POSSE! YOU KEEP THE SPIRIT ALIVE! It's the 1990s ELECTRONIC ALBUMS poll results!

No you're right - "Angel" is 4 Hero though curious "Saint Angel" (which has the better version of the same beat) is not. I was meaning to write "Sensual" above.

I feel really bad about not participating now. So many great albums.

31. Coldcut - Journeys by DJ: 70 Minutes of Madness (Music Unites, 1995)
94 points, 5 votes, 1 first place vote.

http://i1326.photobucket.com/albums/u641/Lixenixen/journeysbydj.jpg

I've got to admit that Coldcut's "Journeys By DJ" is a fave, I'm a bit of a sucker for pointless eclecticism.

― Mike Ratford, 21. elokuuta 2002 22:19

I still reckon that its decent - I've noticed that since the re-release their seems to have been a bit of a backlash against it that I don't quite understand. I find it strange that people who heap praise upon 2 many DJs + DJ Rupture criticize this for being eclectic for eclectics sake, or a bit of a gimmick. Still, I guess that it ultimately comes down to taste - I love the coldcut and DJ Rupture, but find the 2 many DJs a bit grating for the novelty aspect!

― Robin Goad (rgoad), 7. tammikuuta 2003 13:34

also, whereas 'as heard on radio soulwax' is unquestionably designed as a great party mix, '70 minutes of madness' is not - its designed as a general listening experience and exploration - granted this leaves it harder to pidgeonhole and its even frustrating that as Matt says, the first 15-20 minutes are probably the most full-on part of it with the dub and drum n bass followe by techno mixing, and you could definitely dance to that as much as Vitalic or whatever else...but then yeh an enforced lull sets in, everything goes weird - the direction of the mix is totally shifted and you're somewhere else...i dont really see that as a flaw as such - as long as you remember that its strictly not a dance mix

― stevem (blueski), 7. tammikuuta 2003 13:50

i think eclecticism for eclecticism's sake as a criticism is rubbish because in these cynical times it seems to be applicable to anything that features several genres/styles together, which has always been for me a fundamental advantage to any performance, whether on an album, a dj mix, a party soundtrack, movie soundtrack...so its very natural and intuitive for me to want to hear that eclecticism and want to practise it myself. its not about saying 'oh i want everyone to know i like a bit of everything' (then again, whats wrong with that?) - for many people (most in fact) its an HONEST reflection of their musical outlook...i find it far more annoying when these people restrict themselves too much to one thing (e.g. checked out 45 minutes of Tom Middleton at Glasto last yaer but got totally bored because the 4/4 beat and tempo didnt seem to change at all for that entire time)...but i guess what that boils down to is i'm just not cut out for clubbing

― stevem (blueski), 7. tammikuuta 2003 14:22

Yeah this is what I meant by 'too vague'. I think you're completely right steve in that most people do listen to lots of stuff - what I was criticising was the kind of eclecticism that would only work by assuming that they *didn't*. Mixes where you get the idea that the DJs are sitting there thinking "hey I bet you never thought this would go with THIS" and obviously you did think that cos that's how you listen to stuff.

Now obviously 2ManyDJs does exactly this and that's not what I like about it, but for me they go to places Coldcut didn't - with Coldcut I found myself thinking in the second half of the mix, well if you're so fucking eclectic put on some handbag or rock or gabba or, I don't know, hip-hop with actual vocals in it then. So maybe what I'm criticising is acts who seem to make a virtue of their eclecticism when they're less 'eclectic' than most of the people I know.

― Tom (Groke), 7. tammikuuta 2003 14:31

i got the reissue and missed it the first time round, but it does have that feeling of being of its time. so i agree that it's prob unfair to compare this with 2mdjs (or yr dj yodas). we're now interested in different things -- not that we're listening differently (perhaps we are), but that we've moved on and embedded the attitude of the time and built on it. it's certainly not a dud for its content.

