Otto Matta

His dancers/drummers/singers and guitar were live. Anything else?

Are you serious? I saw her twice and never saw guys ironing. Seriously? Noooo, I don't believe you. If it's true maybe that's her British troupe that Warp can't afford to send over to the States.

I've seen a spectrum of live electronic stuff in my time and I really appreciate when an artist doesn't fake anything, like with excessive knob tweaking. I'd take just flat out DJing over that anyday. Mira Calix would roll cigarettes and smoke them between her tracks, played on CDJs, with an occasional knob tweak. I respected that. She wasn't faking it.

Yeah, great track, and I heard the original Mahadeva for the first time today, too! Sweeeet album.

SFX - Butterfly Trip...for the first time. Really cool track, along with most if not all of Trust in Trance 2.

Can't forget NHJOuno Reactor.

I love their earlier stuff. It had a spirit and sound to it that few if any acts have been able to reproduce since, perhaps with the exception of Ofer Dikovsky here and there.

I agree that it adds a lot to the music making process by having a hard synth in your set-up. I also agree with the midi controller recommendation for something cheap and highly useful, especially one that your software recognizes. Otherwise, any midi keyboard will work for at least simple processes. I'm using an old Korg that I had long before my software and it works nicely, but with no knobs to tweak, except for the obvious programmable joystick. Serves the purpose, though, because I prefer to play my melodies and rhythms live.

Long live BotFB! Great music, and getting greater all the time. And I really like the great description of forest music. For what it's worth: Charlie, feel free to eat my fuckin' shorts now.

Wow, I'm actually impressed, Nhjo. You've come a long way. This track is actually listenable, and has an original sort of atmosphere to it. It's a bit repetetive, but all the parts are cool. Keep it up!

It wouldn't be good for any artist to always get positive criticism. But only if the negative criticism is consistent then there's likely some truth to it, and then the artist can choose whether or not to adjust or learn from it.

This is almost exactly how I feel about Shpongle, except I dislike them for being highly overrated.

Great choices! Schnauss' first album really impressed me. I especially like Blumenwiese Neben Autobahn and Molfsee. His second album, A Strangely Isolated Place, is also very good, more mature, and really shot him into popularity. I haven't heard but samples from My Dogan, but I've heard a lot of Kettel's stuff and he's a fantasticly diverse artist with a pretty extensive output. If you like Kettel you'll really enjoy Plaid, especially the earlier stuff like Not For Threes and Rest Proof Clockwork. I also agree that Tri Repetae is overrated, with only a few outstanding tracks, but what somewhat makes up for it is disk 2, the Anvil Vapre EP, which has got some real gems on it. I still agree that Chiastic Slide, Envane EP and Cichlisuite are better choices. An acquired taste, for sure. If it's too harsh, try Arovane, who in my opinion does this sort of thing with more emotive punch (especially the albums Atol Scrap and Icol Diston).

He said he was going back to Bulgaria, so I'm sure he's up to his eye in dep chix and step mountains.

Sweet avatar, faze!!! One of the best yet! Edit: Oh, and NP: HIA/Namlook - S.H.A.D.O.

To me they weren't quite competent yet, but were getting there. Later releases attest to that. FMP.

Actually, I've been slowly but surely warming up to James' music. I still find his early ambient collections completely and horrifyingly unlistenable, but I've heard some tracks he did later that are truly elegant and beautiful. In other words, he knows how to draw, but sometimes, for some reason, he forgets. Or maybe he's like Picasso, who in my opinion was a crap sculptor but a great painter, and James can't sculpt.

It's just nasty. Autechre's gifts are with rhythms and sculpture of sound. They lack proficiency with melody, and the early stuff is pretty bad in my opinion. Jackson Pollack couldn't draw, but he figured out a way to make groundbreaking art anyway. Same with Autechre and melody.

Good points. Yeah, I would definitely put those albums into the "old school" of IDM, which to me is a VERY interesting time in electronic music. I've been avidly listening to music for a loooooong time and I've never heard similar chord, melody or rhythm structures. B12 stands out for me as an act that really put the hardcore sci-fi spin on melodic structure. I'm sure there were others. abasio - If you're interested in this old school sound, two very popular disks that played a big role in solidifying this sound are the Artificial Intelligence I and II disks from Warp that Astro mentioned. Again, they're widely available. I totally agree. Chiastic Slide was my first Autechre album and it totally blew me away at the time - changed my way of listening to music altogether. That and HIA's Freefloater. I might also recommend the Envane EP for a similar sound. I don't understand people's interest in their earlier albums like Incunabula and Amber, which to me sound pretty nasty.

I remember that, too!

Yes, there were and still are some techno elements in the genre - but most electronic genres came from techno, right? I personally think that it took a little while for IDM to solidify into a style, and at that point it didn't want much to do with techno or 4x4 beats. It wanted to be its own thing, and acts like Autechre, Plaid (and its various early entities), Boards of Canada and HIA were among the solidifiers. Namlook's music (and Plastikman's, for that matter), although great, to me never really strayed from that point shortly before IDM solidified. Which is fine, but I don't consider it definitive IDM, which in my ears is constantly striving to redefine the structure of electronic music. So to me the deconstructive element is not as narrow as it is definitive. And yeah, EACIV is a great album, but hopelessly unavailable. My Atol Scrap recommendation is the closest thing from what I've heard.

There are a couple of people here including myself who could be of great service to you regarding the IDM genre. It's my personal favorite. I know that Astro Cortex is also a fan, with his own set of likes and dislikes. IDM stands for "Intelligent Dance Music", which is sort of silly, but the good stuff backs up the awkward title. I prefer the term "Braindance". It started back in the early nineties and was pioneered by the Rephlex and Warp labels, both of which are still releasing music. As a style it is infamous and somewhat narrowly defined for having a deconstructed sound, similar in form and concept to Deconstructivist architecture, if you're familiar. If not, here's a quick link. The attempt is generally to deconstruct sound, to dismantle it in a way that only computers can, and put it back together in a different logical form. Many of the album covers represent this aesthetic, and are therefore very cool-looking. But not all IDM is abstract. There are different kinds, from heavily abstracted to not very abstracted at all. I prefer the moderately abstracted stuff, with nostalgic, sci-fi melodies and innovative beats. My recommendation to you would be to start with some of the now classic and timeless stuff Warp was releasing in the mid to late 90s, which is still widely available. Here's a small, unbiased list: Autechre - Tri Repetae Boards of Canada - Music Has the Right to Children Plaid - Not for Threes And my small, biased list would look like this: Arovane - Atol Scrap Isan - Meet Next Life n.Ln - Astronomy for Children Shuttle358 - Frame If you want to talk more about it with me personally feel free to PM me.

Yes, me too. One particular Arovane track from Atol Scrap made me cry 10x more than I would have otherwise while some shit was going down in my life several years ago. Same with a particular Zero 7 track durinig a breakup some years ago. I think the music that has brought me closest to crying for no reason other than the music itself (watery eyes but no tears) was Gorecki's Symphony No. 3, quite suitably called Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.