Retrospective: Intelligent Dance Music

If you want to start an argument, just mention intelligent dance music – a much-maligned name that still comes closest to defining a movement

Genre tags are often controversial, but rarely are they rejected wholesale by the artists they’re meant to describe. IDM might be the most extreme example of that: a genre that most of its proponents don’t claim to be a part of, and a name almost designed to cause conflict.

There’s a simple reason that almost every record shop in the world categorises music by genre. It’s an effective way of guiding listeners through the diverse styles on offer. The problem – and why so many artists feel that genres are restrictive – is when people’s preconceptions about genres limit creativity. Artists are understandably frustrated by the implication that their music should follow pre-defined rules.

In the case of IDM, the problems go even deeper. As a new sub-genre of techno emerged in the wake of the 1992 Warp Records compilation Artificial Intelligence, a tag quickly followed. The term IDM (intelligent dance music) was coined by a US-based email mailing list – a kind of forerunner to message boards and forums – that focused on the sound, and somehow the name stuck.

The term was applied to a cohort of artists whose impact on electronic music is a lot less hotly contested than the genre tag. Artificial Intelligence collected music by artists including Autechre, Speedy J, Richie Hawtin, B12 (then known as Musicology) and Richard D James (aka Aphex Twin) under his very rarely used pseudonym The Dice Man.

Artificial Intelligence wore its influences on its sleeve, quite literally; the cover art depicted an android in an armchair, apparently listening to records by Kraftwerk and Pink Floyd. Inspired by sci-fi as much as the dancefloor, the sound reflected the trend for a more expansive approach to techno, but the name immediately felt restrictive.

The term IDM was problematic largely because it implied that other dance music wasn’t intelligent, but also because it suggested that the music itself was chin-stroking, cerebral fare meant for armchair listening. Even a cursory skip through the back catalogues of the artists involved made clear that they were all more than familiar with the functional requirements of club music.

Musically, the genre expanded over the course of the next decade, from the global domination of Aphex Twin to the increasingly complex, nuanced output of Autechre, the nostalgic, melodic approach of

Boards Of Canada, and the brutally funky bass workouts of Squarepusher. In a show of his characteristic tongue-in-cheek humour, Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label coined the ironic term ‘braindance’ to describe the music of their artists.

By the early 2000s, journalists had grown a little more wary of tagging artists as IDM, hence why the genre is still so closely associated with the ’90s Warp Records output and its offshoots.

The sound and its influence still lives on to this day, but we won’t fall into the trap of naming any artists … for obvious reasons! Because if there’s just one lesson that we can take from IDM, it’s that genre conventions can be just as restrictive as they are helpful.