― Alan (Alan), 7. tammikuuta 2003 15:56

30. Aphex Twin - Richard D. James Album (Warp Records, 1996)
94 points, 6 votes.

http://i1326.photobucket.com/albums/u641/Lixenixen/richarddjamesalbum.jpg

Aphex is classic, of course. I actually used to see him as a model for making a virtue of geographical isolation as a means of artistically refining yourself, so it's appropriate that K-reg said that. I think "Richard D. James Album" is his best work, as well, whereas FWIW I think "Bryter Layter" is Drake's weakest.

― Robin Carmody, 8. toukokuuta 2001 3:00

someone said aphex had cold landscapes, this is only partially true for me. richard d james album conjures a nick drake-esque sun rising oxfordshire landscape to me (and i've only been to oxfordshire maybe twice...)

― gareth, 28. toukokuuta 2001 3:00

The Richard D James album is more happy, wacky, ultra-caffeinated beat seizures with bonky, funky video-game melodies zinging around the place. (Seriously- sometimes they're on a lead synth, but just as often the melody passes to the tuned drum hits or the unidentifiable chunks of noise)

― rob geary (rgeary), 18. lokakuuta 2003 8:09

after listening to the richard d. james album for the first time, i'm a lot less hostile towards the notion of drum machines.

― lieutenant jimmy john (kelpolaris), 15. syyskuuta 2010 20:47

ban kelpolaris

EP7 and RDJ Album = two of my very favourite albums of all time - certainly had an enormous impact on me at the time. EP7 is probably the closest I've ever come to having a transcendental musical experience. Those last four tracks are the electronic equivalent of something like Scott Walker's The Drift - freeform, beautiful and terrifying.

RDJ Album isn't his very best, but it's nevertheless wonderful. RDJ at the time said he wanted to fit as many ideas into the shortest space possible without sounding messy, and he pulled it off.

Was EP7 your intro to autechre or had you heard their previous stuff?

Coming late to this… I placed Haunted Dancehall very high. I don't know another record like it. I love the evening-to-dawn trajectory. It's one of my favourite London albums.

Was EP7 your intro to autechre or had you heard their previous stuff?

― itt: 'splaining men (ledge), Tuesday, 30 October 2012 11:51 (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm almost certain LP5 (which I also love) was the first one I heard. Maybe EP7 came second? LP5 is a bit more listenable, but I've never had such a visceral, almost tangible musical experience as listening to EP7 in the dark on headphones.

Haunted Dancehall is incredible, has it appeared yet?

http://letmectrl-fthatforyou.com

Yes. Too low. Only three votes.

I'm trying to track down an alternative version of Wilmot with a different bassline. I used to own it, but I can't find it.

I must have forgotten to vote for HAunted Dancehall. Somehow Weatherall completely skipped my mind while voting and I'm kicking myself for it.

oh wait, no i did vote for it - my number 6

no two lone swordsmen though :-(

29. David Holmes - Let's Get Killed (Go! Beat, 1997)
95 points, 6 votes.

http://i1326.photobucket.com/albums/u641/Lixenixen/letsgetkilled.jpg

Interesting point made by James Murphy recently. I'd always heard that he and Tim Goldsworthy despised Holmes's lack of musical chops while making Bow Down to the Exit Sign but Murphy now says that he actually admired it:

"David was this guy who wasn’t really an engineer, he wasn’t a musician, he was just an ideas guy. I was flabbergasted. Here he was calling people like Richard Maguire from Liquid Liquid and getting that done. I was dumbfounded! You just called? And he was like yeah. It was really an eye-opener: why am I not just doing these things I want to do? Why am I sitting around moaning about how things aren't the way I want them to be when I should just fucking do it? It just seems easy. David was a real role model in a way. He just does things. He’s got balls. He was like, fuck it, I’ll do it. I was like, 'I’ll practice with my band for 6 months before we’ll play a show and you don’t even play an instrument and you’re making your third album! I’m an idiot.’"

