Idm

a predictable rejoiner, perhaps, but...
did it ever exist?

looking back, now that the individual styles that were labelled 'IDM' have split up into their own distinct camps, it looks to be more of an unwieldy umbrella term than to have been a particular sound, scene, or common approach (some 'idm' artists were explicitly influenced by techno, some way more influenced by punk, some rejected the dancefloor altogether while some maintained close links with it)

so, i guess the faux-naive noodling thing still exists (Morr music, and may be latterly the likes of black moth super rainbow?)
and the hyper-noisy jungle-derived stuff still exists (breakcore, like you say)
the glitchy, crunchy autechre-esque stuff still exists (skam in particular have been quite active this year i think, people like apparat get lots of attention, and some of the ghostly international/spectral takes on hip-hop and electro perhaps fall into this category...)

but now it feels less like these are all part of 'idm', than they are working in smaller stylistic scenes.

idm as breakcore? don't people dance to breakcore?

I recently saw Marc Leclair aka akufen at a sit-down laptop show playing some muzak to a movie/animation, and it may as well have been idm.

it is a telling sign that Warp are now reissuing the old Artificial Intelligence series...(same with Black Dog)...let the wringing begin...

shudder said:

idm as breakcore? don't people dance to breakcore?

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Well, if you can call it that - the preferred move is to sort of spaz about wildly until you get exhausted/feel a heart attack coming/your pills start to wear off. Or you get bored and decide to see what's going on in the other room.

I think blissblogger's got it dead right that breakcore is "the thinking man's stupid music", if you will. It's certainly great fun for half an hour at a stretch, but it gets samey very quickly, I find.

i really love breakcore when it 'hits'. i feel sometimes it gets unfairly shafted a lot of the time by the sort of person who decides they have to be sophisticated with their music selection now, and god forbid they can't 'rock out' a bit. there's an intensity within the areas of breakcore and choice hardcore (techno) that get me excited, something i can't seem to find in many other areas of electronic music, at least to the degree i like.

that being said, a lot of it is pretty bad to me. yeah, i like fun and stupid music. but you can still be fun, stupid AND good at the same time, which many of these producers seem to forget, which is why for the most part a large margin of it exists as novelty to me. fun for a bit, but very quick to pass.

i don't know about idm though. i guess i've always saw idm not really as a genre, but as a label associated area of music, one that has (or had) a large trickling-down effect on many smaller labels that were inspired by larger ones such as warp. they got branded with the term idm early on and as a result, many smaller labels who got influenced by them went with it, which in turn influenced hundreds of bedroom producers using the internet to make their own idm, perpetuating it even further. after a while it just seemed to be too much, and collapsed under it's own weight.

i for one am one of those influenced by it. back when i was 14 years old, i had heard this sort of sound and didn't immediately know what it was, but people kept saying it was 'idm'. and hey, i just went with it. it seemed like a great area of music with a lot of creativity and i didn't really think about it. but what seemed so great and solid at the time eventually fragmented into what it is today, leaving a ridiculous amount of indie-idm labels stopping all together.

overall i agree with what simon silverdollar is getting at. i feel it exists in some shape or form in many other areas of music, not really as it's own thing, not anymore. despite all this, i still listen to a lot of these albums a lot more now than i had 2 years ago.

someone, somewhere, long ago (maybe even somebody that posts here?) wrote something that resonates with me to this day (although clearly not enough for me to remember their name) about the distinction between "stupid" and "stoopid"...(the former being ignorant/meaningless/inconsequential, the latter being, well the same, but spectacularly aware of it)...the difference between REO Speedwagon and the Ramones, one might surmise...when IDM slums: stupid or stoopid?

Good amen-driven breakcore is my weak spot, I made the mistake of thinking I would therefore like all breakcore and ended up buying things like Doormouse and Kid606 - most of which left me very cold.

The whole amen rinsed sound gets put down upon as lazy, but I honestly couldnt care; you can just feed me that stuff until the day I die. Bong Ra, FFF, 0=0 - all good stuff.

As for IDM, it seems to have been given a variety of different names but its still there. Speaking of which, B12 release their 11CD boxset at the end of this year don't they? Can't wait.

I find it interesting that although they're generally presented as chalk and cheese, early 'IDM' (ie Aphex, Mu-Ziq, Black Dog) and hardcore have a lot of the same DNA - hip hop fans from the UK discover techno and start producing mad sounding records with fairly basic technology.

It's also interesting how naturally those early records precede early drill and bass like Hangable Autobulb or Ummer Bile Trax, particularly if you're used to the orthodox line that Aphex and Mu-Ziq basically realized that their music was boring so they'd better start again by coming up with a watered down version of jungle.

I do agree with what people said of IDM being a social kind of thing - the origins in the mailing list and how it's applied in most of my first hand experiences say it was (and maybe still is) a catch all for a wide swath of electronic music. Typically something with an ear to experimentation and depth, without veering too far into being truely conceptual experimentation. It never really had the strict definitions or even the shifting definitions that establish other genres, although you could argue that there is a certain strain of music that is most commonly labeled IDM - anything that replicates Aphex or Autechre's various sounds.

I think in 2007 I think alot of what was learned through "IDM" has been applied to all sorts of other genres and even pop music that even the social construct is kind of lost now. I think it's just as well.

Also i think it's kind of interesting to hear people's perception of breakcore. I think if Vsnares was never signed to Mu, I don't think people would generally draw a connection between breakcore and IDM, even though it would still be there with some artists, sonically.

i think its a shame it ever happened... some of the early bleep n bass stuff was great... i think it made all that so white... that its painful to listen to - i find it really funny that there is very little bass on aphex records...

its the smugest music around i think..., its like saying all other music is not "clever"


but mu, skam , rephlex etc are doing well are they not?

