Talk:Intelligent dance music

Oxymoron

This is a joke, right? Dance music, by it's very nature is anything BUT intelligent. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.150.65.106 (talk) 18:19, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

Now there's an unbiased opinion. /sarcasm --62.150.121.250 (talk) 04:35, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

Mainstream Popularity

I doubt Intelligent Dance Music can be considered highly mainstream. Medium would be more suitable, if not low- probably fewer than one out of ten random people have heard of it. Country music is also ranked as "High", but I'd be willing to bet that nine out of ten people (if not more) know what that means. Also, as it was mentioned earlier, it's a very subjective and arbitrary measurement- should it even be there without references to real statistics? Fraxtil (talk) 05:19, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

I agree entirely. This should probably be changed. Epigrammed (talk) 01:27, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

Add links to last.fm IDM groups?

Wikipedia Externel Links rules:

1. Links to social networking sites (such as MySpace and Facebook),[2] chat or discussion forums/groups (such as Yahoo! Groups), Twitter feeds, USENET newsgroups or e-mail lists.

This guideline is not a strict rule of wikipedia. It is there to stop the spammers and stuff. It is a guideline. The rule is not for the IDM article in particular and in general wikipedia users of the idm article must in turn decide for themselves if the rule is specifically important to hold towards. In my personal opinion I believe that the truth will decide for the IDM article to host links to the last.fm intelligent dance music groups. I believe that this truth is demonstrable through its virtuosity of fact in that it follows wikipedia's decision to spread knowledge through the internet. There cannot be a fallout, a badness, a moral vacuum by sharing a discussing group. How can the removal of the link to such a group be justified? Pedantry gives birth to anti-knowledge. As a pursuer of truth, I love IDM. —Preceding unsigned comment added by John hannan (talk • contribs) 09:31, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

IDM simplified

After reading some of the discussion, I feel I must put in a little bit of clarification. IDM is both "Intelligent Dance Music" AND "Industrial Death Metal." This is a rather confusing pair of definitions, but this is how I view it: IDM is the death metal of electronica. This means that it's harder, darker (usually), and can include guitars and screamo. Several bands that I consider IDM are Tactical Sekt, FGFC820, Psyclon Nine, and Flesh Field. Most of these bands can also be classified as "Aggrotek," "EBM," "Terror-EBM," or plain old "Electro-Industrial." The music that can be classified under this is very diverse, but at least to me, can easily be identified. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.233.33.1 (talk) 00:27, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

Merge

This should be placed somewhere in the Electronica article, because I think this is some silly term again. All the music this genre is is plain dance music. So I would like to take a moment to propose to merge to electronica. Special Cases ^{Spit out your comments} 07:39, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

The term is silly, but regardless it is a notable distinct genre. And you say that all the music in this genre is dance music?!?... I would really like to see you dance to some Autechre music. :) That's why the genre name is silly, most music is quite undanceable.

Do you actually have any strong sources that support your argument? -- intgr [talk] 12:46, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Have to agree with intgr. Although I've seen "electronica" used in a record shop to categorize IDM and other experimental, hard-to-classify modern electronic music, in North America and especially in citable sources, "electronica" is synonymous with (as the electronica article says) the late '90s marketing push by major labels of acts like Fatboy Slim, Daft Punk, The Chemical Brothers, The Crystal Method, Moby, Underworld and Faithless. These are not IDM groups and IDM is not a subcategory of their brand of music. Meanwhile, we've got numerous sources for IDM as a genre unto itself. If you want to add something to the article to show a relationship with electronica, that's one thing, but to pretend IDM doesn't exist or is just an arbitrary synonym is another. —mjb (talk) 13:44, 23 October 2010 (MST)

Hip-hop acts have also been classed as "electronica," in Music Week magazine and USA industry charts. It's just a useful way of identifying music that is based on synths and samples, rather than guitars, pianos, horns etc. So any electronic (pop, not academic) music can be considered as "electronica."