Like James Lavelle, Holmes just went "Well I like all this cool shit and I'm pretty personable so I'll just corral a load of talent and get them to make the record while I sit there directing it." Obviously that can only go so far - it strikes me as a very late 90s dance-scenester approach to recordmaking that doesn't really happen now. At least, I can't think of an example off the top of my head. But I like the idea that Holmes's chutzpah was one of the springboards for the DFA, LCD, etc.

Re: Let's Get Killed, the remix album had some great stuff on it: Arab Strap's Don't Die Just Yet (aka The Holiday Girl) and Fridge's Head Rush on Lafayette, which sounded like Orbital. Both reissued on the recent best of.

― Haunted Clocks For Sale (Dorianlynskey), 16. toukokuuta 2010 19:31

listening to it for the first time since 2000 except for one time when it was on at a friend's place and I said "oh, what is this" and he showed me it and I sheepishly admitted to myself that for all I used to love it I could probably only recognise one or two tracks off it

I wish I'd been slightly proactive regarding sending out demos in the late 90s - seems like the golden age of labels going "oh shit, we need some electronica, stat" and throwing money at people who have a vague knowledge of electronic music and a slightly cool record collection and (possibly) nothing else. If this really is a case of that, then it's a case where it's worked pretty well.

― xylyl syzygy (a passing spacecadet), 16. toukokuuta 2010 21:00

I met the guy who is sampled saying 'i don't mosh...release this energy'. He moved to New Orleans from NYC after this album. He was coming to our night at Cafe Brazil and I recognized his voice. Crazy coincidence.

I love this album. David Holmes is still underrated.

― brotherlovesdub, 17. toukokuuta 2010 2:00

v illuminating post by dorian upthread

an extremely late-90s kind of bro, david holmes

wonder who actually produced this lp. some of it's right good, like 'my mate paul'

he was obviously a hustler, getting the 'out of sight' soundtrack and stuff, but i reckon he was more adept than james lavelle. lavelle got terrible reviews as a dj: holmes i saw, and he was good. not that i had that much to compare him against.

― all i wanna do is poll poll poll poll and zing and discuss mia (history mayne), 17. toukokuuta 2010 13:00

EP7 was my #3 and highest placed Autechre. Definitely one of their more varied and adventurous efforts, and not at the cost of consistency, there really isn't a skippable track on it.

Sorry if the discussion quoted sounds a bit negative, but those pretty much the only in-depth comments I could find on the subject. FWIW, in dance music there have always been records released under the name of DJs who were mostly "ideas men", where the bulk of the technical production work was done by others: examples of this include Afrika Bambaataa, Westbam, Goldie, etc. I don't think there's anything wrong with it (ideas are pretty important!), as long as they properly credit their collaborators.

(xpost)

28. Saint Etienne - So Tough (Heavenly, 1993)
97 points, 4 votes.

http://i1326.photobucket.com/albums/u641/Lixenixen/sotough.jpg

I voted for So Tough in the end, but that was without going home and listening to it first. It was the first St. Etienne album I bought and it brings back so many good memories. I like all the samples; one of the joys was finding out where they all came from (some I knew already, like the Lord of the Flies excerpt and Rush's Spirit of Radio).

― Grandpont Genie, 15. toukokuuta 2007 11:44

'so tough' is their masterpiece for certain, it is perfect in it's idle observations and at the same time it's ability to move in different ways.

― keith (keithmcl), 1. joulukuuta 2002 22:47

It's weird how Foxbase Alpha seems to be regarded as A Classic London Album cause surely So Tough is SO MUCH MORE so? London Belongs To Me, point taken, but she sounds almost touristy and adventuring on that whereas on Mario's Cafe it is their routine and she/they are absolutely living it and it is glory.

― Alex in Doncaster (Alex in Doncaster), 30. tammikuuta 2004 0:36

"So Tough" is my personal favourite; those spoken samples... the whole gloriously *placed* ambience.

