Black Dog - Plaid - Before and after Idm

Sheffield, 1989

The first light of dawn on just another day. You head home after yet another night packed into some industrial warehouse, your ears barely working anymore. There's no “Sunday Morning” echoing in your head, no heroin running through your veins. What's still pounding is whatever's left of square-edged lashes, metallic blares, rhythmic convulsions, liquid acid dissolving into a fade. The last DJ has just finished drowning some Bobby Konders 12" in effects, blending the hailstorms of Krust and Ice Minus, maybe granting just one spin to Channel X before wrecking things further with some production credited to Spiral Tribe. Hardcore is the keyword that traveled from Germany across the Channel and conquered it, rave party the spatial diktat. Then there are far too many terms flying around: gabber, darkcore, darkstep, neurofunk, and outside London, jungle, drum'n'bass and acid – the latter imported from the United States but soon turned into a British trademark. But these are merely the attributes of a culture about to become dominant, to cross the Channel and spread like wildfire across Europe, lingering on, albeit in lesser form, even today. In the Nineties, rave is and will remain almost the sole synonym for underground electronic music.

Sheffield, 1989. Someone is already looking ahead. Amid that swarm of sounds, furious rhythms and highs, they've glimpsed an opening capable of leading elsewhere, toward uncharted territory. An opening reachable by more than one road: starting from the purest acid-house, from “classic” hardcore, moving straight on to isolating and working on their individual traits. All with the clear intent of exploring new worlds, of carrying the most peculiar insights – once devoted purely to the high – into an unprecedented, experimental context, futuristic yet still indebted to those who had helped create those sounds in the first place. The official christening would come in 1992, with the first chapter of the seminal Warp Records series “Artificial Intelligence”, but so-called intelligent dance music had already begun taking its first steps.

Sheffield, 1989. It will still be a few years before the dazzling ambient contaminations of Boards Of Canada, the liquid techno-atmospheric concoctions of Autechre, and the various universes signed Aphex Twin explode onto the scene, when three young producers decide to leap into that shaft of light beyond ordinary electronic music – taking, however, yet another path: that of techno. Their names are Ken Downie, Ed Handley and Andy Turner. History would come to know them, in their artistic union, as Black Dog, until their paths diverged, with the latter two going on to form another essential act, Plaid.

Atto I: The Black Dog, before Idm

When rave and techno embraced

Little is known about how Ken Downie, Ed Handley and Andy Turner came to form the act that, before anyone else, shaped the earliest days of what would become intelligent dance music. Theirs is a story essentially devoid of anecdotes, low-key and understated, a kind of devotion to the music at the expense of everything surrounding it. What's certain is that the three producers were active solo well before founding their joint project, as shown by a handful of tracks released on samplers and bootlegs under various aliases, some of which would later be gathered by Warp on their first great testament, the masterpiece Bytes.

Although their first steps are taken, unsurprisingly, in the world of raves, the three musicians' interest soon begins to shift toward Berlin, where techno – having already passed through the US via the minimal filter courtesy of Underground Resistance – is starting to spread widely through the most underground circles (the Basic Channel explosion is just around the corner). So Downie, Handley and Turner gradually begin to pull away from core culture, working and experimenting with an entirely new language, rooted firmly in techno, yet not immune to contaminations drawn from their own listening history, from jungle's frenzy to the robotic melodicism of krautrock.

Within a few months, the three set aside a handful of tracks destined to become genuine cult items in the years that followed. But this is 1989, and techno's path to legitimacy is still in its embryonic stage: as a result, it proves extremely difficult to find a label willing to release material so far removed and radically different from the trend dominating the scene at the time. After a brief and fruitless search, the only option left is do-it-yourself: this is how the first three Black Dog extended plays come out, today virtually impossible to find and highly coveted by genre collectors. The first of these, Virtual, is a genuine hidden grenade, built on two potentially seminal tracks: the title track, a masterful techno ride that seems to emerge straight from the Berlin yet to come, and above all “The Weight”, a understated minimal-ambient watercolor that effectively anticipates the languages of both “Selected Ambient Works 85-92” and Plastikman's “Consumed”.

Close behind come the less compelling Age Of Slack and, in 1990, Techno Playtime, which attempts to pull together these early sonic threads, further refining their coordinates. Standouts on its tracklist include “Chiba”, a frosty embrace between techno and acid sounds, and “I Feel Like It”, an intelligent prototype whose jungle rhythm is cut through by warm analogue washes.

Having gone almost entirely unnoticed, these three records are in fact the very first testimonies of what, within two dozen months, would become one of the most important movements in the history of electronic music. The year is 1990, and none of the future protagonists of the IDM era have yet stepped into the record market: the revolution is still being prepared, with Autechre busy abstracting their sound toward a dimension still uncharted today, and Aphex Twin following, step by step, the lessons of Mike Dred. More and more artists, however, are starting to walk the paths leading to a light beyond the rave, reshuffling the cards of drum'n'bass and acid sounds with the organic-ambient universe. Against this backdrop of budding enthusiasm, a newly formed label steps forward and offers Black Dog their first contract: General Production Recordings (GPR), which, besides the trio's three EPs, would in those same years license productions by names such as Shiva, Terrace, 7th Plain and Mark Broom, becoming a sort of convergence point for the British post-rave techno scene.

The trio's adventure can now officially begin.

From future techno to intelligent dance music

The early Nineties were explosive years for the European techno landscape. Rave culture – destined for a future that would be anything but short – was starting to be seen by some as an actual constraint on the artistic possibilities of electronic music: being forced, in effect, to produce music devoted solely to entertaining unruly crowds was becoming an obstacle for those who, in growing numbers, wanted to chart new paths. Impossible-to-ignore lessons kept arriving from across the Atlantic: those of the already-mentioned Underground Resistance, of Derrick May and his "The Beginnings", of a budding Richie Hawtin with his Plus8. Paradoxically, at an incredibly fertile time for the American techno scene, the wave of enthusiasm that had swept through the US underground at the genre's dawn seemed to have burnt itself out: it was in Europe instead, and above all in Berlin, that those sounds kept generating growing interest among the nightlife crowd, to the point of drawing many producers to physically relocate to the German capital. The frenzy of the rave world was in fact generating a genuine backlash, which translated into the gestation of the minimal aesthetic, destined to remain a defining trait of all European techno to come. The technoid "fever" also began spreading to other countries, including Belgium – home to R&S Records, a label destined to become seminal for the genre and which would release, among others, Aphex Twin's first masterpieces – and Great Britain, about to become the nerve centre of the intelligent scene.

The dawn of a new season is now imminent, and Downie, Handley and Turner are increasingly aware of it. It's 1991, and a few months before Richard David James founds Rephlex Records, officially kicking off the intelligent dance wave, Black Dog return with a new EP, their first for GPR.

Parallel is a pure, crystalline manifesto of futurist techno and of what would become the trio's signature style. We might call it the Berlin side of the future IDM, as shown by the caustic expanses of "Squelch" and of the title track, early great examples of the melodic refinement of their productions, a gift that only µ-Ziq would be able to match. That the three are no strangers to the complex rhythmic structures inherited from d'n'b is evident above all in "Erb", which at the same time best points the way they would follow throughout their whole adventure: one of softness and crystalline class. Even once the IDM season would reach a more precise sonic definition, in which a controlled claustrophobia would often play the undisputed lead role, Ken, Ed and Andy would hold firmly to a more nuanced, delicate path, in direct contact with techno tradition from Detroit to Berlin and with the ambient effusions through which the "intelligent spring" would emerge from the underground.

A few months later, Ed Handley and Andy Turner decided to bring to light material they had worked on together before their adventure began, on which Ken Downie had only been called in as producer and assistant. No source reveals whether this was actually the occasion of their first meeting, though it would be reasonable to assume so. Self-released under the radar, Mbuki Mvuki is another release now highly sought after by collectors, and chronologically the first long-playing record in the trio's history. But the album came out almost unbeknownst to their contemporaries under another moniker, one that very few would expect to find, years later, concealing a new project by the two musicians: Plaid.

Musically, the album can be placed in toto – as the future duo's adventure would be – within the circle of a bright, melodic IDM, decidedly further from the world of techno than the Black Dog sound and much closer to the sonic universe of Autechre and, above all, µ-Ziq. All this, as it turns out, with something like a two-year head start on the explosion of those sounds, and marked by top-shelf quality. The sparkling motorik of "Link", the first masterpiece, is already a blueprint for what would become the Plaid sound, launched onto hyperspatial paths with incredibly human movements, shared with the oblique, crackling patterns of "Anything" and the sublunar lasers of "Yak".

This is lively, playful, futuristic-minded music, impossible to dance to yet not at all out of place on some hypothetical dancefloor of the fourth millennium. And, above all, still incredibly relevant today.

In 1992, all on GPR, came an EP accompanying Mbuki Mbuki, Scoobs In Columbia, decidedly more geared toward paying homage to the classic forms of American club music – plus two more 12"s credited to Black Dog, Vir²l and Vanttool. The latter, recorded at the R&S studios, is the definitive launchpad for the trio, who coin their final formula here: the soft concoctions of the title track shape the boundaries of a techno that can be classed as intelligent but that doesn't give up its danceable quality, and is decidedly less abrasive than what the other protagonists of the Sheffield scene were putting out. "Hub", for its part, aims at those liquid stratifications that would reach the peak of their splendour in Autechre's masterpiece "Incunabula", and "Rainbow Bridge" goes back to playing with rhythmic interweavings in odd time signatures, always though with an ineffable grace.

This is the definitive step, the final move toward a consecration that would arrive exactly a year later. A belated consecration, one that would not fully do justice, chronologically, to the trio who can rightly claim to have first elaborated the embryo of IDM.