I have to agree that IDM is a distinct genre, despite the fact that it may have somewhat ambiguous definitions. The use of "electronica" on the other hand is much more controversial, as can be seen in the talk section for the page. To delete IDM in favor of the term electronica, when the two are not synonymous by any definition and especially when Electronica is being considered for a merge with EDM is a bit illogical. All electronic music seems to be difficult to pin down, considering how quickly it is evolving, but throwing IDM into Electronica seems a bit short-sighted. Ninjawailer (talk) 09:35, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

In light of the above discussion, I have reverted Special Cases' attempts to merge this to Electronica. I would agree with the above arguments that whatever the controversy about the naming and scope of IDM, it is a distinct and notable genre worthy of an autonomous article. Skomorokh 16:53, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

FWIW, in the past 3 days, Special Cases got himself temporarily blocked, then indefinitely blocked, for continued disruptive edits and sock puppetry. —mjb (talk) 20:44, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

The sock puppetry resumes... In the past couple of days, I reverted two unsupported attempts to redirect the article to Electronica. The IP addresses used are similar to past suspected sock puppets of Special Cases. —mjb (talk) 20:59, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Not all Autechre is undanceable, or even extremely abstract. Tri Repetae, Amber, and even a good chunk of Quaristice are basically techno albums, and only get called "IDM" by association. Incunabula has a strong hip hop element, and most of their other stuff would better be termed experimental. The term IDM is offensive and useless.~~ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 143.81.18.138 (talk) 01:06, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

At this point it's mainly just an acronym that's not even particularly tied to the words that the letters represent (as happens with all acronyms); everyone who recognizes the term says "IDM", not "intelligent dance music". So I don't see why it's so upsetting. Anyway, if you have constructive criticism for the article, let's hear it. "I don't like this name for the genre" and "some of these bands make dumb dance music" aren't helpful. —mjb (talk) 09:05, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

It's not just that some of the music is "not IDM." None of it is, because there's no such thing. It's so broad a term as to be utterly worthless. What do Aphex Twin and Squarepusher have in common, for example? Not much. One makes electronic ambient music and acidic techno, the other is a drum & bass specialist. Saying it's "smarter" than other electronic music isn't really saying anything useful about it at all, and is really unfair and pathetic. Basically it comes down to "what I like is IDM and what I don't like isn't." I mean, people can do better than that, right? 143.81.18.138 (talk) 23:03, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

Ambient techno vs. IDM?

The article appears to make the case the ambient techno is one of a few terms that seem to coalesced into what we call IDM today. Am I reading that wrong? If so, why is it listed as a subgenre and why do we have e.g. Category:Ambient techno albums which points to Ambient techno (which redirects to this page)? I've only ever heard "ambient techno" used to talk bout ambient electronic music that isn't minimal (more or less), but that's just anecdotal. --— Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 21:59, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

Someone changed the ambient techno redirect to point to ambient house, which is no less contentious, despite the uncited claim in the ambient house genre infobox that ambient techno is a "derivative form" of ambient house. I undid the redirect change today and pointed to this talk page. At best, ambient techno is the equivalent in techno to what happened in house, not a derivative of it.

One might ask why is anything listed as a "subgenre" or "derivative form" in any genre infobox? The answer is that these infoboxes are constantly being edited without any justifications given and no citations...they're nigh on useless. I'm in the habit of ignoring them and their anonymous edit wars entirely. (This is a problem throughout the music genre articles, not just electronic ones.)

Is "ambient techno" a genre? Yes, one that partially overlaps IDM. I think it deserves its own article. The problem is finding someone interested enough to write about it. Or finding much that has been said about it. I think AllMusic got it wrong when they said the term was replaced by intelligent techno; "ambient techno" is the most popular (in Google Books' archive) among the three terms ambient techno, intelligent techno, and intelligent dance music, and its use actually peaked in the second half of the '90s..

Anyway, I don't think we should be trying to cram these terms into "derivative" and "sub"-genre tree structures. They're all just what I would say is a natural progression (or regression, in Simon Reynolds' view) away from the hedonistic, aggressive, "mindless" dance music associated strictly with dancing. Ambient house was first to get a name, but that doesn't make ambient techno its offspring. Similarly, this article isn't trying to say that ambient techno, as a genre, always is or became IDM, per se. I made some edits today to try to make that more clear and to talk more about ambient & intelligent techno. See if it helps. The affected content is the History section, from the beginning up to and including the first paragraph in the IDM List section. —mjb (talk) 10:09, 16 November 2014 (UTC)