― Tom May (Tom May), 16. toukokuuta 2004 4:58

I'm familiar with the name, but I don't think I've ever heard anything by Saint Etienne. For some reason I thought they were an indie rock band or something, but apparently not...?

Indie by nature, but not really indie rock. Definitely song-based music, but more an assimilation of references from disco to sixties British cinema. St Etienne are/were their own little universe of a particular kind of cool that hadn't really been done quite like that before or after. They do get lumped in with indie rock of the time, but it was largely sample-based music. Tuomas, you might remember "He's On The Phone" from the mid-'90s which was almost euro-dance in its execution.

Let's Get Killed is one of my all time fav album names, by the way.

One think that struck me while compiling the results for the album poll was how utterly Brit-centric they were. I guess American producers didn't release a lot of albums in the 90s, and as for albums from other major electronic music countries (Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Japan, etc), it seems ILXors don't much care or know about them.

Wow, two albums I own and would have voted for.

That "mosh" guy, is his band called "ICU" (over-used name there) or "I See You" (not so much) ?

Mark, you did vote for those two albums, have you forgotten?

I love the story of Let's Get Killed - how Holmes and his mate (possibly Paul) took acid and wandered around New York shouting "Let's get killed!" and it got quite dark and fucked up and then they stumbled across a piece of graffiti on a wall that said "Don't die just yet," which turned the trip around, hence the name of the last track (which I thought was one of the greatest things ever until I heard Melodie Nelson).

Oh, yeah, it was 'tracks' I didn't vote for, yeah?

the last track (which I thought was one of the greatest things ever until I heard Melodie Nelson).

ditto, there.

Right, checked up:

It was 'nominating' I didn't do.

Fair enough, you guys know what qualifies and what doesn't, and I'm here to pick the ones I likes.

I expected there to be a fair bit of Warp in this poll but not for it to dominate to this extent.

higher echelons though Matt. Orbital/Prodigy etc will dominate.

and ..

Burger/Ink - Las Vegas (Harvest, 1996)
101 points, 5 votes, 1 first place vote.

http://i1326.photobucket.com/albums/u641/Lixenixen/lasvegas.jpeg

http://open.spotify.com/album/2e9288yxNdFTCKO6MitcDy

Burger/Ink's Las Vegas is unstoppable, easily one of the best dance full-lengths ever release.

― Bill in Chicago, 28. huhtikuuta 2007 1:06

[las vegas]by Burger/Ink, one of the best albums of the 90's and still sounds so fresh. I think Kompakt could release it now and it would still seem brand new.

― jed_ (jed), 21. marraskuuta 2004 17:51

there's a palpable difference between wolfgang voigt being lazy (gas) and burger/ink: las vegas

the main difference being laziness, which tends to plague a lot of ambient music. just because it doesn't have beats and lyrics doesn't mean you can get away with being boring on purpose, or that all concepts hold water (TOMBOT: granular synthesis ate my balls, coming out in 2007)

― TOMBOT (TOMBOT), 18. heinäkuuta 2006 17:27

Burger/Ink is essential. For a few years I was buying used copies and giving them to friends. It's that kind of record.

― brotherlovesdub, 27. huhtikuuta 2010 20:02

gotta go home but Gas AND Burger/Ink = I love you guyz <3 <3

― xylyl syzygy (a passing spacecadet), 29. huhtikuuta 2010 18:53

Sorry, that's 27., obviously.

That was my #2, such a timeless, beautiful album... If you were listening to German techno/house/trance around the time, the sounds they're using are actually pretty familiar (both of them had been producing banging dance music before, and Burger kept on doing that for years afterwards, though Ink veered towards more experimental stuff), but what they are doing with those sounds is totally unique and sublime, and I'm not sure if anyone, not even Burger and Ink themselves, has done anything quite like it ever since. Their second duo album that came out this year was certainly a bit of a disappointment.

