Absurdly Cool: Japanese IDM

Hey steemit, thought I'd share some info on a pretty obscure topic I'm crazy about. 

It's more of a cross-section of topics I love: Music, Japanese Culture, and the futuristic experimental style "IDM". Short for "intelligent dance music", IDM is one of those terms closely associated with many artists who actively reject it. 

Much like the attitude displayed by Debussy and Ravel toward the label "impressionism" around the turn of the 20th century, the leading exponents of IDM display a certain level of discomfort, if not outright contempt for a term that is as constricting as it is pretentious.

This article does a great job of drawing parallels between the two movements: https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/9k5qdd/idm-was-the-romanticism-of-the-new-millennium

If you google the term you'll inevitably come across the definitive trio of English IDM artists: Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, and Autechre. I want to focus on a few Japanese artists that stand out as particularly innovative and unique.

DUB-Russell

Often accompanied by the hallucinatory visuals of Keijiro Takahashi, DUB-Russell offers an extreme take on aggressive sound design and glitch manipulations. Their sound borders on pure noise music at times (a connection to legendary Japanese noise artist Merzbow is worth mentioning here), but listening through their short discography you'll hear a range of textures and approaches to gnarly, metallic beats. It's surprising that they haven't caught on in the US festival scene given their ability to put on a full-on assault of the senses!

Daisuke Tanabe:

If IDM is characterized by "an experimental or 'cerebral' sound better suited for home listening than dancing". Then Daisuke Tanabe fits the bill pretty well. His music is the polar opposite of the mind-shattering bass assaults of modern electronic music, opting for a collage of intimately recorded sounds, assembled into a delicate clockwork of surgical groove. It's that last detail that throws you off! Underneath the pensive melodies and whirring mechanics, Tanabe weaves undeniable hip hop beats that swing and flow with subtlety not often found in your typical bedroom producers latest "fire mixtape".

Ryoji Ikeda

Perhaps the most accomplished and enigmatic of these three, Ikeda is a true multimedia artist, designing massive audio-visual installations that overwhelm and entrance. Many of his pieces employ similar elements: flashing streams of numbers and code, minimalist color schemes, beeps, clicks, and bursts of noise. However, he always manages to assemble these barest of ingredients into shrines of immersive futurist art. If this doesn't sounds like dance music, then check out his performance at the Sonár 2010 festival. And if it doesn't sound intelligent, consider his 2014 installation "Supersymmetry" at CERN, the European council for Nuclear Research.

Well, hope you're into weird music because there's a whole lot more where that came from!