1975–1999 · 250 albums
The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
The 250 best electronic albums of the 20th century, 1975 to 1999: the years when the machine stopped being an effect and became the instrument.
- Albums
- 250
- Artists
- 176
- Most represented
- Ambient techno · 22
- Busiest year
- 1994 · 34
How this list was made
Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 85-92 takes the top place. Below it, 176 artists share 250 positions, and 50 of them appear more than once. The list bunches hard in the middle nineties: 1994, 1995 and 1997 contribute more than thirty albums each. That is not a bias in the ranking. It is when the music was inventing its dialects fastest. Ambient techno leads the genre count, then IDM, then Detroit techno and drum & bass.
Every entry also carries three measures that disagree with the ranking on purpose: a dancefloor placing, an influence placing, and an external-poll position where the record has one. They are not decoration. Selected Ambient Works 85-92 is first overall and 193rd on the dancefloor. That gap is an argument about what the record is actually for, and reading the three against the main order is the most useful thing on any album page.