Landing at Warp and the consecration

9 July 1992: Intelligent dance music officially comes into being. The inaugural event is the release of the compilation "Artificial Intelligence" courtesy of Warp Records, the label that from that moment on would become the linchpin of the entire scene. The list of names featured on the tracklist, largely hidden behind one-off pseudonyms, is the ideal roll call of the genre's founding fathers and their followers: Aphex Twin (as The Dice Man), Autechre, B12, Speedy J, Alex Paterson and Richie Hawtin (UP!). Rounding out the tracklist is a piece, "The Clan", credited to I.A.O.: its author is Ken Downie. It's a music box with a steady, mechanical rhythm, streaked with analogue ripples and wrapped in celestial veils: Black Dog had landed at Warp, and thus officially entered that macro-universe which they had in fact been the first to sketch out. If their appearance on the compilation was the trio's first step toward consecration, the one truly responsible for it is the album with which they made their long-form debut, and which is also the third instalment of that very series: Bytes, a work as fundamental to the trio's history as it is to the history of electronic music.

A kaleidoscope of broken rhythms, blocked flows, astral dances and luminous flashes, where the past and present of techno meet and converge, at times blending together and at others disowning one another. It is the manifesto, the aesthetic and artistic treatise of everything Black Dog have represented, represent, and will represent: proof of this is the fact that Bytes is released under the name Black Dog Productions and takes a form not unlike that of the compilation, as if wanting to offer a complete overview of every facet of the three musicians' activity, not just of their artistic union. A sort of "Ummagumma", in short, signed under multiple aliases and the fruit of both combined collaborations and solitary excursions during the writing process.

Among the monikers, Plaid resurfaces here: Handley and Turner sign the oppressive overture of "Object Oriented", a sinuous track with an industrial aftertaste recalling their hardcore past, and the laser-lit, bass-dominated stroll through the netherworld that is "Yamemm"; two tracks that, to be fair, are quite far removed from what was shown on Mbuki Mvuki and from what the two would go on to offer later. Even more explosive is the crackling edifice of "Caz", designed and built by Handley under the name Close Up Over, who under the same alias also indulges in a squared-off, Berlin-flavoured little march such as "Olivine" and in the potential Autechre homage "Jauqq", before hiding behind the alter-ego Balil to fuse acid with celestial expanses on "Merck" and to calibrate sweet melodic sprays on "3/4 Heart". Turner's contribution is decidedly smaller, coining, as Atypic, only the sticky metallic carpet of "Focus Mel".

A few years later, when the Black Dog saga would continue as a solo venture, Ken Downie would reveal himself as the soul of the trio responsible for their strong attachment to Berlin stylistic traits: with hindsight, the solo excursion into pure hardcore of "Fight The Hits" under the name Discordian Popes and the scratchy acid ambient of "Carceres Ex Novum" credited to Xeper were certainly not clues pointing in that direction. Rounding out the picture is a series of interludes credited to all three under the identity Echo Mike, genuine turning points more significant symbolically than for their (non)-musical value.

Bytes is a genuine puzzle, every piece slotted into place with meticulous precision. It's a Black Dog record through and through, their first full-length as a trio, yet at the same time it's effectively the product of the individual members' efforts rather than a true group dynamic. And it's precisely this apparently impossible duality at its core - which in fact represents the precarious balance underpinning their joint artistic path - that makes the many innovations gathered and arranged within the same container all the more striking. Here, the sounds that would define Idm's three waves coexist, in a form that's finally mature and definitive, with a large part of their origins, a meeting in the present between past and future. The early Black Dog and (their own, but not only) Idm effectively find their identity in this masterpiece.

Bytes is the consecration, the definitive launch of a name now a cornerstone of a new, luminous era for electronic music. But having hit the springboard, Black Dog don't stop there: following the rule of striking while the iron's hot, they wait less than a year before resurfacing with a new long playing, making the most of the final release owed to them under their GPR contract. If its predecessor was effectively a sensational macro-focus on the sonic universe of Ken Downie, Ed Handley and Andy Turner, Temple Of Transparent Bells is the flip side of the coin: a record born of the cohesion of the three minds and their multilateral interaction. There are no solo excursions or carved-up divisions of space here - everything feels far more direct and less architected. What's revisited are the techno-based evolutions already heard on Vanttool, now interfaced with a taste leaning far more towards the solutions pioneered by LFO and their "Frequencies", the other great gateway - alongside Bytes - into the intelligent universe. From those shores come the jagged ripples of "The Actor And The Audience" and the polyrhythmic constructions of the two "Cost" tracks, while the acid scratches of "Jupiler" and the hardcore tribalism of "Cycle" lean more towards rave memories. "4, 7, 8" looks back to analogue Berlin and plays on squarer rhythms, alongside the more relaxed melodic swarms of "Sharp Shooting On Saturn" and the sunset-like closer "The Crete That Crete Made".

Rounding out the skeleton are a few decidedly more bizarre episodes, such as the fourth-world funk of "King Of Sparta" and the hammering acoustic percussion of "Mango".

While it doesn't repeat the unreachable triumph of the previous masterpiece, Temple Of Transparent Bells confirms Black Dog as sole proprietors of a strain of techno all their own, one able to retain clear continuity with the past while still sounding in step with the experimental present - a knack that many of their British contemporaries would struggle to hold onto.

Having firmly established themselves as one of the leading lights of the early-Nineties electronic underground, Downie, Handley and Turner withdrew from view throughout 1994, keeping public appearances and live shows to an absolute minimum. For the first time in their career, the three focused exclusively on studio work, which twelve months later would yield their most complete and personal album, as well as the final chapter of a saga as brief as it was historic.

The second masterpiece, and the split

By 1995, the European techno landscape was already split between two parallel currents: the British intelligent strand, now in its second phase, moving away from ambient towards a universe of calculated, frenetic claustrophobia - a transition well captured by Aphex Twin on "...I Care Because You Do" and by Autechre on "TriRepetae++", but also by "In Pine Effects" by µ-Ziq and the very first sketches of Squarepusher - and the Berlin-based minimal strand, which, thanks to the Basic Channel productions, was pushing firmly towards dub effusions.

Ever keenly attuned, as always, to the evolution of the sounds around them, Black Dog effectively attempt to mediate between these two strands under the banner of the sound laid out on Bytes and then confirmed on Temple Of Transparent Bells. This time around, research plays an even more crucial role than before: and so Spanners, the second and final masterpiece of their joint career, is for the first time a compact record, carefully studied, organised and polished. No longer a puzzle made up of separate pieces, nor a shapeshifting flow strung together without a break, but a record built on a structure designed to make the most of every space in the most fitting way.

There's not a single sound that isn't chosen with purpose, placed with a clear intent: in this sense, it's a work far more geared towards the intelligentsia than anything that came before, even if it's the sound itself that keeps it firmly within the Black Dog microcosm.

As mentioned earlier, it's also the final record of Downie, Handley and Turner's joint journey: it's the album that represents the ultimate essence of their collaboration and, as such, of the differences in sonic vision that by that point separated the former from the other two, differences that would soon lead to their going their separate ways.

Spanners is thus the Black Dog sound at its most concentrated: "Barbola Work" is the eloquent opener, a martial dance built on an alien 4/4 and on those trademark melodic "weirds" that have become a genuine signature since Bytes, just as much as the percussive tribalism that resurfaces - arboreal in "Chase The Manhattan" and square-edged and jabbing in "Frisbee Skip". Emblematic of the internal rifts, meanwhile, are a few episodes that edge closer than ever to the two poles bounding the trio's explorations: the melodic music-box of closer "Chesh", the oppressive, metallic charge of "Tahr" and the sickly nocturnal mood of "Pot Noddle" are genuine previews of the purely Idm sound that Handley and Turner would go on to coin under the Plaid name. By contrast, the homage to Moritz Von Oswald on opener "Raxmus", the astral ambient-techno of "Nommo" and the pounding acceleration of "End Of Time" are the fruits of a Downie increasingly drawn to the minimal sonic universe, keen to bring his experiments back closer to the structures of a more traditional, softer techno.

Rounding out the palette are a few skits titled "Bolt" and numbered in sequence, tasked with marking the divide between almost every track, a genuine divertissement that, truth be told, is of little value ("Further Arm"), and what is probably Black Dog's definitive masterpiece: the irrepressible, hypnotic post-techno ride of "Psil Cosyin", ten minutes that encapsulate the essence of the album and of everything the trio represented across their six years of activity.

Spanners is Black Dog's definitive, mature and probably most complete record, even if it remains a notch below Bytes, lacking that same groundbreaking stature that had marked the manifesto released two years earlier. A masterpiece nonetheless, the absolute peak reached by the trio's music, the height of their formula and the ultimate distillation of their sound.

Like any bomb set to go off, though, the record also marks a substantial point of no return for the trio's joint career. Having pushed themselves to the limit, both creatively and personally, to craft a work conceived from the outset as the best of their career, Downie, Handley and Turner decide, with little real surprise, to go their separate ways. The differences in artistic intent, as evident even in the sound of this final effort, had grown too wide: Ken was by then increasingly drawn to the techno universe that had first captivated him, one he'd managed to keep interwoven with the Black Dog sound even in its thorniest, most experimental episodes. Ed and Andy, by contrast, aim to carry on down the path opened up by Mbuki Mvuki, throwing themselves fully into the world of Intelligent dance music, which had taken shape over the first five years of the Nineties and become a genre in its own right, with clearly defined (and decidedly more "extreme") stylistic coordinates. The conviction that the balanced hybrid between these two poles, which had until then formed the very personal backbone of the Black Dog sound, had no further meaningful room to grow is the final straw: 1995 thus also becomes the year the adventure comes to an end, ready to split into two new paths.

