from the 2017 Pitchfork greatest-IDM-list (that ruffled a few feathers, that did, it was like negative catnip for nerds! I had nothing to do with the selection, honest, apart from being one of many who sent their ballot in)
Isolée: Rest (2000)
There was a moment, around the turn of the millennium, when IDM-aligned figures like Matthew Herbert started to embrace the slinky sensuality of the house template while weaving in glitches and clicks from the Oval/Fennesz world. The term “microhouse” was yet to be coined in 2000, but this is the undefined zone into which Rest slipped to wow the cognoscenti.
As the name hints, Isolée is a one-man-band, Rajko Müller. A German who spent much of his childhood in a French school in Algeria, his music is suitably cosmopolitan and border-crossing, connecting house and techno with ’80s synthpop and discreet touches of hand-played world music, like the Afro-pop guitar figure that flutters intermittently through “Beau Mot Plage” like a darting-and-dipping hummingbird. Müller’s sound works through the coexistence and interlacing of opposites: spartan and luxuriant, angular and lithe, crispy-dry and wet-look sleek, mechanistic and organic. Sensuous, ear-caressing textures juxtapose with abrasive tones as unyielding and chafing as a pair of Perspex underpants.
“Text,” the absolute highlight, is mystifyingly only available on the original 2000 compact disc. It’s an Op Art catacomb, a network of twisting tunnels, abrupt fissures, and pitch-shifted slopes that’s deliriously disorienting but never loses its dance pulse. Other tracks offer an exquisite blend of delicacy and geometry, like origami made out of graph paper, or echo the Fourth World electro-exotica of Sylvian-Sakamoto and Thomas Leer. We Are Monster, Müller’s 2005 follow-up, was excellent but a little too busy, losing the balance between minimal and maximal. So the debut remains Isolée’s true claim to acclaim, laurels on which Müller could Rest forever.
and my intro text
Party in My Mind: The Endless Half-Lives of IDM
At the outset, it needs to be said that “Intelligent Dance Music” is—ironically—kind of a stupid name. By this point, possibly even the folks who coined the term back in 1993—members of an online mailing list mainly consisting of Aphex Twin obsessives—have misgivings about it.
For as a guiding concept, IDM raises way more issues than it settles. What exactly is “intelligence” as manifested in music? Is it an inherent property of certain genres, or more about a mode of listening to any and all music? After all, it’s possible to listen to and write about “stupid” forms of music with scintillating intellect. Equally, millions listen to “smart” sounds like jazz or classical in a mentally inert way, using it as a background ambience of sophistication or uplifting loftiness. Right from the start, IDM was freighted with some problematic assumptions. The equation of complexity with cleverness, for instance—what you might call the prog fallacy. And the notion that abandoning the functional, party-igniting aspect of dance somehow liberated the music and the listener: a privileging of head over body that reinforced biases ingrained from over 2,000 years of Western civilization, from Plato through St. Paul and Descartes to more recent cyber-utopians who dream of abandoning the “meat” and becoming pure spirit.
And yet, and yet... Dubious as the banner was (and is), under that aegis, some of the most fabulous electronic music of our era came into being. You could even dance to some of it! And while its peak has long since passed, IDM’s half-lives echo on around us still, often in the unlikeliest of places: avant-R&B tunes like Travis Scott’s “Goosebumps,” tracks like “Real Friends” on The Life of Pablo, even moments on “The Young Pope” soundtrack.
You could say that the prehistory of IDM was the ambient chill-out fad of the first years of the ’90s, along with certain ethereal and poignant tracks made by Detroit producers like Carl Craig. But really, it all kicks off in 1992 with Warp’s first Artificial Intelligence compilation and its attendant concept of “electronic listening music,” along with that same year’s Aphex Twin album Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (released on Apollo, the ambient imprint of R&S Records). Warp swiftly followed up the compilation with the Artificial Intelligence series of long-players by Black Dog Productions, Autechre, Richard D. James (operating under his Polygon Window alias, rather than as Aphex), and others. Smaller labels contributed to the nascent network, such as Rephlex (co-founded by James) and GPR (which released records by The Black Dog, Plaid, Beaumont Hannant). But it was Warp that ultimately opened up the space—as a niche market as much as a zone of sonic endeavor—for electronic music that retained the formal features of track-oriented, rave floor-targeted dance but oriented itself towards albums and home listening. ELM, as Warp dubbed it—IDM, as it came to be known—was private and introspective, rather than public and collective.
