IDM

A strange genre of music that seems to have a tagged name but has been one of the most difficult music genres to categorize. The acronym unofficially stands for Intelligent Dance Music. I have been supporting 'It Doesn't Matter' to be the words used in the acronym ever since my friend Calvin suggested it to me years ago. Seems more appropriate since most of the musicians don't play by any rules and all sound unique with few derivations, the good ones at least. They mostly make electronic music, use sound samples, sometimes making whole albums out of found sound. Ambient soundscapes permeate a lot of the music within the genre, as do intricate melodies. Perhaps most of all there are extremely well programmed/sequenced drum patterns that boggle the mind and sometimes flat out don't make sense to our Bach-influenced, Western music infused culture. And sometimes there are no drum patterns.

Classical Indian music and jazz come to mind as counter parts for this genre, but any rules for IDM musicians are usually made up by the creator of the piece. Usually no rules are followed, aligning it with some of the early experimental composers like Schoenberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schoenberg, Xenakis, John Cage, Stockhausen http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/St._im_Garten_Mai_2005_RGB.jpg, and many other men and women making electronic/compositional music that didn't follow the same compositional rules like most of their predecessors did.

With the cultural changes that took place in the mid to late 1960's, came a new wave of music with long lasting tangible effects. Morton Subotnick, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Delia Derbyshire, Stockhausen, Can, Cluster, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, Mort Garson, and many more laid the ground work for what has become a world wide phenomenon that still seems to be underrated even after years of being talked about in magazines, on message boards, in blogs, and on phones/people speaking at each. I want everyone to share the love I have for this music and hope that the musicians working their asses off do get the recognition they deserve, after many years in a dull light, obscured by non-recognition within the pop music industry game, and the lack of patience in the modern city dwelling human. Here is to patience and the understanding of aesthetic value.

I didn't really even scratch the surface there so here is a list of some of my favourite musicians in this genre:

Aphex Twin

Autechre

Arovane

Squarepusher

Boards of Canada

µZiq

Jega

Freeform

Phoenecia

Proem

Two Lone Swordsmen

Plaid

Aleksi Perälä

Lackluster

Isan

Michael Fakesch

Team Doyobi

and many many more....

here is a list I made on youtube of great IDM tracks: http://www.youtube.com/user/Atop77#grid/user/94D8D8BC4737EC23

music is a large part of my life, I used to say it was my whole life but I was younger when I said that....thanks for reading.

As a hobby I make mixed sets of music, in many different genres and here is my mix of various IDM tunes that make me feel the tingles.........  http://soundcloud.com/atop/atop-idm-mix-set

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