Finally free to move on his own terms, Ken Downie decides to carry the Black Dog name forward solo, and for a brief period it effectively becomes his alter-ego. The main product of this transitional phase is Music For Adverts (And Short Films), released less than a year after Spanners, gathering some twenty micro-fragments conceived explicitly in the mould of library music. Commendable in quality, it nonetheless suffers from the classic, excessive fragmentation that this kind of release is almost always prone to, and is saved only by a handful of weightier tracks pointing the way towards the astral techno that would come to define Black Dog's sound in the new millennium: the docile yet biting "Euthanasia" - the true beating heart of the record - the brisk, square-edged "Minour" and the ambient carpet of "Kheprit", a closing track that also marks Downie's last tie to the more liquid sounds of the Idm cosmos.

What follows, finally, is a nostalgic “Peel Session” in which he will once again cross paths with his two former partners in crime, albeit in two separate performances (Handley and Turner will play on their own under the name Plaid). Both will be released as EPs in 1999: the one signed by Downie under the Black Dog name – split between purely acid-tinged memories (“Psycosyin”), some more organic moments (“Shadehead”) and passages with dark undertones (“Rue”) – will bring down the curtain on the act that first ushered in one of the most glorious and innovative eras for contemporary electronic music.

Act II: Plaid, into IDM

The transition and the new “intelligent” creed

That the kind of electronic music devoted to dance intellighenzia, yet still firmly rooted in techno tradition, was starting to feel too narrow for the intentions of Ed Handley and Andy Turner had already become clear for some time. Spanners had been the definitive confirmation: a classic masterpiece whose status stems from reaching a peak, the total saturation of a formula. It would have been impossible for Black Dog, as for any imitator, to craft a work able to go further, to continue a quest within that microcosm over which the trio had managed to maintain complete supremacy, thanks to their unique ability to balance between two poles of equal magnetic pull. In the history of electronic music, Black Dog are now recognized as a starting point and an integral part of the “intelligent” scene, yet it remains difficult to fully associate them with what would become the flagship acts of the movement: this is precisely because of the singular nature of their formula and, above all, Ken Downie's love of techno and his inimitable take on the genre, which runs through much of the trio's output. And so, once freed from his presence, Handley and Turner continue their journey by taking the decisive step, picking up what they had begun with a dazzling head start four years earlier and establishing themselves fully as standard-bearers of intelligent dance music. The name chosen to carry on their journey is, as mentioned, the historic moniker that has marked their artistic partnership since Mbuki Mvuki, now ready to be carved alongside the likes of Boards Of Canada, Autechre, Aphex Twin, LFO and µ-Ziq.

Eager to kick off their new adventure, the two shut themselves in the studio, promptly accepting two different offers: one from Crane Records – a small, short-lived label founded shortly before, which would close down in 1998 – and one from Handley's longtime friends Alan and Dave Hill, aka Mind Over Rhythm. The fruit of the first is the EP Android, released just two months after Spanners and containing four early sketches of the duo's style: in particular, the oppressive, dark odd-time beat of the title track and the acrobatic pastiche of acidic melodies and frantic rhythm of “Anything” mark their definitive departure from techno's rigid structures toward the more arty and experimental universe of proper IDM.

Less interesting turns out to be the joint effort alongside the Hill brothers: Mind Over Rhythm Meets The Men From Plaid On The Planet Luv is essentially a maxi-split on which Ed and Andy only sign the excellent “Kiss Me Off”, an early manifesto of their future love for melodic experimentation, and the more rugged “Orange Sky”, as well as sharing knobs and cables on the tamer, more mechanical “System Talk”. Taken as a whole, though, the record proves to be little more than a revival exercise in a certain retro-futuristic sci-fi aesthetic that was already past its prime, complete with constant homages to the Orb's Ultramondo and the analog fantasies of Orbital's “Diversions”, but lacking any concrete ideas that go beyond pure quotation.

These, however, are only two releases meant purely to warm up the engines ahead of the duo's actual first move, which would take a year to complete their first full-length, returning in the meantime to the Warp fold. Absurdly, then, Plaid end up entering the IDM world during the last flourishing period of its golden age, the stretch running from the advent of Squarepusher to Aphex Twin's final offering, “Drukqs”, which, all things considered, stands as the movement's last great banner.

1997 is thus finally the year of Handley and Turner's rise, as they prepare their move over the span of two months: the first to come out is a three-track EP, Undoneson, a genuine sonic and qualitative preview of the LP to follow. The title track is the first definitive compendium of Plaid-branded intelligent dance music and confirms their gift as melodists, built on liquid synthetic loops tangling around a voracious rhythm. “Spudink” moves in a similar direction, but leans further into the sugary, crystalline quality of its melodic flows, while “Headspin” indulges in dreamy, ambient-flavored expanses.

Although Plaid represent a new world, the softness already typical of much of the Black Dog catalogue proves to remain unchanged, simply re-adapted to the new sonic context of Handley and Turner's research. Eight weeks later comes Not For Threes, the hugely anticipated, formidable and surprising full-length debut of the duo, and yet another confirmation of their unquenchable urge to tackle every sonic world while trying to stay as far as possible from cliché, instead reinterpreting it with a heavy dose of personal, unprecedented elements. It stands as a true landing point for the research begun on Mbuki Mvuki, already filtered through the two preceding EPs: compared to that album, the tempos drop, slowing down while still retaining their frantic edge. Add to this a further development of their melodic research – which from here on can be considered a genuine trademark of the Plaid aesthetic – and the decidedly revolutionary choice, by the genre's standards, to break electronic omnipotence by including acoustic instruments and even vocals on some tracks.

The result is an unexpected breath of pure fresh air in the world of intelligent dance music, second perhaps only to the one Black Dog had delivered four years earlier with Bytes. The electric guitar driving the playful romps of “Kortisin” is thus already a mini-revolution in itself, at a time when the laptop had become the sole instrument of composition, performance, production and mixing, followed closely by the pounding overture of “Abla Eedio” – the ideal culmination of the research into exotic percussion begun with Downie – and by the faithfully reproduced chamber orchestra of “Getting”.

Keeping Plaid anchored to the IDM mainstream are the rough, industrial-tinged protests of “Prague Radio”, the playful acrobatics of “Fer”, the acid bow of “Ol” and the fragments of analog melancholy found in “Seph” and “Forever”. But where vocal contributions come into play, their research begins heading into wholly unexplored territory: it starts with “Myopia”, amid plucked strings, slurs and the warmth of Mara Carlyle's vocalizations, also present in the strings-and-accordion passage of “Rakimou” – something that, to be fair, Aphex Twin's “Ittc Hedral” and “Goon Gumpas” had already flirted with.

Continuing in this vein, under disguised but all-too-recognizable identities, are two internationally renowned names: Nicolette Suwoton – for many better known as the voice on Massive Attack's “Sly” – weaving her way through the tangle of bass and scratchy distortion on the splendid “Extork” – and Björk, who offers, in the oppressive romanticism of “Lilith”, an outtake from the masterpiece “Homogenic”, released five months earlier bearing the unmistakable touch of another scene guru, Mark Bell aka LFO.

A must-have of nineties electronic music and the unsurpassed creative peak of the Plaid saga, Not For Threes is an unexpected flash of light that opens the door to a new and decidedly more “human” way of understanding IDM.

Having laid the groundwork for the birth of the genre itself with Bytes and its predecessors, and having gone on to blend its developments with those of the techno world in a masterclass of synthesis like Spanners, Handley and Turner now literally burst into that universe, offering a fresh perspective from which to view it. In the years to come, the duo's research would continue, keeping this album as its inseparable root while increasingly focusing on developing the melodic side of their music, in parallel with the gradual decline of the intelligent era.

The evolution

Two years go by, and we arrive at 1999. A lot has changed since Ed and Andy took their first, mammoth steps into the electronic underground. The rave party universe has by now reached the end of its golden age, and with it the music tied to it too — hardcore, drum'n'bass, acid and jungle. The ashes of that era, recycled appropriately and sanded down of their harshest edges, are repackaged not without success in the so-called big beat of the likes of Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim, before becoming useful material for the punk cause too on the seminal "The Fat Of The Land" by Prodigy. The minimal aesthetic imposed by Berlin on the whole of Europe has exploded to the point of infecting most of the Old Continent's club music, turning first-era experimenters like Richie Hawtin into genuine stars. Dub applied to the digital universe is an increasingly sought-after field of research: it's an integral part of that blend of hip-hop, psychedelia and lucid dreams that makes up the second wave of Bristol trip-hop, and under the blows dealt first by Basic Channel and then by Monolake, it is about to cross the Atlantic and reach even Detroit, its birthplace (Deepchord and the Echospace productions above all), and Canada (Deadbeat). Sealing it all, Daft Punk, with the unexpected success of "Homework", have also launched house music onto the European springboard: Paris, with its "french touch", will be its cradle.

This is admittedly a limited and condensed overview, but it's enough to frame the context in which Plaid find themselves working on their third full-length album, right as most of their contemporaries are starting to look elsewhere, trying to find a path to keep moving forward.

Handley and Turner's deliberate refusal to linger on the same formula for more than one album leads them to seek out and find, once again, fresh solutions, which once more stem from a panoramic look at the surrounding European sound landscape. The aforementioned Peel Session, a meeting/clash with former bandmate Ken Downie, is the perfect opportunity for a dress rehearsal of the sounds set to resurface on the album in the works, which comes to fruition two months later under the title Rest Proof Clockwork.