Phase 2 of IDM came when other artists and labels rushed in to supply the demand, the taste market, that Warp had stirred into existence. Among the key labels of this second phase were Skam, Schematic, Mille Plateaux, Morr, and Planet Mu. The latter was the brainchild of Mike Paradinas, aka μ-Ziq— one of the original Big Four IDM artists, alongside Aphex, Autechre, and Black Dog. (Or the Big Six, if you count Squarepusher and Luke Vibert, aka Wagon Christ/Plug). Most of these artists knew each other socially and sometimes collaborated. All were British.
The two stages of IDM correlate roughly with a shift in mood. First-phase intelligent tended to be strong on melody, atmosphere, and emotion; the beats, while modeled on house and techno, lacked the “oomph” required by DJs, the physical force that would cause a raver to enthuse about a tune as bangin’ or slammin’. Largely in response to the emergence of jungle, with its complex but physically coercive rhythmic innovations, Phase 2 IDM tended to be far more imposing and inventive with its drums; at the same time, the mood switched from misty-eyed reverie towards antic excess or whimsy. Often approaching a caricature of jungle, IDM tunes were still unlikely to get dropped in a main-room DJ’s set. But by now, the genre had spawned its own circuit of “eclectronica” clubs on both sides of the Atlantic, while the biggest artists could tour as concert acts.
You could talk about a Phase 3 stage of IDM, when the music—not content with borrowing rhythmic tricks from post-rave styles like jungle—actually moved to assimilate the rudeboy spirit of rave itself: the original Stupid Dance Music whose cheesy ‘n’ mental fervor was the very thing that IDM defined itself again. This early 2000s phase resulted in styles like breakcore and glitchcore; these had an international following and, for the first time in IDM’s history, a strong creative basis in the United States. Drawing on an array of street musics from gangsta to gabba, upstart mischief-makers like Kid606 and Lesser made fun of first-wave IDM’s chronic Anglophilia, releasing tracks with titles like “Luke Vibert Can Kiss My Indie-Punk Whiteboy Ass” and “Markus Popp Can Kiss My Redneck Ass.” Around this time, IDM pulled off its peak achievement of mainstream penetration when Radiohead released Kid A—an album for which Thom Yorke prepared by buying the entire Warp back catalog.
Seventeen years after that (albeit indirect) crossover triumph, the original IDM crew continues to release sporadically inspired work. Autechre’s discography is quite the feat of immaculate sustain, Richard D. James unexpectedly returned to delightful relevance after a long silence, Boards of Canada remain a treasure. Label-wise, there’s Planet Mu, who appear to be unstoppable, hurling out releases in a dozen different micro-styles. Overall, though, you’d have to say that IDM as a scene and a sound doesn’t really exist anymore. But its spectral traces can be tracked all across contemporary music, from genius producers like Actress and Oneohtrix Point Never, to the abstruse end of post-dubstep, to Arca’s smeared, gender-fluid texturology. Its reach goes way further: I’m constantly hearing IDM-like sounds on Power FM, the big commercial rap/R&B station here in L.A. At the end of the day, stupid name though it may be, IDM has given the world a stupefying immensity of fantastic music. And its reverberations have yet to dim.
Someone in Italy asked me questions about Selected Ambient Works 1985-1992 upon the occasion of its 30th Anniversary. This is what I said:
There was this moment when some record labels astutely noticed that there was the beginnings of a demand for music that related to rave dancefloor sounds like techno but was designed for home listening – atmospheric, intricately textured, dreamy or pensive in mood. Artists had started to do tracks like that on the B-side of their dancefloor-target singles, or on the fourth track of an EP. Ambient interludes or stuff that had drums but wasn’t as pounding and body- coercive as the kind of techno a DJ would play. The two main labels that really spotted this development and saw that it could be the basis of album-length works – and album-oriented careers - were Warp, in Sheffield, England, and R&S, in Belgium. It was R&S who put out the Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92 and then Richard D. James signed to Warp. He was also doing that kind of thing through the label he co-founded, Rephlex.
