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

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

Thought that would place higher actually - Halcyon is the one that gets all the attention but the seamless run from Lush to Remind is nearly flawless.

8. The KLF - Chill Out (KLF Communications, 1990)
188 points, 10 votes, 1 first place vote.

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

Is it a good starting point? Well for post rave chill out music, Yes. So much which followed on uses the techniques on chill out, but as usual without the wit and wry inventiveness.

Is it a good starting point for the KLF? A qualified yes, as it's rather atypical of their work which tends to be rather more frenetic.

― Billy Dods, 7. maaliskuuta 2002 3:00

I so love The White Room but I've never been able to get through all of Chill Out without....well...falling asleep. Maybe that's the idea.

― Alex in NYC (vassifer), 22. lokakuuta 2005 7:28

i heard this album was recorded in less time than it lasts.

― jed_ (jed), 26. elokuuta 2006 3:51

listening to this album is like having a staring contest with god.

― andi, 24. elokuuta 2007 14:49

Oh God, Chill out is so wonderful. I remember downloading Madrugada Eterna out on a whim back when I was 16 in my solemn days of late summer, having never heard of, and being quite ignorant of the KLF. Either way, I was just blown away by it, listened to that song like 8 times in a row. I seem to remember saying "when the sun goes down tuesday night, you gonna have so much money you gonna be scared, cause I got it" a lot after that.

― mehlt, 25. elokuuta 2007 3:42

i heard this album was recorded in less time than it lasts.

― jed_ (jed), 26. elokuuta 2006 3:51

that is a fucking beautiful comment

I wish that was true so much.

7. Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Warp Records, 1994)
214 points, 10 votes, 2 first place votes.

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

Induces insanity is right. This album is little Richie's big practical joke on the chill-out room crowd. I think RDJ laughs whenever he hears someone taking it seriously.

― Dan I., 27. lokakuuta 2001 3:00

It's scary in the way so many of the pieces on the album just sort of sit and lurk there and in so doing start to tear at my sanity (like the second-to-last song on CD2),and subversive the way it turns out something really gentle and melodic,like the aforementioned third song on disc one,and that one on the second disc that sounds like Discreet Music.

― Damian, 28. lokakuuta 2001 3:00

I listened to the album for the first time in a long while the other day, and I realized how utterly fantastic it was all over again. Scrape away all the dull as ditchwater clot accrued to it over the years thanks to so many indifferent IDM releases and it's all the more lovely to appreciate, a glorious one-off from him in that nothing (much) was spiked with the humor or freneticism or any of that from elsewhere.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), 6. huhtikuuta 2004 4:47

SAW II is one of my favourite albums. It is simultaneously frightening, uplifting, confusing, and enlightening. There are some tracks that never fail to give me goosebumps, even in hot weather. While reading some of the posts in this thread I was brought almost to tears thinking about some of the feelings these tracks have evoked in me. Definitely one of the most powerful pieces of music ever recorded.

To play favourites, I absolutely adore 'Stone In Focus' and 'Blue Calx'. The latter makes me think of water, godly celestial beings of scifi, slow peaceful death (relief) through suffocation, drowning, peacefulness. 'Curtains' will always bring me back to the halcyon days of my school years, where friends and I would go to the nearby botanical gardens and smoke dope and tell each other what the music made us think about - one of the happiest times of my life thus far.

There have been very few other artists who've been able to even approach James' attention to texture as exhibited on this release. The subtle distortions and (aforementioned) microtonal deviations are what makes this album so effective. In the three weeks before my end-of-highschool exams I listened to this whole album every morning before getting out of bed. I maintain that it was more than somewhat responsible for my excellent marks.

― Andrew (enneff), 18. toukokuuta 2004 7:57

This is such a nice album to paint to, it's really good for doing lots of detailed textural work. Especially late at night, when you actually have the time to get a block of a few hours to listen to it all in sequence.

Apparently he played some of the tracks from it at the gig in Dublin last weekend. But I've no idea how that would work at a festival, quite hard to yell for songs which don't have names.

― Karen D. Tregaskin, 13. kesäkuuta 2011 12:38

Love the Brown album. Still gets a regular airing on the car stereo. It's all about that Lush, Impact, Remind run though.

Also must have worn out my CD single with Underworld's Lush 3.3 on it.

Wasn't there some sort of story where he lucid dreamt the album or something? Not sure how much truth there was in that.

Also where did the track titles come from? I remember them not having any but it seems things like Rhubarb and Cliffs are accepted as the the titles these days. Is that something to do with the little picture that accompanied each track?

How well does SAWII hold up today? Such a big important album. So many different moods and vibes and jarring bits and interesting bits and frightening bits, it's hard to define exactly how one should appreciate a record like this because, well, it's actually very hard to chill out to it.