The opening of the tracklist is already disorienting and astonishing: "Shackbu" is a foggy, staggering splash of dub, lulling as it winks at the sounds of the intelligentsia. The performance repeats itself among the more traditional crackling basses of "Little People", in the more relaxed downtempo passage of "Buddy" and in the curious divertissement of "New Bass Hippo". Alongside this new contamination, the album continues developing the melodic research already underway on Not For Threes: the sweet, fragile "Ralome", the sibylline music-box of "Tearisci" and the long, crackling symphony of "Air Locked" open up new horizons, effectively pushing past the boundaries of intelligent melodicism towards a new dimension that would be further expanded in the following years. The sugary ups and downs of "Dang Spot" and the swirling yet soothing frenzy of "Last Remembered Thing" take on the role of keeping the bridges to the distant past of Mbuki Mvuki intact, while the link to the seminal predecessor is guaranteed by the organic digest of "Pino Pomo" and by the only vocal track, the dreamy, ethereal "Face Me", where the voice lent is that of a still-unknown but already enchanting Allison Goldfrapp.

Rest Proof Clockwork is another step forward towards the sunset of the IDM era, and at the same time proof that Plaid are anything but willing to go down with it. It's once again an album full of fresh ideas, even though for the first time it's entirely the product of combining sound worlds already explored previously. The quality remains extremely high nonetheless, as does the depth of Handley and Turner's research, who moreover hit a new melodic peak, quietly pointing towards what would soon become the main distinguishing feature of their music.

As the months go by, the curtain on the world of intelligent dance music begins to fall more and more unstoppably. 2000 is something of a sabbatical year for nearly all the scene's protagonists, all busy searching for a path capable of leading them towards new horizons, new territories to experiment on. Clear warning signs of this had already appeared earlier: at the same time as the release of Rest Proof Clockwork, µ-Ziq had delivered "Royal Astronomy", his first post-IDM work. A year earlier, "LP5" and "EP7" had laid the groundwork for Autechre's takeoff towards a world of pure artificial claustrophobia that would find its first true realization in "Confield". The "newcomer" Squarepusher, for his part, had tried to go further by getting mired in a murky avant-garde swamp on the dreadful "Selection Sixteen", ready to redeem himself later with "Go Plastic", one of the high points of his career.

The transition process is evident and complex, so much so that not everyone manages to complete it at the same level: after the embarrassing divertissement of "Windowlicker", Aphex Twin would, two years later, impose a veto on the continuation of his career that persists to this day, using (and, at least in part, abusing) his last reserves of oxygen for the monumental "Drukqs", a formal showcase of the intelligent aesthetic capable of blending visionary flashes of genius with utterly exhausted exercises in style.

Mike Dred would follow his pupil by distilling his theories into the DJ mix "Innovations In The Dynamic Of Acid" before disappearing from the scene for good, and other Rephlex (Luke Vibert and Jeremy Simmonds) and Warp (B12 and Speedy J) standard-bearers would also vanish without a trace, just as Richie Hawtin would abandon his historic monikers to launch, under his own name, a process of self-dismantling of his artistic persona, becoming the undisputed King — alongside people like Ricardo Villalobos — of a static, plastic minimal techno aimed exclusively at the worst kind of club crowd.

Entering the new millennium is therefore a crucial juncture, one that Handley and Turner manage to get through by completing the process of mutation set in motion on Rest Proof Clockwork. First, though, the two allow themselves a brief pause of a few months to revisit some of the material conceived before leaving Black Dog: out of this intent comes Trainer, which contains the whole of Mbuki Mvuki, the Space In Columbia EP and a handful of previously unreleased tracks that had until then stayed locked in a secret drawer. It's an important testimony to a decidedly little-known phase of the Plaid saga, as well as the only document on it that is still easy to find today.

A few months later comes the Booc EP too, which, in what has by now become a tradition for the duo, anticipates the release of the new long player. This time the edition is limited to just 3,500 copies, but the title track is an unmissable gem built on richly coloured ups and downs of prepared piano, which hint between the lines at the attainment of yet another new peak of melodic lyricism. This peak shows up in every sound of Double Figure, released in mid-2001 and definable without hesitation as the quintessential "new" Plaid album. Sweetness and evocative power are the main features of this new skin of the duo, one whose roots go back as far as Black Dog's Spanners, and which, through the "new IDM" of Not For Threes and the multiform contaminations of Rest Proof Clockwork, has evolved to the point of taking over completely and replacing the earlier version. The Plaid music of Double Figure is richly coloured, atmospheric yet lively electronic music, where harmonic progressions guide a world of images and sublimations.

The album is without doubt the least historically influential of the wonder trilogy it ideally forms with its two predecessors, but at the same time it's the litmus test, the bridge connecting the Plaid of the past to the Plaid of the future, containing both within it. Although by now they've drifted out of the IDM macrocosm, Handley and Turner retain in their new guise the fruits of their many past flashes of genius, particularly when it comes to rhythm and track structure. The latter, in fact, unapologetically echoes that of Spanners: instead of the "Bolt" tracks, it's now the "Tak" tracks that come between songs in the second half of the album. The splendid opener "Eyen", a cascade of clear, pristine sine waves, the sugary sci-fi of "Assault On Precinct Zero" and the cathartic nocturne of "Sincetta" are the three emblems of this new sonic course, built on the pair's finest melodic progressions. The polyrhythmic odysseys, still present in the form of bass clashes ("Ooh Be Do"), overt tributes to Aphex Twin ("Twin Home") and the by-now-usual funkadelic divertissements ("Porn Coconut Co"), shed their acid nastiness, almost forced to yield to the gentle, picturesque approach that characterizes the whole record. Even the livelier moments, like the dancing rainbow of "Squance" and the spaceship clash of "New Family", tend to isolate themselves in a taste closer to cinema than to claustrophobia: it's no coincidence that the final frontier reached by Ed and Andy is precisely that of film scores. The one exception here is the wild card "Zala", supersonic speed and rhythmic flourishes nonetheless ready to be submerged beneath a warm blanket of melody.

Completing the puzzle are a series of plunges into pure ambience, such as the jazzy "Light Rain", the visionary, enchanted expanse of "Zamami", the more convoluted "Ti Bom", led by Tim Hutton's sax, and the soft, winking marimba of "Manyme", which, as tradition dictates, closes with Mara Carlyle's laconic vocal.

Double Figure is the testament of Plaid and of a sound developed exclusively between their synths and their laptops, the third great album from an act that would go on to prove itself the longest-lived among the protagonists of Nineties electronic music. This despite the fact that, as one might expect, their later releases were never destined to match up to this extraordinary triptych.

The arc

The year is 2002. Having disentangled themselves remarkably from the IDM macrocosm — to reach which they had effectively broken away from the Black Dog experience — Plaid now find themselves in the equally complex position of having to carry on beyond the near-perfect triumph of Double Figure. That album left an indelible mark on their story and on an ever wider, more varied audience of fans: from a niche act of the electronic underground, Handley and Turner have become highly esteemed authors of a rich, sensual, visionary and evocative brand of electronic music, decidedly more accessible and by now traceable only to their own name. It's hard now to go further, to keep searching for something new and find it without risking the loss of the magical balance they've achieved.

Thus, starting with the EP P-Brane – the most recent of their career – the duo turn their focus to the evocative character of their music: what now gets varied are moods, atmospheres and images, explored through a sound that becomes a common thread running through all of them. A decidedly cinematic approach, as shown by the à-la-Mouse On Mars sparks of "Diddymousedid", the enveloping flashes of "Stills" and the collision-course flows of "Coat".

As usual, this is a prelude to what would be offered a year later by Spokes, the fourth full-length chapter in the Plaid saga and the hardest for the duo, both for the reasons already outlined and simply because of its status as heir to a trio of sensational records.

The soft glimmers of "Even Spring" open the album, adorned by the astral vocals of Luca Santucci (the same Santucci who years later would form the Stubborn Heart project), launching a collection of melodic tapestries with an almost sci-fi feel, able to move from polished music-box tones (the gorgeous "Zeal", the more downtempo "B Born Droid") to power electronics-style fascinations (the brisk "Cedar City", the visionary "Marry"), while also indulging in a few too many oddities (the closing cascade of bubbles that is "Quick Emix", the dub detour of "Get What You Gave").

The overall atmosphere is decidedly more relaxed and laid-back, with the total disappearance of the more frantic, claustrophobic side of the Plaid sound – truth be told, already pushed into the background after Not For Threes. What's missing are the sharp edges, the surprise twists, but also simply the evolving sense of exploration that had characterized all three predecessors, driven by a willingness to take risks that here is understandably reined in. The quality of the sounds and production remains decidedly high, along with that talent for churning out crystalline, evocative melodic constructions: these are the strengths of an album that satisfies and pleases without thrilling the way its predecessors once did.

From this new way of making music, so strongly built on images and atmospheres, the step toward the world of film scores is a short one. So, after Parts In The Post – a Peacefrog-issued collection documenting Handley and Turner's little-known but no less interesting work as remixers – the two decide to take a break (one that would end up lasting three years), looking for the chance to bring their music – at that point ripe for significant developments or shifts – into a brand new context. The right opportunity arrives in 2006, courtesy of director Michael Arias, American by birth and Japanese by adoption, who finds in the duo's soundscapes the ideal accompaniment to the animated adventures of his Tekkonkinkreet, released in Italy under the title "Soli contro tutti". The soundtrack the duo put together is exactly what anyone who had followed their story up to that point might have expected: a restatement of the gentle, polished sonorities of Spokes, in a guise even further removed from the world of techno and not far at all from a chamber-music dimension.

