My Dance Music is Smarter than Your Dance Music
rsdio 
IDM, or intelligent dance music, is a genre that both is cursed with such a terrible name that it irks all who hear it and are enthusiastic about the music, and blessed with such a terrible name that it acts as a good way to keep out people who wouldn’t like or even just get it.
Genres are generally bullshit, of course, and I think IDM and related genres, techno and electronica, and the artists who get lumped into them, are only justified by being in good company. It’s characterized, I suppose, by its heavy reliance on digital sound manipulation: be it software instruments or sampled sounds. And the musicians you’ll find here are all technical savants, endlessly tweaking circuits and code to produce something perfectly complex and hard to understand.
Sometimes, often with the same artist, and possibly on the same (non-compilation) album, you may find lilting, ambient works or melodic beats and pianos, making for great music to relax, muse, or sleep to.
Glitches, or what sound like glitches, or maybe, what a kernel panic would sound like if you were inside the computer, feature heavily, and have since have birth to entire sub-genres crafted entirely out of pushing analog circuitry beyond its limits. It works well, lending anything from a rising panic to an intense rhythm to music. Rock, punk, metal, and so on, after all, depend heavily on glitchy, unclean music: distortion and overdrive, synthetic effects derived from the way real speakers sound when driven beyond their intended capacity; in the era of the blues greats, hollow-body guitars and primitive amplification gave the music fuzz, clipping, overtones, harmonics.
There’s jazz in there, too. Some of the tracks from Squarepusher are a genuine simulacrum, with the pixelated bits just cutting you a little bit.
I think it’s the glitches, the frenetically paced snares, the overdriven synthesizers you find in artists like Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Squarepusher that lend the best to your ear. It’s something to be terrified of in the modern age; something to lose yourself into with its infinite, fractal, abstract patterns flooding you. No, this is not something to dance to. This can be something to enjoy the complexity of, or chill out to, or hack code with it blaring while you’re caffeinated and/or drunk.
That was a long way to go just to say this: you’ll probably appreciate it if you’re a nerd.
Reader Comments (4)
I agree with your sentiment that IDM is a semantically problematic genre, especially since that I would ask if that marginalizes "techno" that doesn't fit into the genre? That it is somehow aconceptual and therefore unintelligent? I would question whether most IDM is even conceptual at all, aside from pushing our sensory responses to sound. Perhaps a project like Aphex Twin, which actively postulates different electronic genres, conceptualizing their phenomenology of form, and playing jokes on pop culture via a somewhat underground genre. There is certainly a movement to strip electronic elements down to their structural essentials, while still preserving something that might be called danceable. I'd recommend an artist like Pan Sonic, who do just that. Sometimes they forego beats entirely, especially with their side projects. But there is certainly a tendency for them and for other artists to have experimental interests, but also having a desire to fit that concern into a more accessible form, such as IDM. If you're not interested in even that though, there is certainly things that happily manage to dispose of tempo and metre, overwhelmingly so.
Whoa! Great one Casey. Looked them up to see if there are any upcoming shows planned but didn't see anything. If there are any shows coming up let us know!
Pan Sonic was pretty good too!
Orbital is the shit live btw.
I wouldn't really consider Orbital a real part of the IDM sub genre, they are fairly rooted in house, techno, and breaks.
I really dislike the term IDM but it fits sometimes, you'll notice the fit when you play some for a friend and get the "I don't get it" response. It isn't necessarily saying other dance music is stupid, but there is some degree of musical theory needed to appreciate the intricacies of beat structures, and some of the insane rhythms, and sampling techniques that get used.