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

All in all about 40 people voted in the poll, but I think only 25-30 of them voted for albums, the rest were tracks-only ballots.

No no no.

Dubno > STITI > BF

No Orbital or Daft Punk yet either

The Underworld albums are the right way round I think. Never liked Second Toughest but Beaucoup Fish is by far their best. It sags in the middle a bit but those first four tracks are just wow.

no way. how is BF higher than the other 2? Crazy!

11. LFO - Frequencies (Warp Records, 1991)
169 points, 8 votes.

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

Why is it after all this time I still think this is the best "Techno" record ever? I just can not find fault in anything about it. I have listened to electronic based music for years here as well so I am not some naive kid... DM/Kraftwerk/Soft Cell/HL/etc... to Juan Atkins/Derrick May/Armando etc... to Hawtin/Beltram/Tresor/R&S etc... now onto (too many to list) I just think that after 14 years of listening to this record and still thinking it is a masterpiece deserves some mention. It was hard for me to say this as I love sooooo much from this time period... but this one still throws one up me.

― benoit, 6. toukokuuta 2005 15:26

One of my all-time favorites. Completely sublime and still offering rewards each time I listen to it.

― chris breitenbach (Chris808), 6. toukokuuta 2005 18:55

Frequencies = still dope beyond all reason

― Music should never have changed anymore after my mid 80s (Noodle Vague), 15. lokakuuta 2009 11:37

"Frequencies" is probably my favourite warp album ever. The 5 track - We are back/Tan ta ha/you have to understand/el ef oh/ love is the message - sequence of the album makes me almost explode with joy. The sounds are so basic; the result is so rich. Gorgeous.

― jed_ (jed), 4. syyskuuta 2004 4:01

I have to take a break from posting now, but I'll try to post the final results later today.

Go on with the top 10 speculation then, you know you wanna!

More Aphex, the two Boards albums, a couple from Orbital, Photek and Incunabula of course ;)

I'm surprised Jilted Generation ranked so low. Overexposure maybe?

Frequencies is just amazing. I saw Mark Bell play live as LFO last year and the set was still largely drawn from that album and he took the room and shook it.

Do people actually listen to Jilted Generation that much? I haven't touched it in years.

Does anyone listen to anything on this list that much any more? I don't exactly dig out Jilted on a regular basis, but it was massively important to me throughout the nineties - got played pretty much any social occasion because of its wide appeal.

10. Super Discount
9. The White Rooms
8. Selected Ambient Works II
7. Endtroducing
6. In Sides
5. Music Has The Right To Children
4. Orbital II - The Brown Album
3. Homework
2. Selected Ambient Works 88-92
1. Bentley Rhythm Ace - Bentley Rhythm Ace

Played Jilted to death the year it came out and occasionally for the next couple of years. Honestly don't think I've listened to it once in the last 10.

Dubno still gets a couple of airings a year.

I listened to the whole of Exit Planet Dust yesterday. If anything it's improved with age (for me at least) totally thrilling, and you can really hear the Dust Brothers influence in there which I never noticed the first time round.

I've never heard Super Discount! Christ on crutches, there's so many records on this list I always thought I'd get round to checking out and never got to.

I've actually been listening to Super Discount again the last couple of weeks. Great record and much better than Super Discount 2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4biQDLz_uwI

1. Bentley Rhythm Ace - Bentley Rhythm Ace

― Matt DC,

ouch!

i was actually half expecting them to turn up. for some reason, and despite being wilfully crap, they're sort of the first band i think of when i hear the phrase "nineties dance music".

Being an old bastard who doesn't keep up with new releases as much as I did, I listen to stuff on this list / era quite regularly.

I think the only album among these I still play regularly is Las Vegas... But I do occasionally give Music for the Jilted Generation a spin, and it never sounds dated (unlike many other mid-90s breakbeat/d&b records), and I have such fond memories of that album and that era (I was 15 when it came out, the perfect age for something like MftJG; I can't remember ever having expected - and subsequently, played - any album as much as I did that one) that it would've been impossible not to put it in my top 10.

I liked that Bentley Rhythm Ace album at the time. LOOK I WAS 18 OKAY???

I remember some friends playing BRA a lot back in the day, but now I can't quite recall what they sounded like...? Were they like a big beat version of Mouse on Mars?

I've seen Bentley Rhythm Ace live (they were on a Radio 1 Sound City double bill with DJ Shadow. We stood at the back and talked through their set.)

I don't know what a big beat version of MoM would be like but iirc they were utterly artless, music for the lads mag set.

This was probably the best thing they did. And it's still pretty shit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IWl77o3l50

more like a big beat version of Pop Will Eat Itself, and if I remember (I try to block the memories TBH) they had some greebo-type connections?

members of PWEI and EMF

Members of Pop Will Eat Itself were actually in Bentley Rhythm Ace so yeah that's yr connection. (xpost)

Dubno > STITI > BF
This is correct ==> this poll is wrong.

my prediction is that mr fingers-introduction is not gonna make it and i can think of no sadder indictment.

the youtube comments on BRA songs are super unfathomable:

"these were way ahead of their time and because of that people thought they were too obscure and cast them aside.."

in what universe could BRA have been ignored for being ahead of their time? they were the most 1997 of all acts who released records in 1997.

i saw BRA dj when i was 18, they played the coronation st theme tune

lol 90s

I remember some friends playing BRA a lot back in the day, but now I can't quite recall what they sounded like...? Were they like a big beat version of Mouse on Mars?

― Tuomas, Friday, 2 November 2012 11:03 (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Heinously in-jokey big beat act mixing lightweight Skint Records beats with comedy whistle-and-bell samples. They were going for a "British indie-dance played out the back of a Morris Minor at a carboot sale" vibe and represented much of what was wrong with the mid-90s IMO.