As the track titles suggest, the record is decisively shaped by cinematic needs, which the duo prove themselves quite capable of meeting – above all the tightrope-walking march of "Rat's Step", the futuristic decadence of the main theme from "This City" and the metallic-edged tension of "Oasis". For the first time in their career, however, the whole thing feels more like the product of pre-planning than genuine inspiration, (understandably) crafted to sound a certain way, but often lacking spontaneity in the process. The forays into world music (the acoustic tribal feel of "Brothers Chase"), jazz ("Butterfly") and industrial-tinged darkness ("Open Kastle") convince very little, and certainly don't read as possible new avenues for musical exploration; by contrast, "This City Is Hell" – the most classic of their music-box pieces – the pure ambient of "Safety In Solitude" and the gorgeous, melancholic "White's Dream" sound like unanswerable displays of mastery, guaranteeing quality across the whole product. What is rather surprising, on a record that is deliberately self-referential, is the presence of a glimpse of something new in the glitch-pop storm of "Where?", an idea that would nonetheless go unexplored in the future.

That Tekkonkinkreet was intended, by design, as an artistic project going well beyond a simple soundtrack is shown by the remix album Ainplex put out the following year: reworking the original tracks in new guises are, among others, His Majesty Derrick May, Uwe Schmidt, here under the Atom alias, Mathew Jonson and Prefuse 73. Louder in its names than in its actual content, Tekkonkinkreet Remix Tekkonkinkreet is nonetheless a solid counterpart to the original soundtrack, though it tends to go largely unnoticed thanks to the surprise arrival, just a few months later, of the sixth chapter in the Plaid saga.

On Greedy Baby, Handley and Turner carry on, buoyed by the influence of their very recent visual experience: Bob Jaroc, visual artist and director already behind some of their videos, is accordingly brought in to co-credit a work that presents itself as a full-fledged multimedia piece. Dazzling and illusory in its packaging, the record nonetheless reveals all its weaknesses once you get to the content: an even mix, and this time a rather tired one, of the atmospheres of Spokes ("I Citizen The Loathsome", "The Launching Of Big Face", "E.M.R.") and the already none-too-successful tensions of Tekkonkinkreet ("War Dialer" and the two halves of "The Return Of Super Barrio"), topped off by the anachronistic throwbacks of "Super Positions" and the frantic "To". What's missing this time isn't just a spark or any kind of novelty compared to the duo's (already underwhelming) previous two records, but creative lifeblood itself.

Ultimately more easily regarded as a soundtrack to its far more successful visual effects than as an album in its own right, Greedy Baby is Plaid's first real misstep in fifteen years of honorable career, destined, with hindsight, to remain an almost entirely isolated case.

Aware of their momentary inability to push forward with even the slightest variation on their sonic identity, Ed and Andy decide to stay out of the studio entirely for a good year and ramp up their live activity instead. Their live shows stand out for their austere character and the near-total absence of special effects, except for visuals that are never allowed to step forward enough to outgrow their status as mere "backdrops". Behind their trusty laptops and a few miniature representatives of their analog synth collection, Plaid blend remixes, improvisation and memories drawn from their albums, among which Double Figure and Spokes are the most represented. All of it kept under direct control and adapted, through live editing, to the context of the sonic flow as it unfolds. Each track thus takes on a new guise from set to set, closely tied to the sounds that precede its performance and those that follow right after. Any form of pre-programming is likewise totally absent: tracks from the archive are picked on the fly, just like the sounds assembled during improvised passages, and the two need only a glance or a gesture to stay in sync on what to do next. A perfect machine, capable of periodically renewing itself, updating its hard drive with new sounds and rhythms never before heard on record, thus using the spontaneity of the live dimension as an alternative testing ground in this phase that precedes the recording studio.

It is precisely this new way of working that will lead Plaid to an unexpected sonic rebirth, one that would materialize a few years later, right as interest – already waning since the early 2000s – in post-IDM scenes would drop off dramatically. In between, there's still room for one failure, corresponding to the duo's second foray into film music: once again it's Michael Arias who calls on Handley and Turner, this time to score Heaven's Door, his remake of Thomas Jahn's "Knockin' On Heaven's Door". The result the two producers come up with is a repetitive, half-hearted blend of Double Figure's sounds, almost entirely forgoing the poor ambient-style detours of Tekkonkinkreet and Greedy Baby. Precisely because of this, the album ultimately comes across as more harmless than outright botched, while at the same time sounding like it could be the final nail in the coffin for their sonic future. After the triumph of their first three extraordinary records, Ed and Andy's saga seems to have lost that spark and creative drive needed as substance to pair with the evocative power – by now purely formal and abstract – of their music.

The resurrection

It's 2011 when Warp announces the release, four years on from Greedy Baby, of a new Plaid studio record. Three years, meanwhile, have passed since the (effectively inconsequential) Heaven's Door. Years in which the duo had decided to keep up the live activity that had seemed like the only way out of their recent creative crisis, setting aside any studio ventures for a while.

Much has changed since Double Figure, a full ten years earlier, had shown off their remarkable ability to recreate a sonic world of their own in the post-intelligent era. If after that unsurpassed peak the duo made one mistake, it was undoubtedly abandoning a defining trait of their music going all the way back to their Black Dog days: contamination. That relentless urge to cross stylistic boundaries, to draw from the least obvious corners of music, the same urge that had led them – together with Ken Downie – to build a Sheffield-Berlin-Detroit axis at least three years ahead of Basic Channel's own tribute to the Underground Resistance legacy. The same urge through which Ed and Andy had burst into the IDM world in the most unexpected way with Not For Threes, before evolving by looking toward the hazy universes of dub on Rest Proof Clockwork. That same drive, ready to resurface after three years of touring the world playing live, which had already given a future to Mike Paradinas and his Planet Mu label, who went from being standard-bearers of an increasingly colorful IDM to forerunners in importing to Britain the surprising new American sounds – juke and footwork above all. That very same drive whose absence, by contrast, marked the gradual decline of Autechre and the ever more extreme fossilization of their soundworld, and the one Aphex Twin resisted by vanishing almost entirely from the recording scene to this day.

The fact remains that in 2011 very few people are expecting any particular comeback from Plaid, who had by then been largely forgotten even by nostalgists for nineties electronica. And this is perhaps the very reason why the resurrection represented by Scintilli ends up passing more or less unnoticed. While footwork and juke had been the talk of the town with µ-Ziq, the Sheffield duo's new album is instead steeped in nods to the world of beat music, the pair once again looking around and picking up on trends with which to "dirty up" their own sound. This is a trend, as mentioned, that had already been noticeable in many of their live shows: it's no surprise, then, that Scintilli is the liveliest, most direct and most live-oriented record of their career, the first to definitively abandon that chamber-music quality that had always been a hallmark of their electronics, without however returning to the acid-frantic rough edges lost after Double Figure. A genuine ticking time bomb, kicking off on the most dazzling, heavenly melodic bed the duo have ever written, that almost psychedelic-tinged "Missing", driven by alien vocoders, marking the first step of a possible new era. Electronic voices again lead the way in the lunar dance of "Unbank" and the floating pace of "Tender Hooks", while the irresistible, booming combustion-engine drive of "Eye Robot" is an unmistakable wink to post-garage basslines. Nostalgia finds decidedly little room here, condensed into the LFO-à-la- frictions of "Upgrade", into the new chapter of "ethnic passion" that is "African Woods" – this time under the aegis of Four Tet – and into the techno drizzle of "Thank", where the sounds are nonetheless decidedly closer to the Berlin of DJ Hell than to Leftfield. Along with the renewed creative energy, their never-lost talent for crystalline harmonies also reaches new heights: see the ambient passages of "Craft Nine" and "35 Summers" – echoing the best of Tekkonkinkreet – and the vocoder play of the closing "At Last", surely the most pop song of their entire career.

Scintilli marks the return to the top for the longest-running and most chameleonic duo of Nineties British electronica. While it's not a seminal work on the level of the trilogy that launched their career, the album is a tight, fresh distillation of their sound brought up to date with the trends of the new millennium, full of the defining traits that made the Plaid sound great. At the same time, it's a decidedly softer, more accessible work, in that sense continuing the gradual evolution that had led to Double Figure, of which it stands as the first true heir.

Having taken back the reins of their career, Plaid decide to try once again – less than a year later – to engage with the world of multimedia. This time it's Evan Bohem who entrusts them with the score for his short film The Carp And The Seagull, a role in which the duo evoke an aquatic universe through their sound: the nine brief fragments that make up the soundtrack immerse themselves in a liquid, astral ambient-techno, decidedly far removed from any past work by the duo and, paradoxically, closer to the style developed in parallel by former bandmate Ken Downie under the ever-resilient Black Dog banner. A minor affair, almost a side project, released by Warp in a limited edition that's now hard to track down, it nonetheless stands as Plaid's best result in the world of soundtracks, and further confirmation of their resurrection.

Throughout 2012, Ed Handley and Andy Turner took Scintilli on the road across Europe, even stopping in Italy for a memorable Milan date with an audience far smaller than the event deserved.