If the rave scene of the period was marked by ecstasy, what drug could be associated with IDM?
Cannabis – and for some LSD perhaps. It’s also music that was associated with the after-party and the chill-out room – so music that fit the afterglow of MDMA but not so much the “I got dance like a maniac” phase. But overwhelming it’s cannabis. That’s why the robot on the front of Artificial Intelligence, the Warp compilation of Aphex-type music, is blowing smoke rings and puffing on a fat joint.
Why did IDM strike a chord with Silicon Valley geeks? And what effect did it have on ravers?
Electronic sound fits the aethetic of digital technology – and the musicians are using a lot of the same equipment as the Silicon Valley people. So there’s an affinity there on both levels. Also I think Aphex Twin type music is ideal for people who are working at computers – it’s hypnotic, it’s rhythmic but not “get up dance NOW”, there are patterns in it that are attractive to the ear but you can also tune out if you need to concentrate and it falls back very easily into being background music.
IDM didn’t get a lot of play on the rave dancefloor, it might get some play in side-rooms where people want to chill out after frenzied dancing. But also there developed a scene of chill-out clubs, people sitting around and smoking while listening to ambient and floaty electronic music.
What memories do you have related to the release of the album?
It was probably my favorite album of that year and certainly the one I played the most. I must have played it about a hundred times at least. Because it was a CD I quickly reprogrammed it to my favorite five or six tunes. But the whole album is brilliant.
What are your favorite tracks on the tracklist? And why?
I can’t be getting into reviewing the album, but my favorites are “Tha”, “Pulsewidth”, “We Are the Music Makers” and “Heliosphan”. “Xtal” is really dreamy and conversely "Hedphelym" is a really scary bit of dark electronic music.
What was Aphex Twin trying to tell us with the quote from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, We Are The Music Makers?
Well, I think it’s simply an honestly arrogant reflection of his self-belief – he knows he’s a genius. So that’s what he literally thinks musicians – the greatest musicians – do. They weave dreams.
In what elements does the album echo Brian Eno's ambient lesson?
Apart from “Xtal” and “Tha”, it’s not really an ambient album. It’s only ambient in comparison to the hardcore techno, jungle and gabber of that time, which was breakneck fast. Most of the tracks have beats and some are pretty propulsive – “Pulsewidth”. It’s music that has a physical element and a relation to dance music, but it pulls at your body gently.
But you can use as background music, something to fill the air like fragrance, so in that sense it can be used like ambient music. It’s a bit too insistent melodically and rhythmically to qualify as Eno’s definition of ambient being “as ignorable as it is interesting”.
What does it feel like to listen to the album again today thirty years later?
I haven’t listened to it.
What distinguishes Aphex Twin from Autechre and Boards of Canada?
Aphex Twin versus Autechre – well, it’s just much better music. It’s not afraid to be beautiful and it connects to actual human emotions that are relatable. Autechre have interesting textures but I don’t hear tunes like Richard D. James. Autechre have commanding rhythms but they’re not groovy, whereas with Aphex Twin there’s more of swing and feel – you can imagine dancing to them.
Aphex Twin versus Boards of Canada. Both are sublime melodists. But Aphex Twin has more interesting rhythms – again, you can imagine dancing to much of his music, whereas BoC is about the headnod. The way they use hip hop beats is very effective but as the brothers would admit, they have very little to do with club music. Aphex music is much more on the edge of rave.
Boards of Canada also have this consistently elegaic, nostalgic, wistful quality – the sense of childhood or a lost future. Aphex will go into that zone but generally sounds more aligned with the idea of the future or outer space, in that sense he’s more of a techno artist. BoC are more like a shoegaze band that when into sampling and loops.
Are some elements of IDM present in the conceptronica today? Or in what music?
Where I hear the textures of IDM is actually in a lot of the last several years trap and mumble rap – Playboi Carti, Rich the Kid, Migos, Lil Uzi Vert, Travis Scott, Young Thug. You get the blurry, idyllic textures and the bittersweet melody-loops. Even the vocal presence, fed through the glittering and glitchy textures of Auto-Tune, sounds very IDM-compatible – dreamy, sparkly, passively swooning. That kind of trapadelic sound is almost the sole bastion of minimalism in modern popular music, which is otherwise overly dramatic and busy.
