Intelligent dance music

Intelligent dance music still carries its primordial genetic code from Autechre, Boards Of Canada and Aphex Twin. But the network is still very much alive: a new generation of producers, nourished by the pioneering experience of the founding fathers and armed with more refined technologies, is now shaping the language into new, hybrid forms, ever closer to a dialogue with the machine. Here are five records from the 2020s that show how this new crop of artists isn't merely replicating the memory of the past, but injecting fresh lifeblood into the system, renewing the genre's vital circuits.

Aheloy! – Deep In The Big Blue Dream – 2024

Adrian Kolarczyk didn't stop at club music: he passed through it and then left it behind, projecting himself toward the hybrid zones of IDM with the clarity of someone who already knows where they want to go. The matrix remains that of intelligent dance music, but the spell expands to absorb every futurist aesthetic codified so far: from the atmospheric drum'n'bass of Seba & Lotek to the quantized downtempo of Aural Imbalance and Deep Space Organisms; even on his debut, he orchestrates a fascinating web with clarity and emotional verve.

Treating synthesis algorithms like underwater incantations, the record depicts a submerged world that seems to have sunk to the ocean floor. The artist guards a secret formula for laptop in an altered state, as though an Aphex Twin turned pure calculation could generate the emotions of tomorrow. His formula weaves viscous atmospheres together with limpid breakbeat modulations, and the sound becomes a fragmented flow, like a network in constant recoding.

Hoavi – Invariant – 2021

After the excellent "Phobia Airlines" in 2018, Russian producer Kirill Vasin resurfaces with a new compendium of techno and IDM steeped in muted visions. Like an electronic drift with comforting tones, the opener sets the trajectory toward an intimate, out-of-body crossing, where liquid pads collide with splintered amen breaks and vocal fragments reduced to sample data. The record moves through the genre's various inclinations, keeping the soft glow of technology as its main destination.

The sonic arsenal is broad: from cybernetic swagger to slow-motion trance, where nostalgia and dub intertwine in a tangle of hiss, murky kick drums and parallel arpeggios. In an unusually organic riot of self-sustaining circuitry, the record reaches almost primordial moments, intent on conjuring alien civilizations encoded into sound. Like a µ-Ziq born outside the solar system, "Invariant" has the merit of pairing variety with sonic refinement, looking to the past while deciphering the present at the same time.

Kakuhan – Metal Zone – 2022

The debut work by Japan's Kakuhan, where interweaving electroacoustics and algorithmic textures create a language that vibrates between an industrial timeline and the remote tribal past. The project arms itself with a drum machine and cello, turning the bow into glitchy, bouncing percussion, relentlessly marked out within a gargantuan stereo image. The opener "Mt-Dmz" makes the intentions clear right away: the synthetic rhythm, of clear Roland lineage, is barely manipulated beyond its own perennial distortions.

Everything revolves around the abyssal space between the bare electronic pulse and the ticking of the bow: a mantra for dinosaurs played by a John Cale projected beyond time. The sonic matter slides from the ancestral to the digital fragmentation of the Autechre lineage, until it starts to sound like quantum gamelan or atonal footwork. The work of Yuki Nakagawa and Koshiro Hino is as anxiety-inducing as it is disorienting, a lucid dream that turns into a waking nightmare of cyborgs and dark energy.

Serwed – Serwed III – 2022

Sound design is a load-bearing pillar of intelligent dance music, especially when the goal is to spawn its most abstract offspring, heir to both glitch and odd-time signatures. On this terrain, Flaty and OL compile a compendium of cerebral networks. Their solo careers, underway for over a decade now, move through ambient territory via rhythms that are smoky, hallucinatory and derealized to the point of glitching out. The result is a synaptic ecstasy: dance music for androids that sometimes goes beyond our comprehension.

A tapestry that fuses lived experience into a seismic, neural grid, as if Ryoji Ikeda were forced to program beats on percussive processors forged by alien civilizations. Between one short-circuit and the next, an alienating echo of dematerialized cloud trap resurfaces, a bionic delirium hinting at two eclectic entities. If we can even call them entities. Who's to say this intricate, post-industrial, dub-inflected, ethereal mantra wasn't written by artificial intelligences infiltrated from the future?

Xen Model – Core – 2021

Like Autechre plunged into an artificial ocean of shattered rhythms and glitches: that's exactly where Xen Model reside, inside a cybernetic magma that deconstructs and rematerializes itself in micro-details. The Los Angeles duo, on their second album, engineer ultra-complex patterns capable of throwing even Squarepusher off course. Ultra-fast rhythms crash into sudden chords that grant a brief moment of respite, only to resume with one synthetic stab after another.

There's no shortage of breathing space either: electronic layers stack up until they generate irregular beats; but the real surprise lies in how meticulously the two fuse these elements into a single continuum. The delirious synthetic rhythm dissolves into arpeggios, field recordings transmute into chords as if they couldn't do otherwise. Bliss emerges from the chaos: across fifty minutes of bionic schizophrenia, "Core" builds a sonic impact that's hard to walk away from unscathed.

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