Only two years pass before the pair return to the record market, though the news remains known only to a select few for several weeks, not helped by Warp's delay in promoting it. Reachy Prints is not a flawless record, nor is it particularly original or surprising in any way, and it lacks even the varied brilliance that made its predecessor so great. If anything, it's a paradigm, an album that's "all substance," where the lack of form occasionally makes itself felt, a record that embodies Plaid's approach to making music more than any before it. The step forward sits in full continuity with Scintilli and leads to a definitive farewell to rhythmic faceting, bowing instead to the strength of melody and lucid dreaming, to the point of occasionally brushing against the most sophisticated and luxurious forms of the downtempo universe. But the truth is that these nine tracks are "later" only in a strictly temporal sense, because they actually bring to light, in pure form, what have always been the defining traits of Plaid's music. The cradle that the music box of "Nafovanny" reveals to us, for instance, is the very same one where, some fifteen years earlier, Ed and Andy strove to simplify the complex equations of idm origin, here finally reduced to their normal form amid the spontaneous smiles of "Tether" and the muffled laments of "Ropen". "Wallet" does the same, once again drawing on their longstanding ability to seal emotions within the brightly colored tiles of their kaleidoscopes. In the same stylistic vein, the opening one-two punch is the kind of true knock-out: the irrepressible progression of "OH" and the gentle watercolor of "Hawkmoth" are proof of genuine mastery, crystalline gems that no one else has yet shown they can produce. On the other hand, the attempts to impress through jazzy effusions on "Liverpool Street" and the glittering sci-fi sounds of "Matin Lunaire" don't achieve the desired effect, though without disrupting the fluent flow of the tracklist.

Twenty-three years have passed since their actual debut up to Reachy Prints, and seventeen since the real deal "solo" effort, yet the passing years seem to have granted Plaid's music only maturity and creative awareness in generous doses, unlike what happened to most of the other protagonists of "old" idm. And it matters little that this time the spark is dimmer than it once was and the craftsmanship perhaps shows a bit more than usual: it's artists like these, who make electronic music of class with heart and who know how to stir and touch the heart through electronic music, that we will never stop needing.

Continuing the research they've only recently resumed, whose current linchpin is precisely their live experimentation, Plaid are today one of the jewels of Warp's roster, as well as perhaps the only surviving act of the Idm era still pushing forward under the banner of modernity. An essential project for the electronic music of the past, and one in the full bloom of its present.

Atto III: The Black Dog, after Idm

The "in-between period": the opening act

The departure of Ed Handley and Andy Turner from Black Dog, as already mentioned, was anything but unexpected for Ken Downie, who was by then well on his way down a completely different path, leading straight to Berlin and its ever-flourishing techno underground. Even before Plaid had time to finish and release Not For Threes, the producer already seemed almost impatient to freely explore his own soundworld: the medium of library music, however, certainly didn't help the already forgettable Music For Adverts (And Short Films), which disappointingly cast a momentary shadow over the Black Dog name.

It was precisely during this period, aware that he had to face the challenge of a comeback, that Downie decided to temporarily step away from the act of which he had remained the sole member, so as to have time to gather his thoughts for a fresh start in grand style. Thus began, for him, a long period of study and discovery: Berlin was the main destination, but London's thriving underground and certain house-oriented clubs were also among the worlds that drew him in. And it was precisely in these environments that Downie discovered and became fascinated by a new form of artistic collaboration: that of the collective. In this new modus he found a convergence between the long-coveted possibility (as shown by the nature of Bytes) of keeping his own sonic identity independent from that of other members, and the benefits of working side by side with other creative minds. Under circumstances once again never fully explained – Downie would only state in rare interviews that the change in the project's status had taken place, and how natural it felt – Black Dog thus became a collective, taking on a form destined to last for half of the Noughties.

The early years of this new incarnation of the project saw Downie alternating between various travel companions, focused mainly on the role of remixer: the key figures joining him in this phase were guitarist Ross Knight (merely a namesake of the better-known Cosmic Psychos) and Steve Ash, a sound engineer with a passion for multimedia. The horizon surrounding the newborn collective thus expanded to include video art, design and literature: in this latter field, in particular, Ken and co. managed to pull off an unlikely collaboration with William S. Burroughs, enlisted to "perform" on some experiments with spoken poetry.

In these years Black Dog were a true volcano, with all the pros and cons that status entails: a swarm of ideas and projects came paired with the difficulty of focusing enough to actually complete them and give practical shape to so many intentions. For this very reason, a full five years had to pass before a work under the Black Dog name was finally released, aside from the numerous remixes collected between 1997 and 2002. A few years later, Downie himself would confirm that "nothing came out in that period, but we were definitely busy, much busier than we've ever been, probably even too much so".

Perhaps also due to the excessive haste with which it was put together, Unsavoury Products – the "comeback" album, but also the first and last Black Dog record made with an "open" lineup – is undoubtedly the worst product ever released under the name. It's a tribute to Burroughs, who had since passed away, and whose collaborative contributions from several years earlier were destined to remain unreleased. In his place, the young Black Sifichi was brought on board, and it was from here that he would launch a career that would lead him to collaborate with, among others, Mathias Delplanque, Florian Hecker, Philippe Petit, Simon Fisher Turner and Rob Mazurek. The album's musical component is decisively shaped by the libertarian, and ultimately rather anarchic, spirit that characterizes the collective's activity: Downie and co. explore a great many worlds superficially and hastily, to the point that the only real common thread running through all the tracks is Sifichi's chilling treated voice, vaguely reminiscent of some character from the "Star Wars" saga.

The failed attempts thus revolve around algorithmic dub that tries to take its cue from Monolake ("Dogbite", "Secret Biscuits"), harsh-noise crackles that owe too much to the likes of Drumm and Haswell ("If I Were King", "New York Dox"), retreats into decidedly anachronistic chill-out ("Someone At The Office", "Science Tells Us", "Wishing Well"), and even vague, muddled nods to hip-hop ("Invisible Things", "Interview") and acid-jazz ("What Do They Want?", "Pigeon Chest").

As if this series of clumsy stylistic missteps weren't enough, rounding out a work of a full twenty tracks are a number of even more pointless divertissements, short rhythm-breakers (in the tradition launched by Spanners), which only further weigh down a listen that already skirts the embarrassing.

The remixes on Genetically Modified, in the vein of lunar dancefloor sounds – admittedly already more dignified – won't be enough to redeem the fortunes of what is a true fish out of water within the Black Dog discography, as well as the worst possible testimony to an otherwise dense and demanding period in the history of Downie and co.

The new setup and the techno conversion

In the years to come, as Ken Downie repeatedly stated, the Black Dog name would continue to correspond to a group open to anyone interested in contributing artistically to the act's cause. Nevertheless, after the debacle of Unsavoury Products and given the impossibility of bringing to completion the excessive number of projects in the works, the producer from Sheffield decided in 2004 to steer his (by now exclusively his own) creation back towards a more stable shape. Among the various personalities who had passed through the banner, two brothers, Martin and Richard Dust, put in the most effort, gradually gaining ever more importance within the collective, until they became the only two permanent members alongside the founder. The decisive step came in 2005, when the two decided to set up their own record label, Dust Science, intending to have a fixed, self-run springboard to release the material piled up after the dismal pre-2002 experiments. With this move, Black Dog effectively went back to being a trio, a line-up they have kept to this day.

The label's founding was followed, almost as if to satisfy years of pent-up release hunger, by a flood of singles and EPs, all exemplifying the sonic direction the three had decided to focus on. This is a world rooted firmly in techno, drawing from the past in its most astral and atmospheric traits, from Downie's long-standing love of minimal experimental Berlin in its rhythmic squareness, and from the Dust brothers' experience in its more sinister, pounding passages.

Among the many 12"s released in 2005, standouts include the test run of Bite Thee Back and the two gems Trojan Hours and Remote Viewing, whose A-sides are both featured on the first work by the "new" Black Dog: the monumental, magnificent Silenced. The two halves of that first EP open the show, broadcasting live from a distant planet the chronicles of an intergalactic journey, letting the suspended sprays of "Lam Vril" and the desolate stretches of "Truth Benders D.I.E." relay the first position coordinates.

To these first four classics of the new repertoire are added the analog warmth of the splendid "Sudden Intake" and the liquid opening of "The Stele Of Revealing", alongside the more straightforwardly rhythmic episodes, such as the slow-motion ride of "Alt/Dash/Return/Kill", the dub inferno of "Remote Viewing" and the hi-hat triumph of "Gummi Void", before the closing two halves of "4 3s 555" let themselves drop into purely ambient rarefaction. A few new entries in the "Bolt" series act as skits between tracks, rounding out a tracklist that upholds a tradition which is, in fact, the only real link to the group's IDM past.

Rarely, in the recent past or otherwise, has a techno record managed to stay true to its definition while reaching the atmospheric and emotional depths found in Silenced. Here, Black Dog's music loses all contact with the intelligentsia of the Nineties, shedding every sharp edge in favour of a softness that digs deep enough to find a new face for minimal aesthetics. A record that fully redeems the failure of its predecessor, and that opens the door to a new season for the reunited English trio, who within a few years would become one of the most in-demand acts on the techno club and festival circuit.

Finally off the ground after a long and troubled gestation, the new trio fronting the act kept sowing singles between 2005 and 2008 (interrupted only by the excellent nineties-era commemorative compilation Book Of Dogma), split evenly between the Dust Science catalogue - meanwhile expanded thanks to the work of producers linked, even indirectly, to the collective, such as Anthony Shakir, Carl Taylor, Claude Young and Dan Curtin - and that of Soma Quality, the historic label among the very first to deal in techno in England. It was for the latter that Riphead was released in 2006, an EP that testifies to the continuing journey towards techno proper: the rhythms grow tighter, the sound more compact and less expansive, the atmosphere sturdier.

