but the truth is I am not listening to enough of anything in any one given genre. some here and some there.

the problem is: too much music too little time too little money!

it is interesting to notice that a lot of us got turned on by sir james' stuff at first.

Well, everyone here shares that problem, don't they? I know I do!

like Josh has stated before in the Funckarma thread, the ones who are compared to the most are those who were the pioneers. thus, we have Autechre, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher et al. being the roots.

I've heard a lot of people say they got into Aphex etc. around 98 or 99, and maybe the fact that he had been doing stuff that was so unique for so long, bent some minds. His career, while enigmatic on purpose, is possibly the easiest to follow and evaluate of all IDM artists. It's almost a timeline for plug-in history too...

But aren't the real pioneers the ones who started with electronica? I eman would we have Aphex twin without Kraftwerk? Would we have Autechre without Rythim is Rythim? Or even Talking Heads?

Pioneers of high-brow electric music (i'm trying not to call it all IDM) but not the >true< pioneers.

Right, but I guess Aphex, Squarepusher, etc were the first to take the technology in a different direction... And after a few moments of thinking I can't back up my argument so I'm going to move on.

Aphex Twin - Flim

When I heard that song for the first time... my eyes were opened. It sounds strange, but after I heard it, I felt like I knew something that everybody else didn't. From there I bought SAW 1 and 2 Come to Daddy, I care because you do. I got into ambient and lounge stuff before moving back into the what my friends like to call "Richard's beatless rythmless avant-garde bullshit"

I think he/they'd be classed as pioneers of a kind of DIY electronica. Everyone starts somewhere and can be influenced by anything, but it seems a lot of early '90s stuff was produced on a smaller scale than some earlier stuff. God knows how much Eno's studio cost for instance, yet people made comparable stuff for way less trouble and cost (obviously up to 20 years later in some cases).

Plus, who the hell programmed drums like Squarepusher before him?

does Matmos count as IDM?

precisely. Noone, and I mean noone will ever be as good at drum programming than Tom himself. It still amazes me that he took a simple BOSS drum machine on the early albums and made the stuff that he did.

a few of their early albums, sure. Maybe more experimental than anything else, yet they are all over the map when it comes to music.