Nov. 2016, www.factmag.com/2012/04/17/oh-my-god-what-have-we-done-the-secret-history-of-warp-records/.
“The SAW II GRAPHICAL F.A.Q.” The Aphex Twin Community / Learn / F.A.Q / The SAW II GRAPHICAL F.A.Q, AphexTwin.Nu, 2001, www.aphextwin.nu/learn/98491895499398.shtml.
Wilson, Scott. “7 Pieces of Gear That Helped Define Aphex Twin’s Pioneering Sound.” FACT Magazine: Music News, New Music., FACT Magazine, 5 May 2017, www.factmag.com/2017/04/14/aphex-twin-gear-synths-samplers-drum-machines/.
“Thirty Years Ago, Britain Gave the World Rave Culture.” The Spectator, 10 Aug. 2017, www.spectator.co.uk/2017/08/thirty-years-ago-britain-invented-acid-house/.
Suarez , Gary. “Features | Anniversary | 20 Years On: Autechre’s Tri Repetae Revisited.” The Quietus, 18 Nov. 2015, thequietus.com/articles/19246-autechre-trirepetae-review-anniversary.
Richardson, Mark. “Boards of Canada: Music Has the Right to Children.” Pitchfork, Pitchfork, 26 Apr. 2004, pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/838-music-has-the-right-to-children/.
“Intelligent Dance Music (IDM).” Wofford.edu, Wofford University, webs.wofford.edu/whisnantdm/Interim/Handouts/Intelligent%20Dance%20Music.pdf.
Politano, Giovanni Coppola Cristina. “IDM Was the Romanticism of the New Millennium.”Noisey, Vice, 10 June 2017, noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/9k5qdd/idm-was-the-romanticism-of-the-new-millennium.
“IDM or Experimental Electronic Music – But With Vocals?” Rateyourmusic.com, rateyourmusic.com/board_message?message_id=5770399.