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Ranked list

The 10 Best IDM Albums

IDM as the listening tradition that grew out of British techno and rave in the early nineties and never stopped mutating: Warp's Artificial Intelligence generation, Rephlex and Skam, drill and bass, glitch, and the laptop music that followed. The name was always a bad one and everyone involved said so. Ambient, techno and house are ranked elsewhere, though the borders here are porous and a few records appear on more than one list. From 1991 to now.

Nobody has ever liked the name. It came off an American mailing list in 1993, it insults every other kind of electronic music by implication, and the people it was attached to spent years batting it away. It stuck anyway, because something did happen: a set of producers who had come up through rave decided the music was worth sitting down with, and started making records built for headphones and armchairs rather than rooms.

What followed was less a genre than a permission slip. Autechre took it toward abstraction, Squarepusher toward fusion, Boards of Canada toward memory and damage, Aphex Twin in whichever direction annoyed people most that year. The common thread is a refusal of function. These are records that do not care whether you can dance to them, made mostly by people who could have written a floor filler had they wanted the money.

Two catalogues dominate and there is no honest way around it. Aphex Twin and Autechre take four of the ten between them, which would be a problem if the four were interchangeable and they are not. The rest of the list is deliberately wide, because the interesting thing about this music is how far it travelled from Sheffield and Rochdale once other people got hold of it.

The ten

  1. Number 1 on The 10 Best IDM Albums

    Aphex Twin — Selected Ambient Works 85-921992

    № 1 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Cheap equipment, enormous tunes, and a hiss that half the following decade tried to buy. Thirty years of argument about when it was actually made has not dented it once.

    Why it is number one

    The story is that some of it was recorded when Richard James was a teenager, and the story has been picked at for thirty years, and it does not matter. Selected Ambient Works 85-92 sounds like nothing that came before it and better than most of what came after. The tracks are melodic without being sweet, rhythmic without being functional, and recorded on gear cheap enough to give the whole thing a hiss that later producers spent fortunes trying to replicate. It heads this list and the ambient one, and there is no fudge available: it is the best record in both traditions, and the traditions were never as separate as the tags suggest.

  2. Number 2 on The 10 Best IDM Albums

    Autechre — Tri Repetae1995

    № 14 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    The record where Booth and Brown stop sounding like anyone else. Corroded, precise, and considerably funkier than the reputation allows. Everything they did afterwards is downstream of the decisions taken here.

  3. Number 3 on The 10 Best IDM Albums

    Boards of Canada — Music Has the Right to Children1998

    № 8 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Two brothers in rural Scotland turning nostalgia into a production technique. Detuned tape, half-heard children, and an atmosphere so complete that an entire strain of electronic music still cannot escape it.

  4. Number 4 on The 10 Best IDM Albums

    Autechre — Confield2001

    № 9 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century

    The moment they handed structural decisions to processes and let the results stand. It baffled people on release and it still resists, but the rhythms underneath are alive rather than academic, which is why it outlasted every record made to imitate it.

  5. Number 5 on The 10 Best IDM Albums

    Squarepusher — Feed Me Weird Things1996

    № 38 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Tom Jenkinson plays bass properly, which is the whole explanation. Drum and bass programming at inhuman speed with actual fusion musicianship on top, and a warmth the genre rarely bothered with.

  6. Number 6 on The 10 Best IDM Albums

    The Black Dog — Bytes1993

    № 34 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Sheffield's founding text, made before Handley and Turner left to become Plaid. Machine music with mysticism attached, and the record that proved this stuff could carry ideas without becoming a lecture.

  7. Number 7 on The 10 Best IDM Albums

    Aphex Twin — Richard D. James Album1996

    № 30 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Thirty-two minutes, chopped breakbeats faster than anyone was programming them, and string melodies that would sound sentimental at any other tempo. His most complete record and his most quietly emotional.

  8. Number 8 on The 10 Best IDM Albums

    Plaid — Not for Threes1997

    № 92 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    The melodists of the group, working alone and unembarrassed about writing tunes. Björk turns up, the arrangements are immaculate, and it remains the friendliest great record in this canon.

  9. Number 9 on The 10 Best IDM Albums

    Oval — 94diskont1995

    Markus Popp painted over the surface of CDs to create the errors and then composed with them. Glitch starts here, and the strangest thing about it is how beautiful the damage turned out to be.

  10. Number 10 on The 10 Best IDM Albums

    Boards of Canada — Geogaddi2002

    № 12 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century

    The darker one, and the better constructed one. Numerology in the sleeve, dread in the middle, and a mood that the duo have never fully returned to since. Forums are still arguing about the track lengths.

Eleven to twenty

Ranked, and held to the same rules as the ten.

  1. Number 11 on The 10 Best IDM Albums

    Autechre — Amber1994

    № 33 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    The warm one, before the corrosion set in. The record people return to when the later work exhausts them.

  2. Number 12 on The 10 Best IDM Albums

    Squarepusher — Go Plastic2001

    № 8 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century

    My Red Hot Car and drill and bass played as free jazz. The technical ceiling for the entire style.

  3. Number 13 on The 10 Best IDM Albums

    Aphex Twin — Drukqs2001

    № 31 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century

    Prepared piano next to punishing programming, over two discs that argue with each other. Sprawling by design and still divisive.

  4. Number 14 on The 10 Best IDM Albums

    Mouse on Mars — Autoditacker1997

    Fizzing rubberised micro-funk. German IDM at its most alive and least interested in looking serious.

  5. Number 15 on The 10 Best IDM Albums

    LFO — Frequencies1991

    № 18 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Yorkshire bleep, and the record that shook Warp into existence. Sits on the border between this list and techno.

  6. Number 16 on The 10 Best IDM Albums

    B12 — Electro-Soma1993

    № 35 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    London answering Detroit through headphones. Armchair techno that sounds romantic rather than academic.

  7. Number 17 on The 10 Best IDM Albums

    Bola — Soup1998

    № 93 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Skam's melodic secret weapon. Beloved by everyone who has found him, which remains a smaller group than it should be.

  8. Number 18 on The 10 Best IDM Albums

    Seefeel — Quique1993

    № 47 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Guitars processed until they become texture. Sits exactly between shoegaze and ambient techno and fathered both conversations.

  9. Number 19 on The 10 Best IDM Albums

    µ-Ziq — Lunatic Harness1997

    № 90 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Paradinas at his most melodic and most violent at once. The album that funded Planet Mu, which then found everyone else's future.

  10. Number 20 on The 10 Best IDM Albums

    Polygon Window — Surfing on Sine Waves1993

    № 36 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    The architectural Aphex alias, made for Warp's Artificial Intelligence series. Quoth is still harder than most things released under any of his names.

Near misses

Records considered and not ranked, with the reason each fell short.

How this list was built

Ten from 147 assessed. Drawn from both raver.me canons, the 21st-century contender file and the gathering passes, including everything tagged glitch, braindance, drill and bass, electronica and experimental electronic, because the boundaries of this tradition were always argued and a list should be arguing from the whole field.

Aphex Twin and Autechre take four places between them. That is not a quota being ignored so much as an honest reading of a tradition where two catalogues did the majority of the load-bearing work, and the four records are doing genuinely different things. Selected Ambient Works 85-92 also heads the ambient list. Warp's Artificial Intelligence compilation is ineligible on format and named in the near misses instead, which is the only way to be truthful about a various-artists record that gave the whole thing its name.

Every idm record on this site, ranked within its own canon rather than against each other, is on the idm genre page.

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