Keeping to the pattern already adopted for Silenced, Downie and the Dust brothers waited a couple of years to compile a new mix of unreleased tracks and A-sides from the 12"s scattered across the London label's catalogue, which came out in early 2008. Radio Scarecrow follows the wavelength of the fragments that preceded it and that it partly collects, devoting itself to a lush yet decidedly darker techno. While not entirely losing the softness that has always characterised Downie's vision of the genre, the record sees the near-total disappearance of the expansive, liquid atmospheres that had defined at least half of Silenced - with the exception of the piano sonata "Ghost Vexations" - placing the emphasis instead on the trio's more hypnotic, dancefloor-oriented textures. It's also the first in a series of works in which the artistic ambitions of Richard and (above all) Martin Dust would end up prevailing over Downie's, with a consequent shift towards darker, more hammering sonic territory. Thus, the two halves of "Train By The Autobahn" - born of an interesting exchange of views with mentor Robert Hood on the Detroit vs. Sheffield single - revolve around an aesthetic entirely in keeping with pure minimal, while "UV Sine", "Siiipher" and the resurrected "Floods" and "Riphead" step on the gas, hurling themselves onto the most underground of dancefloors. Although it holds up to a solid standard, the record ends up suffering from the loss of the astral traits that had made its predecessor great, turning out, all things considered, to be a fine collection of hand-crafted techno cuts far better suited to live performance or DJ sets than to home listening.

Less than a year later, it was again Soma Quality that put out Further Vexations, the ideal opening chapter of a trilogy destined to extend to the Vexing EP and the remixes of Final Collected Vexations. Rather than a sequel, the record should be understood as a true enhanced listen into the darker, more minimal side of the trio's music, here even more to the fore than on the previous album, from which the sound once again pulls decisively away from the dancefloor. The three sections of "Northern Electronic Soul" represent the peak of this expression of the new Black Dog sound, well embodied too by the opening digital skyscraper of "Biomantric L-if-e" and the pounding deluge of "0093".

For the first time in the act's history, the titles carry clear references to current affairs, another novelty introduced by the - here almost total - dominance of Richard Dust's artistic spirit. Such is the case with the claustrophobia stripped down to its bare essentials in "CCTV Nation" - an expressionist portrait of a Britain oppressed by surveillance - and with the attack on governmental paranoia in the form of the primordial bass drum of "You're Only SQL". Even where rhythm and tension ease off, as in the caustic descent of "Later Vexation", the atmosphere stays sinister enough to make Further Vexations the darkest release to bear the Black Dog name, decidedly more personal and original than the preceding Radio Scarecrow, even if once again far from the heights of Silenced.

The subsequent remix album transplants the same scenarios into the more impetuous, geometric techno of the likes of Chris Liebing, Sandwell District and Silent Servant, giving them a new outfit that doesn't always fit. Preceding it chronologically was the release of the CD-R Ov Mind, Ov Magick, limited to just 110 copies and containing the recording of a live performance held in Brussels in 2009.

The latter years and a new entry into the pantheon

Coming off two projects fully consistent with the spirit they had adopted but unable to match the splendid inauguration of their new course, Downie and the Dust brothers decided to try steering their music towards new shores. All this happened while maintaining the prolific pace kept up in recent years, thanks to which the three didn't wait much more than half a year before resurfacing once again, with what is to date the final chapter of their partnership with Soma Quality. So, if the setting on Radio Scarecrow was a dark dancefloor and on Further Vexations an alienating, sinister world, for Music For Real Airports the chosen location is the quintessential symbol of ambient music, the one that Brian Eno had described thirty years earlier in his visionary masterpiece. But the shift doesn't stop there: the record also marks the Black Dog name's first contact with the multimedia world, as well as a new dialogue with the visual arts after Music For Adverts (And Short Films).

It is in fact a project commissioned by a number of London contemporary art galleries, developed jointly with the design studio Human, and made up of a visual component, curated by the latter, and a musical one. Unlike the Eno-ian revolution, which turned music into a complement to its surroundings, here it is a faithful description of them, thanks to the extensive use of field recordings and samples taken directly on site. Stylistically, it's a return to the astral, twilit soundscape of Silenced, here further deepened in its ambient dimension. Drawing inspiration partly from Eno and partly from those fusions of ambient and techno of which Aphex Twin had been a pioneer on his "Selected Ambient Works 85-92" - and to which the Black Dog of Bytes had certainly not been indifferent - the three craft a work that is finally convincing and original, able to represent their arrival in an entirely new sonic dimension.

The desert-like, nocturnal "M1", the sketched-out shape of "Terminal EMA", the Harold Budd-esque sonata of "Delay 9" and the two halves of "Sleep Depravation" are genuine gems of ambient music, among the most evocative the duo have ever composed. Even where rhythm does appear, the mood remains entirely relaxed: such is the case with the livid "DISinformation Desk", the sinister "What Behind This Line" and the pairing "Business Car Park 9"-"Empty Seat Calculation", swaying under their breath with a concrete tinkling. Even in the few livelier episodes - the slow-motion rhythmic crossings of "Strip Light Hate" and "Future Delay Thinking" - the memory evoked, atmospherically, points back to the previous album, and stylistically to a genuine comeback into that pre-IDM territory of which Downie had been a trailblazer back in his partnership with Handley and Turner.

Music For Real Airports is the fullest display of Black Dog's most atmospheric, evocative side, as well as the perfect counterweight to the dancefloor descent of Radio Scarecrow. The icy production and the evident need to fit futuristic multimedia clichés are the weights that keep the album from joining in full the pantheon of the act's great records, even though it marks a clear, bold step forward from its immediate predecessors.

Having returned home after the Dust Science experience, Downie and the Dust brothers went back to flooding the second half of 2010 and all of 2011 with limited-edition 12"s, among which Thee Lounge stands out in particular, an ideal companion Ep to the last album, continuing its sound and visual identity, with the magnifying glass pointed at the waiting-room environment. A further step towards ambient music came with the Dadavic Orchestra project, born from the meeting between the trio and Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia – another almost mythological project of the German techno scene – in the three-piece line-up made up of Reiner Brekelmans, Robbert Heynen and Tim Freeman. To this day their three Dokument releases – two Eps bookending a CD – remain impossible to find, all issued in extremely limited editions by Dust Science and in any case akin to ambient-drone sonorities.

But just when one might have expected a continuation along the same lines, the trio surprised everyone once again, releasing yet another Lp at the end of the year and sharply reversing course. Liber Dogma is, as Richard Dust himself stated, an album worked out exclusively with the dancefloor in mind, as well as a deliberate homage to Berlin minimal sounds. The result is an unstoppable succession of tears and beats, an ideal evolution of what had been explored on Radio Scarecrow. Missing, however, are the darkness and that last veil of softness that had characterized that album, and any remaining trace of the experiences of the other two episodes in the Soma Quality trilogy is decidedly rejected: this time the mood is austere, pure and hypnotic, with no room for half measures.

The opening of "Dark Wave Creeping" is tasked with building a bridge through analogue sparks with a pronounced krautrock flavour, before the merciless blasts of "Steam Caliphate" and "Drop Kick Kali" hypothetically throw themselves onto the floors of the Berghain, following in the footsteps of a Ricardo Villalobos in a state of grace. The party has only just begun, and while a faint opening seems to appear amid the melodic wounds of "The Black Maria", the red-hot hammer of "Silent Escape" even crosses beyond minimal territory, drawing unapologetically close to the sound of a Drumcell. It is instead on minimal aesthetics that the closing part of the album places its emphasis, between the stinging whispers of "Hype Knot 7" and the stripped-down rave mutterings of "Worship: The Drum", almost a tiptoed visit to that frenetic underground scene from which Downie and co. had wanted to escape at the start of their career.

Liber Dogma is a disorienting and unexpected yet solid and convincing tribute to those sounds that Ken Downie had, for years, been introducing in controlled doses into the sonic formula that evolved over the course of his career. The Dust brothers' driving energy thus served the belated encounter between the producer and his enduring passion for Berlin and its sounds, an event that, all things considered, matters more to the trio's history than for its intrinsic value – it is, after all, a work that adds nothing to what has been carried forward in the German capital since the early Nineties.

The wave that followed the album's release was perhaps, this time, more unexpected for the trio than for those who had followed its gestation: breaking free from that status of untouchable myth in which the Black Dog name had in some ways found itself bogged down in recent years, Downie and the Dust brothers found themselves facing unexpected success in the world of club music, numerous offers from the most sought-after techno venues, and a new wave of admirers drawn from the clubbing crowd. While it must be acknowledged that the organic violence (because, for the first time, that is indeed what it is) that characterized Liber Dogma had a few sporadic precedents precisely in the live performances of that period, these are now also being brought before the eyes of those who, having come to the techno world when the Idm era had already set, had not been able to appreciate the historic glories of Downie in the first incarnation of his creation.

Throughout 2012, then, live performances spread evenly across the whole European continent, and it was precisely Berlin's Berghain – the most prestigious temple of New Millennium techno – that enlisted them for a fixed collaboration that continues to this day. And it was precisely during these live experiences, which strung together seals from the glorious past with the much-requested hammer blows of Liber Dogma, that the substance which would later take shape, a year on, in their latest work to date, naturally took form within the trio.

Released in 2013 and preceded by the four hand grenades of the The Return Ov Bleep Ep, Tranklements is the testament to what Black Dog has represented over nearly twenty-five years of activity. An album that mixes the innovations of Bytes and Spanners, the recent hammering tendency and the softly consistent class of Silenced with the naturalness and never-forced tightness that only a live approach can bring together. An album made to be played, in short, able to fuse from the very overture of "Alien Boys" analogue, astral liquefactions with a rhythmic framework never so robust and virile, ready to break apart into minimal bullets in the two "Pray Crash" tracks and to wrap itself in cutting lasers within the rhythmic knots of "Atavistic Resurgence".

This time, there is also room for the house-oriented ambitions – previously kept hidden – of Martin Dust, free and indulged in the pairing of "Cult Mentality" and "Hymn From So", before the final part of the album goes back to scattering itself with luminous trails and shooting stars, sometimes alone ("Internal Collapse" and the closing "Spatches", the only ambient-flavoured concession) and other times backed by a powerful backbone ("First Cut", "Death Bingo") or a frenetic one ("Mind Object"). Worth noting too is the return of the structure that had made Spanners great, with the now-classic skits of shards and white noise (once again titled "Bolt") breaking up the rhythm here and there.