Need to distinguish culture of "IDM" from the music labelled with it I think. Realistically that music which was so labelled (ie electronic music derived from mid to late 90s Warp stuff basically yes?) could rather be thought of as a series of production tics... the "dance" bit of the name is every bit as misleading as the "intelligent" of course, since actually the classic canon of stuff (which is endlessly reiterated in a zombified fashion now) was rather the production ideas from various electronic avant gardes (both dance based- eg: Jungle, and more abstracted- eg: mille plateaux etc) refracted into a rather less challenging or vanguard form of electronic home-listening music...

gek-opel said:

Need to distinguish culture of "IDM" from the music labelled with it I think.

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Very much so. I think the reason that there isn't anything much referred to as IDM at the moment is that where the term was originally a catch-all term for a culture (or rather, a mailing list) that picked up on all sorts of interesting tangents to the core trajectory of dance music, it started to refer to a well defined genre involving a fixed set of stylistic tropes. The culture then zeroed in on the genre, which did what all genres do almost by definition and ended up endlessly retreading old ground. Consequently the culture was left fairly washed up too.

It's daft because there's all sorts of stuff around at the moment that would fit the classic remit of IDMl, but it doesn't get picked up on and extrapolated in the same way.

By coincidence I recently renamed the IDM folder in my mp3 archive to "wonky".

cutups said:

I do agree with what people said of IDM being a social kind of thing - the origins in the mailing list and how it's applied in most of my first hand experiences say it was (and maybe still is) a catch all for a wide swath of electronic music. Typically something with an ear to experimentation and depth, without veering too far into being truely conceptual experimentation. It never really had the strict definitions or even the shifting definitions that establish other genres, although you could argue that there is a certain strain of music that is most commonly labeled IDM - anything that replicates Aphex or Autechre's various sounds.

I think in 2007 I think alot of what was learned through "IDM" has been applied to all sorts of other genres and even pop music that even the social construct is kind of lost now. I think it's just as well.

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^totally my thoughts

&

lazybones said:

its the smugest music around i think..., its like saying all other music is not "clever"

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Its the people that came up with the term (in the USA) that have created a smug attitude it wasn't the artists decision to call it idm in fact ive only really ever heard the term used on the internet so to me its a pretty non-existent genre really, there is no real defining characteristics or aesthetics to pin it down with much like 'electronica' or 'nu rave', another genre name that has absolutely no bearing to the musical content but more for people would like to put themselves in a box.

blissblogger said:

perhaps IDM was less a style of music that a social constituency and/or a mode of consumption/set of attitudes that at different points attached itself to an array of sound
.

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so perhaps dubstep is IDM now? certainly, a lot of people who usde to be into the canonical IDM stuff are now quite involved in dubstep. but although this 'social constituency' carries over, i'm not sure that the 'mode of consumption' is the same- dubstep is so overwhelmingly music for the club rather than than the home.

henry s said:

it is a telling sign that Warp are now reissuing the old Artificial Intelligence series...(same with Black Dog)...let the wringing begin...

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they've always been available so it's not telling at all.

i think alot of minimal is just idm flattened out really.

apart from the artificial intelligence series, which pretty much coined it, i think the term IDM was a really big millstone for anything/anyone that happened to get stuck with it and that they were fairly keen to get away from it as soon as possible (i can think of a bunch of interviews where i used the term "intelligent" while talking to people and the reaction was pretty bad — occasionally i did do it on purpose, though.) after all, who's going to stand up and say; "well, actually dear boy, i like intelligent music, don't you know..."
i'm not so sure whether this was true in the states, but it's definitely the case in england. aside from the IDM list and certain journalistic pieces, i've never yet encountered anyone using the term IDM to describe what they were into, even if pretty much everything they listened to fell into that category — and, believe me, there were and still are plenty of them.
it was a hell of a broad and unweildy non-category, too, with plenty of crossover between different strands of music — what i mean is that slightly later in the day, at no particular point in time, it was entirely natural for people to love autechre, anti-pop consortium, el-p and the stuff on good-looking records, morr music, force tracks, perlon and kompakt equally. you're really looking at a way of listening and a certain set of aesthetic/cultural demands and expectations than a distinct genre. it's also interesting that 99 per cent of the things we're talking about here fit very neatly into that prog list that you put together a few years, ago simon.
the breakcore strand really is the exception that proves the rule here and i think throws us quite a way off the real issue of progressiveness, taste and all those other hoary old motors that are unfortunately actually pretty applicable here. it's also important to recognise the whiteness of IDM, too and the problematic nature of the term in relation to issues off class and race. Not something people would really want to be assocaited with for too long after this became obvious...
this one's to the other simon... you totally beat me to the dubstep issue! dubstep is definitely an IDM genre. it wasn't always, but it's certainly become that way. this actually happened more or less overnight, with the release of those rather funnily named rephlex grime compilations a few years back. if you were going to fwd pretty frequently at that point, as i was, you saw things shift dramatically within the space of a couple of months. at one point it was still a relatively mixed and recognisable offshoot of 2step - as well as hearing it in the music, you could see this in the crowd and the way they were dressed etc — then the music changed slightly, became breakier, more linear etc (i seem to remember warp courting oris jay and talking about a one-man style called "bleep and bass", am i hallucinating here marcus, or is that true?) and all of a sudden the audience underwent a pretty big shift, with a huge amount of what you can call IDM folks coming in. as it turned out, this was pivotal to dubstep's success. without this attention, i honestly don't think it would still be around and it certainly wouldn't be what it is today. also worth noting the whole discussion we were having about minimal/dubstep crossover a while ago. if this doesn't show that IDM is still with us, i don't know what will.