Burger, btw, co-mixed the new Gudrun Gut album.

absolutely love the burger/ink. so pulsing, and fluid. just masterful.

willing to bet that more or less everything that places above [las vegas] is inferior to it

If I had voted, I think Burger/Ink's Las Vegas may have been my #1--certainly in my top 3.

I just found a pristine vinyl pressing of it a few months back, and it sounds absolutely gorgeous. It's such an expansive record.

I didn't have time to think about voting (sorry Tuomas) but since Las Vegas and Autoditacker placed without me I shall die happy, etc. (Especially if xxxxxxx and xxxxxxxxxxx place.)

It's definitely more electronic than dance per se. I guess that was in the brief.

Can't believe, for instance, Basic Channel was so low, and ranked below 2 (!) FSOL records. Weird.

Proud of myself for not freaking out about where RDJ placed - actually, wait, there are some good tracks there but it's not really a front-to-back essential album is it? *explodes*

Now I wish I had voted more strategically.

Plus already regretting not voting for Model 500's Deep Space, not that it would have placed.

26. The Chemical Brothers - Exit Planet Dust (Junior Boy's Own, 1995)
106 points, 7 votes.

http://i1326.photobucket.com/albums/u641/Lixenixen/exitplanetdust.jpeg

'Exit Planet Dust'. Bringing club culture to the masses who thought 'Screamadelica' too indie/arty, creating 'lad culture'.

― tarden, 19. kesäkuuta 2001 3:00

De elpee Exit Planet Dust van Chemical Brothers, dankzij alles wat ze daarna uitbrachten.

― Maurice, 15. marraskuuta 2004 18:18

it's evidently the mid 90s stuff that is now deemed irrelevant and has been re-evaluated in the process. 'Exit Planet Dust' is the prime example (along with 'Leftism' I suppose, Underworld having escaped the expiry date trend gun with more intact). In 1995, a dynamic sonic tour de force with the Chems amalgamating love of JB breaks, European techno, bone-crunching NY electro, psychey/droney folk etc. to excellent effect. In 2005 it's widely seen as a stodgy, amateurish forerunner to better things. Though it's relevancy depends on whether you still see the Chems as influential today. They've moved on from it somewhat (though their album template does remain more or less the same) thus it's hard for me to berate their first effort because as lumpy as it may sound now it's also got the spunk the latter work naturally lacks due to repetition of formulae).

― Sociah T Azzahole (blueski), 16. elokuuta 2005 15:33

Also I'd say go so far as to say that of the big 90s acts the ones who most successfully made the "dance album" feel like a brilliant idea did so by making the whole record feel like a really awesome DJ mix or live set - Exit Planet Dust, Orbital's Brown album, etc. Obviously the Chemical Brothers went on to make the idea of a "dance album" feel like a terrible idea but hey.

― Homosexual Satan Wasp (Matt DC), 13. toukokuuta 2012 14:50

"Creating lad culture" is a bit harsh but this and Leftism did create the template that produced a few good dance albums and many bad ones - the self-consciously eclectic ones where you call in a variety of guest vocalists. If anything, the bad ones highlight how successfully this hangs together. This sounds somewhat rudimentary next to DYOH but I love it - some gorgeous downtempo tracks here like One Too Many Mornings, Chico's Groove and Alive Alone. So many good memories of the summer of 95.

I have literally never heard of Burger/Ink but clearly I should.

I wish the EP tracks and remixes were easier to find digitally because they were tearing through ideas at a tremendous rate in the couple of years preceding this album. It seemed like there was something from them every month. I saw one of their first ever live dates, supporting Underworld at the Astoria.

>I wish the EP tracks and remixes were easier to find digitally

it's all about this one for me: http://www.discogs.com/Dust-Brothers-Loops-Of-Fury/release/178392

when this came out I was all amped because I thought they were the -real- Dust Brothers. punked!

I can't remember if I voted for Exit Planet Dust or Dig Your Own Hole but the former is a much stronger, much heavier album than I ever remember it as being when I haven't listened to it in a while. Matt is right that it works like a really great DJ set.