My main memory of this record is reading books to it. That works best.

Wasn't there some sort of story where he lucid dreamt the album or something? Not sure how much truth there was in that.

He claims a lot of his melodies come to him in dreams and he can induce lucid dreaming through thinking about melodies etc.

Also where did the track titles come from? I remember them not having any but it seems things like Rhubarb and Cliffs are accepted as the the titles these days. Is that something to do with the little picture that accompanied each track?

― groovypanda, Friday, 2 November 2012 12:55 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Made up by fans online. They're rather tenuous descriptions of the images on the inner sleeve.

6. Daft Punk - Homework (Virgin, 1997)
216 points, 12 votes.

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

I liked Homework better. Not because it is a better album per se, just because it is a bit more raw and tracky. It is the difference between a mid-90's underground 12" act vibe, or a more mature "musical" dance act.

At the end of the day nothing will beat hearing Mike Dearborn or Robert Armani play Rolling and Scratching or Rock and Roll right along with the hard tracky Chicago stuff through 10' tall bassbins at midwest raves in the mid-90's.

Your playing Daft Punk for the Rock Kids at CBGB's mileage may vary.

― Disco Nihilist (mjt), 17. tammikuuta 2005 7:27

Exactly, l like Homework for it's immediacy and intensity.

― supercub, 17. tammikuuta 2005 7:35

Loved it at the time and think it's a perfect distillation of 20 years of dance music up to that point. It's hard to forget now how by '96 a lot of electronic and club stuff was getting a really cheesy pseudo-spiritual vibe: from "underground" PLUR raves to drippy chart house and trance. This record put a harder, more streamlined perspective on things. Pedestrian it aint!

― Bodrick III, 2. maaliskuuta 2008 23:12

it was like a pop version of 20 years of Detroit and Chicago rolled into one, mixed with love, and while giving props to the artists they loved.

― pipecock, 3. maaliskuuta 2008 4:55

I only heard 'Homework' within the last month.

God only knows why I'd avoided them for so long. The suspicion of them being a major label act in the boom-time of dance popularity? I got it cheap and expected dissapointment, ace couple of singles, probably overlong filler.

fuck ................. me

16 tracks and I'd maybe lose only 3 or 4 if I had to and tbh nothing drags as much as I'd expected at all.

It's astounding. So simple in excecution, yet so innovative. All within the confines of a totally recognisable house/techno/disco blueprint (I mean it isn't 'prog'-anything).

And it rocks like a bastard.

― fandango (fandango), 31. toukokuuta 2005 2:08

REALLY didn't expect that to miss the top five.

I hope Tuomas fiddled the results to get Utah Saints in the top three or something.

Ah cheers.

So six to go and I'm thinking more Orbital, Homework and Boards Of Canada to come?

And would Massive Attack qualify?

I'm also guessing there'll be no place for Gargantuan in the Top 50 which is a shame.

No Massive Attack albums were nominated for this poll.

ugh Homework :(

those three Underworld albums wipe the floor with anything Daft Punk's done, come on people

I don't know about, but this poll is making me sad. Sorry :/

phew, for a minute i was worried there might be some dance music in the top 5

For them to wipe Daft Punk they'd have to get rid of the vocals first...

I actually love the original, instrumental version of "Dirty" (the one which samples the creepy toy sounds from Akira) more than any Daft Punk song; back in the day I was under the impression Underworld was some kind of a trance/ambient act, based on hearing only that track and "Why Why Why", so you can imagine my disappointment when I bought Dubnobass and found out every tune had rock singing on them. Only later did I find out Underworld were a indie band gone techno.

(xx-post)

Jabba, dance music is, by definition, more about tracks than albums, so it shouldn't be too surprising that the albums poll is less focused on dance than the tracks poll.

oh i'm not surprised :)

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

their 2CD (!) mix for FSUK was gr8 iirc

shan't be checking any time soon though

jed's Chill Out comment is beautiful

I wonder if there's any electronic music albums where that would true, though? I guess Vladislav Delay's Anima could theoretically be an example (though I don't really think it is): I can imagine him starting to record the track, then going to a nearby tea house while some random number generator runs the changes, then coming back after 50 minutes to add the vocal sample to the end.

Tuomas - have you heard "Thing in a Book"?

It's a joke about the actual recording process of the album, combined with its deliberately hypnagogic affect, but mainly lovely in its poetry

There's a Finnish rock musician who claims to have actually recorded an album in less time than its length. He says every song on it was a first take, and the band played everything non-stop in the studio, but on the album there are a few seconds of silence between the tracks, so the extra length comes from that.

ha

I don't know about, but this poll is making me sad. Sorry :/

I'm curious, what's missing that's making you sad?

"In Sides"

My money's on In Sides winning