intelligent dance music up the khyber

[amw]

There is a certain form of British Ass Fucking Bullshit Techno that is called Intelligent Dance Music (IDM). I mean, it used to be called IDM. My knowledge of genre hairsplitting is at least 20 years out of date. Caring about what genre a song should be classified under is very teenager-y

Comments

[motodraconis]

Not all metal is the same, I find some metal (and some Black Metal) quite unbearable, the ambient and avant garde stuff mostly.* My brain literally cannot process music without tangible and interesting vocals, it just flies in one ear and out of the other.

I do wonder though, if the videos made Aphex Twin more accessible, once he started setting up his visual "brand" (with the creepy mask face) then everyone started talking about it, but who remembers the music? Even the youtube comments are mostly about the music+visual effect. I remember the stir that "Come to Daddy" made at work... but everyone was freaking out about the "screaming in the grannies face" video sequence. (Then again, I was working in a Games company at the time, so surrounded by artists... visual people like myself, and coders... non-committal in general! 😂

Alas, the stand alone music remains incomprehensible to me, my brain just isn't wired that way.

* I'm not an expert, but it occurs to me that the avant garde metal and Black Metal is in the same vein as IDM as you describe it, "dissonant clash of sounds and that kind of "tense" sound" personally I find that "avant garde" stuff utterly ghastly, though I have chums who seem to like it (inexplicably) stuff like SunnO))) Arg!

[amw]

There is a certain subgenre of metal that i think that i like, but i don't know enough to identify it. I think it's power metal? It's the one where there are lots of epic guitar riffs! Unfortunately words tend to get in the way of enjoying the music for me, which i think is how i ended up in electronic music land, because they distill the essence of what i like best about guitar music, and cut out all the stuff i don't much like.

I wonder if Aphex Twin has two parallel fan groups? Back in the 90s days, he was considered a highbrow musician, sort of "the thinking man's techno", up there with people like Brian Eno or something. But then somehow he broke out in the mainstream and there was the stretchy face video clip (going by memory here since the YouTube is blocked for whatever copyright reasons in Canada). I'm sure he must have found that all rather puzzling.

For visual artists like you worked with, did you follow the directors more than the musicians? Like (I just looked it up) Aphex Twin's was Chris Cunningham, and Daft Punk famously had Michael Gondry and Spike Jonze.