Warp's second Artificial Intelligence compilation was released in 1994, featuring posts from the mailing list in the sleeve notes. During this period
the experimental electronic music produced by Warp Records artists such as Polygon Window (an alias of Richard D. James), Autechre, LFO, B12, Seefeel, and The Black Dog, gained popularity among electronic music fans, who were beginning to call the music IDM. Lesser-known artists on the Likemind label and Kirk Degiorgio's A.R.T. and Op-Art labels, including Degiorgio himself under various names (As One, Future/Past, Esoterik), Steve Pickton (Stasis), and Nurmad Jusat (Nuron) were also branded IDM, along with artists like Björk and Future Sound of London. The majority of the IDM during this era was produced in Britain, with a few exceptions, such as Sun Electric from Berlin, coming from other parts of Europe.
http://groups.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=groups.groupProfile&groupID=103273782&MyToken=5f96f727-5a92-45eb-83d5-e23c6a6699de
ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO
EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC
Since the Futurists' early experiments with Noise making machines, music has been put under the knife by a long line of sonic inquisitors. It's been reduced to a drone by the Minimalists, diluted to sonic wallpaper as Ambience, subjected to the hazards of Free Improvisation, then spliced, diced and finally pulverised into atoms by the white coated boffins of the Musique Concrete and Early Electronic Music Studios. Nowadays the laptop generation have taken things to the subatomic level and beyond.
Such explorations have gradually filtered through to the world of rock in the form of Krautrock, Industrial Music and, er, Post Rock (that's nothing to do with stamps, in case you were wondering). Meanwhile Dance Music has given us the distinctly non-danceable Intelligent Dance Music, aka Electronica. And then there are many maverick figures who resist classification. You'd have to say they were None of the Above. And pretty much all of this comes back to the work of one man; John Cage.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/experimental/guides/experimental/#guide
IDM refers to a style of experimental electronic music with an emphasis on unconventional sequencing and processing which sets it apart from traditional dancefloor techno and house. Some IDM is influenced by earlier styles; for example, the music of B12, Kirk DeGiorgio, and others incorporates elements of jazz. Other influences include musique concrète and avant-garde classical composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis; and early hip hoppers like Mantronix. The initials IDM appeared in music magazines during the genre's first wave in 1992 – 1993, but the term caught on with the formation of the IDM electronic mailing list in August 1993. Initially, the discussion list focused on the music of Richard D. James (Aphex Twin) and the Rephlex Records label, as well as various forms of electronic dub by artists such as The Orb, Richard H. Kirk, and Future Sound of London. In fact, any form of new, percussive electronic music that was not easy to categorize as pure house, trance, electro or techno was fair game for discussion; it was not unusual for artists such as System 7, William Orbit, Sabres of Paradise, Orbital, Plastikman and Bjork to take equal footing as IDM alongside Autechre, Atom Heart, and LFO.
http://bethbagel.blogspot.com/2006/01/oh-thats-what-idm-means.html
IDM artists, as stated before, draw from any and all influences, including non-musical ones. For example, Squarepusher created a micro-genre within Intelligent Drum and Bass called Drill and Bass because of his use of electric drill sounds in place of snare drum or other percussive instrument sounds. IDM artists are also notorious for using recordings of natural conversations. Scanner [Amazon.com] is one such artist. As he stated in an interview, “…when I came across the scanner device about five or six years ago, it was a means of entering a very vulnerable intimate space without somebody knowing, achieving the ability to actually find a very clear sound, a very clear signal, and hear people that were not aware they were being listened to so they would talk in a very comfortable and very easy way” (Shapiro 184). Electronic music has always attracted musicians because of how it lends itself to experimentation.
Utilizing non-musical sounds and making them musical is a compositional technique only fully at the disposal of a composer working in the realm of electronic music. IDM artists take full advantage of those kinds of experimental capabilities.
http://ryan-rapsys.com/essays-writings/intelligent-dance-music-music-for-the-head/
do I make a point now?
(νομιζω το ξεφτυλισα λιγο ;D)