Conceptronica has the thoughtfulness of certain kinds of IDM – like Oval or the label Mille Plateaux Fax – but it rarely has the kind of sheer melodic beauty of Aphex and Seefeel and Boards of Canada. Most of today’s conceptual electronic artists are trying to reflect or deal with issues related to contemporary society – whether it’s queer identity, racial injustice, rage against what’s going on politically, or it’s the stresses and distortions of personality caused by living on the internet and social media, that “always on” purgatory of today’s existence. So the sounds they make are often not pretty and they are rarely relaxing in the way that Selected Ambient Works could be. They are often trying to put you through an extreme or challenging experience. Or they are trying to command your full attention. Either way it’s not music – for me – that I can use in everyday life like I did the great Aphex Twin music.
introduction to Valerio Mattioli's book Exmachina: Storia musicale della nostra estinzione 1992 → which centers on Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of Canada, and is a genius work that someone needs to translate into English
The idea that certain kinds of music have a special relationship with the Future has a long history and continues to make a potent appeal to our imaginations—as listeners and thinkers, and as music-makers too.
In the early ‘90s, for instance, David Toop – a critic and a musician - wrote evocatively about a sensation of “nostalgia for the future” that wafted vaguely off the recordings of The Black Dog, a British group associated with an emerging genre briefly identified as “electronic listening music” but later permanently rebranded as Intelligent Dance Music or IDM.
The notion is not limited to professional analysts and champions of music. William Gibson, in his 1996 near-future novel Idoru, ventriloquizes his own insight through the character of Mr. Kuwayama, a Japanese entertainment executive, who observes that pop “is the test-bed of futurity”. Jacques Attali, in his classic 1977 treatise Noise: The Political Economy of Music, constructed an entire theory of music’s evolution based around the belief that music is prophecy. But his argument is not so much about the formal properties of music (say, increased tolerance for dissonance, as the title Noise might suggest) as the structures and hierarchies that music engenders around itself. Attali’s focus is on the modes of music making, distribution, and consumption, which he sees as a preview of emerging forms of social organization.
As someone who’s dedicated
his life to magnifying the power and significance of music, this kind of talk
is very much to my taste: it stirs my patriotic feelings about music as an area
of human existence. Through my personal history of listening and the accident
of the era I was born in, I’m wired to seek out and recognize “the future” as
it manifests in music, and equally primed to be entranced by arguments and
narratives that present music as the herald of a world to come.
So in many ways I’m an
ideal reader for Valerio Mattioli’s extraordinary book. It’s a feat of
hyper-interpretation that detects the flexing of the Zeitgeist within the
discographies of just three operators, preeminent in a field that is relatively
speaking a marginal sidestream of popular music, the aforementioned genre-not-genre
known as IDM. To those who know them, Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of
Canada are gods, whose every last scrap of recorded work warrants decoding by
the devotees. But even these cult believers will be taken aback by the
intensity of Mattioli’s scrutiny and the scale of the claims he makes.
Exmachina is an archeology of the
future embedded in music made a quarter-century or more ago; a future that is
now our present. As with Attali’s theory, that futurity is not so much in the
surface trappings of the music – the coldness of synthesized sound, the domineering
mechanistic rhythms – nor even in the imagery wrapped around it (often
“futuristic” in a way that was even at the time fairly familiar and occasionally
bordered on sci-fi kitsch). The futurism resides more in the deeper grammar of
the music and the subjectivity that the music proposed, modeled, and elicited; a
future that the music in some way trained the listener for, through the molding
of perception and instilling of affect.
Although the subject of
Mattioli’s book is the latent future in music some of which is 30 years old
now, the future that has come true and is now our digital everyday, in other
ways a big part of the pleasure of reading it for me is frankly nostalgic. Exmachina
is a kind of time machine: it creates a delicious sensation of being plunged
back into the early ‘90s and immersed in all the wide-eyed excitement
about the oncoming future that seemed to be manifesting itself through electronic
dance and non-dance music, swept up once again in the fevered intellectual
climate of that time.