Mixing the best of the first and second phases of their history into a single cocktail and treating the resulting blend with modern, at times visionary sounds, Black Dog deliver their best album since Silenced, the most spontaneous and inspired. If the former was the ideal peak of their new formula, as well as the purest apex of that astral techno Downie had been forging since the start of his career, Tranklements is the culmination of every strand pursued under the more-than-twenty-year-old name, and at the same time the most genuine and widely distributed product of his creative crossover with Martin and Richard Dust.

Two years later, and after scattering singles and 12"s (including a split with Happa) and working on a series of "sound exhibitions" devoted to Nineties Sheffield (documented across three Eps), Downie and the Dust brothers released Neither/Neither in 2015. The dominant colour of the cover seems chosen specifically to mark the departure from the predecessor's liquid, dub-chiselled techno, replaced instead by a colourful arsenal of grooves, melodies and sonic architectures at a constant, very high temperature. Not quite a true back-to-dancefloor move, as Radio Scarecrow had been, but a synthesis between the trio's more geometric, intelligent soul and its more distinctly club-oriented one. Thus, the fifteen tracks stage a kind of phased rollercoaster, starting from the expanse of flows and harmonies in the style of Boards Of Canada on the opener "Non Linear Information Life", before unexpectedly spilling into the urban field recordings of "Phil 3 To 5 To 3", the first in a series of interludes meant to break up the rhythm. The dark, slow-motion mantra of the title track raises the pace while remaining on a measured hypnotic stride, offering the first glimpses of a class that has never faltered, shown off even more on the return to dub-ambient geometries of "Them (Everyone Is A Liar But)" and in the veiled homage to friend Aphex Twin and his "Xtal" found on "Control Needs Time". The sonic path, designed to build momentum subtly but steadily, gives the first half of the album its quietest, most atmospheric episodes, while reserving the more muscular, uptempo material for the second half. All of this starting right from "Shut Eye", a venomous little march steeped in noise that delivers yet another lesson to Perc, before continuing with the cybernetic (and perhaps slightly risky) "Self Organising Sealed Systems", which veers vaguely towards early Daft Punk. The pace doesn't let up even on the more elegant "Commodification", which winks more than once at last year's back-to-Sheffield saga, nor in the ferment of "Platform Lvl 6", which moves in the direction of pre-mainstream-hangover Ellen Allien. "Hollow Stories, Hollow Head" is a genuine hand grenade that breaks through barriers and strays into pop territory, thanks to a simply irresistible electronic melody, while the masterful close of "MK Ultrabritte" is the icing on the cake, a cascade of stellar loops in pure Orbital style that brings the dancing to an end, reaffirming the three Britons' status as masters of the craft.

Black Dog's techno, however, is never intoxicated, never the product of a binge or devoted to mere entertainment: it remains instead among the rare examples of music that, while distinctly close to the dancefloor, is conceived for pure listening, for direct and conscious consumption. This is also shown by the few but important purely ambient gems scattered between one groove and the next, from the achingly sweet and touching "The Frequency Ov The Truthers", immediately followed by the crossed drones of "B.O.O.K.S." ahead of the fireworks-filled finale, to the last chapter of the urban interludes signed David. What the trio launch with Neither/Neither is yet another loud and clear message, with which they declare (and prove) that they still occupy a seat on the throne of techno in the broadest sense. Not exactly something within everyone's reach, not even among the Magnificent of Sheffield.

Able in 2015, with a career already paved behind them, to carry forward one of the most personal and polyglot paths in the genre, Black Dog – by now settled permanently as a trio – confirm themselves among the fundamental forces of electronic music. A status never quite acknowledged enough, both for their indispensable role in the development of the genre in the Nineties, and for the continuation – initially precarious but grown, over the years, tighter and ever higher in quality – of their deeply personal discourse within techno. One that, as shown by the recent confirmation of yet another Berghain date, promises to keep moving along a track of primary importance.

Ever since Ed Handley and Andy Turner departed in 1995 to devote themselves to Plaid, Ken Downie has increasingly steered Black Dog's music towards a synthesis of techno and ambient focused on understanding and critiquing the present. This approach was further solidified with the arrival of Richard and Martin Dust, with whom Black Dog became a powerful vehicle for social critique through a potent brand of electronics that, while never abandoning techno impulses, focuses mainly on describing the desolate landscapes of the last 20 years: from Music For Real Airports, an acidic response to the reassuring, historic album by Brian Eno, conceived to dismantle the false freedom granted by air travel in an age of clashes of civilizations and the rise of new walls; through to 2018's Post Truth, in which a concentrate of pulsing techno and broken beats takes it upon itself to fiercely criticize the rise of Trumpism and its criminal use of social networks.

Little by little, Black Dog have consolidated their ambient leanings, and the result can be heard in their most recent works, for example 2021's Music For Photographers, an intense soundtrack for black-and-white images of urban places, meant to capture their greyness and the gloomy mood brought about by the alienation that man-made places and structures induce in stunted lives.

The fact that Downie is a photographer is key to understanding the need behind a project like this, which continued in 2022 with the Ep Brutal Minimalism (again for Dust Science). Music composed on site during photo sessions to underline the oppressiveness of Yorkshire's minimalist architecture, brutal because it leaves no room for the hope of cultivating beauty, and merciless because it determines the social future of those who live within it: "Four snapshots for a promised future that we all deserve." With its fragmented beats, samples taken from the surrounding environment and powerful basslines, a track like "Form, Funcion And Friction" is an atmospheric evolution of Intelligent techno. "Corbusier: Five Points" confirms the enrichment of the sound compared to "Music For Photographers", with acidic sequencers slashing through the cloudy, rain-soaked landscape. "My Brutal Life Of It" gives us back a hyper-minimal techno dominated by post-industrial glitches embellished by beams of sonic light that lift up an otherwise dark environment. Right through to "WD23", a concentrate of ambient pulsations in which the harshness of metallic clangour merges with the hazy undertow of the synths.

From the masters of electronic sound we always expect a lot, and once again Black Dog's answer lives up to expectations. It jolts us out of our torpor, makes us accountable, reminds us that we can change a fate that seems already written.

Their subsequent album under the Plaid name, Feorm Falorx (2022), shows instead how the weight of the past can overshadow the present. The album only intermittently grabs attention, moving from caressed synth textures to contagious beats without ever really shaking things up. It's too easy for a band of their calibre to tackle the sparkle of arpeggiated strings on opener "Perspex", which sounds like a bit of rehearsal-room fun. The beat on "Modenet" is too lightweight too, even if the 4/4 choice keeps the track lively and primed to be remixed into something more powerful - depth being exactly what it's missing. It all culminates in the vapidity of a track like "Wondergan", all cheerful, melodious loops that are far too easy to churn out.

The album starts to take off with the sonic blades of "C.A", an obsessive techno beat and swelling urban sounds. This is what you'd expect from Plaid, if this kind of music still meant anything to generations used to listening to nothing but low frequencies. Of course, that's a debate Plaid care little about, intent as they are on asserting their presence and identity, as "Cwtchr" demonstrates with its broken rhythm wrapped in spacey synth sounds that never tip into excessive distortion. We're back in 90s IDM territory, and I'm not sure that's entirely reassuring news, even if the sounds themselves are pleasant. Because it's on the less reassuring tracks, like "Bowl", that Plaid still hit hardest, when they ditch the garlands of starry sounds and dig deep into restless souls with dark basslines, looming sounds and barely sketched melodies. It's no accident that the album closes with "Wide I's", a sonic game of interwoven basslines and drones that gets right under your skin.

Three years later, Black Dog's return takes the form of Loud Ambient (2025), an album that charts a journey through emotions. Released on Dust Science, the record draws inspiration from the work of Rothko and his paintings, which explore, through shifting tones of colour, the variable intensity of our emotions.

The opening track "They Came For My Head" begins with shimmering, repeating synth layers accompanied by light beats, recalling the work of Boards Of Canada. The deep synthetic bassline that bursts in after a while gives the track depth and makes it, in its own way, danceable. "I Will Cleanse You" builds up layers of glitch and synth shimmer, while a sonic jolt arrives via the full-bodied bassline, bringing tension where before there was calm.

We're far from ambient music as it's conventionally understood (the album title, incidentally, is an ironic nod to how Black Dog sometimes describe certain sounds of theirs) and much closer to that strain of IDM built on broken rhythms and obsessive rhythmic repetition. "Working Class Sabbath" conjures a fearsome industrial darkness, like a genuine witches' sabbath of sonic shards and waves of noise, while "Double Drop Nightmare" is an elegant example of how skilfully Black Dog can handle minimal techno: amid hisses and distant sounds, the track builds atmosphere while keeping the body moving with ease. "Pamphlet" closes the album with a triumph of almost symphonic analogue synthesizers, a light rhythmic bed and sounds that wrap around you with delicacy.

Black Dog once again confirm themselves as a benchmark for a warm strain of electronic music, one through which we can take care of our own emotions and those of others.

Shortly after the release of this latest work came the sad news of the passing of Ken Downie, who died on 20 December 2025, announced via a note on Black Dog's social media channels: "It's with great sadness and a heavy heart that we announce the passing of Ken Downie on 20/12/25. Rest In Peace brother, you will be deeply missed and never forgotten. Our condolences to Sheena and his family".

Downie leaves a huge void in the international electronic music scene, and his final work with Black Dog inevitably takes on the flavour of a musical testament - both to his career and to an entire era.

Contributions by Luigi Zampi ("Feorm Falorx", "Loud Ambient")

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