There are a lot of people on our planet that claim they love IDM. With a multitude of artists that make IDM, or say they make IDM, you’d think the hardest question to ask any random IDM-lover is which artist they like best. Though this is for a lot of people a tough question, most of the times they can answer it with a bit of thought. Everyone has his or her personal taste that can be put into words when asked. However, there is one question that you will not get answered very quickly: “What is IDM?”
And truth be told, there is no definite answer to this question. In this essay, I will try to give an overview of topics related to IDM that might explain what IDM is about. Simply said, though, this essay will never truly be finished. Every day, a new interpretation of IDM may come into existence. And there is not a single person in the world that will be able to give you all information related to IDM. For that, IDM is too vague and widespread, and definitions differ too much.
So what exactly is IDM? The easiest but probably most incorrect answer is that it’s a musical style, a genre. It isn’t. If anything likely, it could be defined as a group of genres and styles that people with a similar mindset listen to. And even that is maybe too general. Wikipedia.org, the online encyclopedia that is edited by the whole Internet community, has a pretty extensive definition at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDM. It isn’t even a definition, it’s more a collection of facts and opinions on IDM, much like this essay, but written by multiple persons instead of just one person. When reading that definition, or even just taking a first glance, you’ll immediately understand that it is simply impossible to give a quick and easy answer to the question asked above. It definitely does give a good overview of what IDM is about, with a nice view into the history of IDM.
Other people like to say that IDM is simply a mailing-list. And indeed, there has been a discussion mailing-list for years already simply named IDM where the subscribers all listen to the same kind of music, and that is the music that most people define as IDM (Hyperreal). Is this where the name comes from? Possible, but opinions differ. Is it a good definition of what is IDM? Maybe years ago it was. It is definitely not fitting anymore, as IDM has grown to become much more than just a mailing-list. And people on the mailing-list seem to like and discuss much more than what was traditionally called IDM.
Then there is, of course, the Warp label, who are to a lot of fans of IDM the founding fathers of what IDM is about. So does this mean we can define all music in the likeliness of Warp to be IDM? Probably not. Warp has over the years released a lot of different material, including but not limited to house music, hip hop, ambient, quite experimental pieces. A huge range of music, some of which people would not call IDM. So here as well we cannot find a definitive answer to our question.
One term that will pop up regularly when talking about IDM is experiment. In its nature, IDM is a very experimental style of electronic music. Simply naming it experimental would be too wide of course. Where IDM is a global term for a multitude of styles, experimental is probably a similar term but even higher up. So IDM is experimental, but experimental is not necessarily IDM. However, especially in the early days, a lot of sounds and tracks were the result of experimenting. These days, there are still pioneers who do, or try to do, new things, but with of course some exceptions, a lot of these experiments are focusing on cloning the existing sound of IDM.
But what is this “sound”? The sound of IDM, again, is not a set thing. Because it ranges over quite a few styles of music, there is a big variation. One common element, at least up until a few years ago, was the very electronic, inorganic sound of the music, regularly combined with very irregular, sometimes frantic, rhythmic elements. A lot of the music was composed using synthesizers, and probably even more was done using laptops. Popular tools for this were the various modular software synthesizers and applications such as Ableton Live. The more traditional software such as Cubase and Cakewalk were smaller players within the IDM scene because these software titles focus much more on traditional composing than its more recent counterparts.
Over the years however, new streams within IDM have come into existence that have been combining the digital sound of IDM with more organic sounds, creating a blend of both styles. This was a welcoming change. A lot of traditional (non-digital) instruments have been used, either in combination with digital instruments and/or computers, or as source material for digital processing.
Another funny thing is the confusion, or maybe disagreement, on what the acronym IDM actually stands for. The more popular interpretation by far is of course “Intelligent Dance Music,” which is the original term and has been the leading term ever since its inception. Some years ago, though, a small group of people, probably fed up with the reference to intelligent and the implying of any other musical style to be unintelligent, decided to start defining IDM as “Industrial Dance Music,” with a reference to the industrial genre, another wide genre in electronic music with a very experimental edge. Though I don’t agree with this definition, since the term industrial by far does not cover the range of musical styles that are seen to be IDM (though it does partially overlap), I do agree with the fact that the term intelligent is probably not well chosen. The problem here, though, is that it’s really hard to give the style (by lack of a better way to refer to IDM) a better name, especially now that the term IDM is so widely regarded as the name for the style. Braindance is a funny name for it, but it’s not more than that, funny.
I could go on and on and on probably, it’s impossible to stop writing about IDM, since there are an infinite number of definitions and an infinite number of variations. However, I think I’ve given a good basic introduction into IDM. Please do check out the Wikipedia article for a good and probably slightly more objective look into this acronym.
- Article written by: Stefan Koopmanschap
- For more info about IDM, visit Wikipedia
- Hyperreal’s IDM-List