In 1992, computers had
become widespread at work and in domestic spaces, but they didn’t dominate our
existence. Broadband was still many years away; dial-up was cumbersome and
time-consuming, and when you got on the internet, there was hardly anything to
see (which was just as well given how long it took a page to come up). Almost
no one had email; mobile phones were still in their infancy, in terms of
widespread usage and the things you could do with them. None of the commonplace
“superpowers” of today – wi-fi, search engines, Siri, social media, etc –
existed, and some weren’t even imagined. The digital realm existed in a cordoned-off
zone of our existence. Yet precisely because of this, digital technology could
then carry with it the scent of the future—an alluring or alarming aroma,
depending on your inclinations.
For most people, the
places where you could get the most pungent advance whiff of how things were
going to be were music and videogames. They offered the hardest hit of futurity
that an ordinary person could access - and even more so if that person happened
to make music themselves. As well as the Promethean rush and world-building buzz
of grappling with machines and software that by today’s standards are laughably
rudimentary and clumsy, electronic musicians in the ‘90s were conceptually
stimulated by emergent forms of technology outside of the sonic realm,
including things that were then barely more than rumors or pipe dreams.
Concepts like virtual reality and surveillance provided imagery for techno and
jungle artists long before VR became commercially available or CCTV became
omnipresent in some countries.
The polarities represented
by VR and CCTV – the artificial pleasuredome versus the Panopticon –
relate to a curious bi-polar quality to the writing about digital culture
during the 1990s. The naïve optimism and excessive dread were two sides of the
same coin: a euphoria that flipped so easily into dysphoria. Reading theorists
like Arthur Kroker, Paul Virilio, Donna Haraway, Sadie Plant, Erik Davis, Mark
Dery, Jaron Lanier, Kodwo Eshun (and many of these names pop up in Mattioli’s text),
all it took was to tilt your angle of reading slightly and the exultation could
be taken as denunciation. The fervor and fever of the prose would be the same
in either the utopian or dystopian modalities. With some of these writers, it
was never clear whether they were anticipating or flinching from the posthuman
future. And some former evangelists have subsequently morphed into Jeremiahs,
writing books with titles like You Are Not A Gadget or New Dark Age:
Technology and the End of the Future.
With music in particular,
it was an exhilarating time to be a critic. For someone like myself or Kodwo Eshun
or the young Mark Fisher and Steve Goodman (both then associated with the
para-academic outfit Cybernetic Culture Research Unit), you rarely found
yourself using reference points from history. You couldn’t resort to
coordinates based on existing earlier music because the new music was going
right off the map. The rapidly advancing and mutating tones and beats put
pressure on you to generate new tropes and concepts. Hence the proliferation
of neologisms and invented genre terms. And the posthuman feeling of the
music, its seeming absence of human touch, also seemed to demand a
depersonalized analysis that attributed a purposive sentience to the way that
individual tracks unfolded and that entire genres and scenes evolved.
Mattioli reinhabits this mindset, this ecstatically paranoid sense that the
music is independent of human designs and has its own dark agenda. Humans
didn’t make the music; the music is remaking – and undoing – the human as a
category. “We must change for the machines” and “human viewpoint
redundant," as the video art / theory collective 0(rphan)d(rift>), put
it in a 1995 book called Cyberpositive, a delirious collage-text infused
with their experiences of going to techno clubs and being mangled mentally by
the combination of loud music and hallucinogens, written in a tone of mystical
masochism.
Mattioli entered a similar
kind of mind-state when writing Exmachina. But rather than reach it
through immersion in the congested darkness of the rave space, it was the covid
lockdown’s enforced isolation that pushed him into a state of creative paranoia
in which everything radiated significance and hitherto hidden patterns pulsated
into visibility. Decades before wi-fi, Baudrillard imagined the
tele-connected citizen of the future as essentially living inside a satellite, a sealed pod in orbit around the
void where society once was. Plugged into networks, this was a new kind of
porous self, vibrating in a perpetual “ecstasy of communication. All
secrets, spaces and scenes abolished in a single dimension of
information.” A desolated self “open to everything in spite of himself,
living in the greatest confusion... He is now only a pure screen, a switching
center for all the networks of influence." That describes how many of us
having been living during 2020 and 2021. Mattioli took the pandemic trauma and
used it to create an adventure close to home. This is the story of where the
music took his mind.