Yeah the 90s album dance canon has felt really ossified for, what, 10 years now? I'd expect the tracks list to be a LOT more vibrant and surprising.

no Nightmares on Wax on this poll? I'd have liked to have seen their second album in the lower echelons. I'm just surprised this didn't get a bigger response.

Sure it's shit but I still quite like "Bentley's Gonna Sort You Out". Considerably less after watching the video (for the first time, today) though.

Can dog latin or anyone else tell me why BRA are "heinously in-jokey" but the goofier moments of his new 80s thread (which btw I've enjoyed the youtubes on and will be watching with interest), Nightmares on Wax or Aphex Twin are "mutant/offbeat/catchy nonsense", in ways more specific/descriptive than asserting that BRA are shit? I mean "BRA are shit because they're jokey" but clearly being jokey isn't enough to be shit and it all gets a bit circular "they're shit because their jokes are shit and their jokes are shit because they're shit", not that I disagree.

(btw I do like the three other things I mentioned in the previous post, and can't remember a single Bentleys track apart from "...Sort You Out". I think I bought the album for £1 from a charity shop and listened to it all of once. Let us not talk of how I also spent money on reduced-to-clear promo bin singles by Bentleys/PWEI drummer Fuzz Townshend.)

Suppose it's that fine line between humorous music and comedy music.

Air - Moon Safari (Source, 1998)
170 points, 9 votes.

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

wht a fkn GREAT album

I hear loads in it now I'd never have heard back when I first listened

― cozen (Cozen), 3. joulukuuta 2005 18:39

this record goes out of its way to sound nice. makes it great fodder for shoe stores and thai restaurants. it is a sweet thing to listen to though.

― Charlie Howard, 13. maaliskuuta 2008 18:32

This album reminds me of good times. Although I bought it in fall '99, a year after its release, it took nearly that long for it to make an impact in my little group. It played at a lot of parties. "Kelly Watch The Stars!" I listen to most fondly.

― Filmmaker, Author, Radio Host Stephen Baldwin (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), 26. toukokuuta 2010 3:07

La Femme D'Argent is quintessential Air to me, closest to what I liked about early singles like Casanova 70, Modular, Le Soleil est Pres de Moi, etc. I like the pop stuff just fine but this is where I think they introduced a whole new vocabulary to downtempo instrumental music.

― Haunted Clocks For Sale (Dorianlynskey), 28. toukokuuta 2010 17:15

I knew there was one I'd forgotten.

Lol, I've never noticed the album cover says "French band" next to "Air". Were they often confused with some other, non-French Air?

That was number 10.

I liked Moon Safari but I can't ever see myself wanting to put it on again because 13 years on you still hear these tracks pretty much everywhere. Switchboard hold music level of ubiquity.

I've actually been listening to Premiers Symptomes this week. I think it holds up better simply because it wasn't as ubiquitous as Moon Safari. La Femme D'Argent still sounds amazing though.

Good album but yeah, kind of ruined by its ubiquity.

Shit, I guess that means the Moby album might be a contender.

xposts it's a good question, a passing spacecadet.

I guess the music on that thread I started is lighthearted, humorous etc but not as knowingly jokey as BRA. BRA seemed to think that pasting lots of zany "boioioing" noises over their flimsy beats constituted something people actually wanted to hear. I'm not saying there's no place for humour in music because Aphex has always used humour in his work, but BRA weren't actually funny, they were just wacky in the most forced way.

Then again I never really enjoyed that whole Skint Records/Wall of Sound/Mary Anne Hobbes thing. It always sounded neither here-nor-there, not quite dance, not quite indie, breaks for the Jools Holland set - that "ho ho look at us we're on a bus to Brighton with a bass guitar and some second-hand vinyl, who cares if we're a bit shit, yay football!"... Something shite must have happened to me in '96/'97 cos I have horrible memories of a lot of that era of music.

It was the unsatisfactory nature of the beats and samples that got me. Those breaks never seemed to deliver the required oomph for me and I kind of see it as a precursor to all that Grand Central downtempo vibe that was pervasive throughout the late-'90s.

It's probably why my perception of the Chemical Brothers (who were described as Big Beat in the first part of their career) came to get so skewed over the years. Compare Exit Planet Dust to, say, something by Lo-Fi Allstars and there's no competition.

I'm probably alone in being more partial to Air's proggy epic '10,000Hz The Legend' but Moon Safari is a pleasant (often TOO pleasant in places) listen.

9. Orbital - Orbital (Internal, 1993)
185 points, 10 votes.

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

Back in the day, for years actually, I would have said InSides but I played that and the Brown album in the run-up to the gigs a few months ago and the latter was like WOW. It still feels like the perfect example of how to make dancefloor-orientated house and techno work in the album format.

― Space Battle Rothko (Matt DC), 6. marraskuuta 2009 12:26

When I first bought Brown (on casette!) I only played side (Lush to Remind as continous mix on the tape) for a whole week, refusing to accept that side 2 could be any better.

Largely true bar Halcyon.

― Tannenbaum Schmidt, 20. marraskuuta 2009 13:38

i always felt the orbial 2 (the brown album) hung together much beter than all the others. and while in sides> was complete brilliance end to end - it was much shorter; so the brown album always won out becuase of it quantity. obviously the quality was there too, but that same quality is on all the others too.

― dyson (dyson), 29. huhtikuuta 2003 17:32

but still...Orbital 2 had the cohesion, the consistency. To maintain that over an entire album's length is pretty rare.

― bimble (bimble), 21. huhtikuuta 2004 6:06