Papa My Buddha - Coppe (2002)
Intelligent Dance Music (IDM) emerged in the 90s as a reaction both to big beat rave-oriented techno and to clouds of formless tonal ambient music, charting a middle path that gave you a beat to lock on to but not demanding constant attention.
The idea of IDM didn’t really go anywhere. At some point in the mid-aughts, I think, IDM stopped being a genre and started being a general vibe that a whole new generation of artists liked to name-drop while they were doing their own, often very different, thing. Downtempo, minimalist, indietronica, ambient, and post rock artists were all doing things that you could easily have called IDM but there wasn’t really a cohesive idea any longer about what that meant.
If this era was the last days of IDM, it left behind some fantastic and fascinating records. This one leans into the up and coming electronic pop sound, with chopped and processed vocals trying to make the tracks more pop-song-structured.
That would end up being a canny move in the long run that makes this a foundational document, or at least an interesting footnote.
Of course, the idea of beat music that isn’t just four-on-the-floor tackle dummy for bouncing kids is still alive and well. It just has a lot of other context wrapped around it now, and this descriptor doesn’t work as well as it used to.
