There is so much music that sometimes your eyes run up from what to choose. Especially if you sometimes want something new after a hard day’s work, when you are having fun doing live betting Burundi or playing computer games.
The list of albums published today is intended to help newly-minted “music lovers” fall in love with electronic music in its (not all, of course, no list will be enough for this) variety and to show how many of its types are there.
It so happened that it was Depeche Mode who became the icons of the synth-pop style, eclipsing everything that came before them in the inattentive eyes of the modern listener, and influencing everything that came later. Violator’s seventh studio album played a key role in this. It is absurd to think that the disc is notable for only two well-known hits: Violator is an excellent example of a powerful monolithic album, each of the songs of which is an integral part of it. The group has recorded seven more awesome records, the latest of which was released this year, but Violator remains an unapproachable pinnacle not only for its authors but for all modern electronic pop music.
And 15 years earlier, an album was released, without which neither Depeche Mode nor many other things could have taken place. The Düsseldorf group Kraftwerk, which at first stood in the ranks of the pioneers of German psychedelic electronics called Krautrock (a phenomenon certainly worthy of separate consideration), suddenly “mechanized” its image, and with it – the sound. It began with the Autobahn album (the third official disc of the band), and the definitively new style of these “The Beatles of electronic music”, the newly emerging trendsetters in the culture of their contemporaries and kings of retrofuturism, was formed on the Radio-Aktivitaet disc. In general, any representative of progressive humanity must listen to discography completely. Better to start with the German version of the 1975 album.
We return to the nineties, which is impossible to remember without an energy explosion produced by guys from the English countryside. “Music of a Generation Left Behind” tore all the templates, made The Prodigy one of the leaders in the world music industry, and made a new style – electronic big beat – the main dish of discos around the world. Gradually, Europe recognized the names of other heroes of the genre – The Crystal Method, The Chemical Brothers, Propellerheads. The British music veteran Norman Cook joined them and on this occasion renamed Fatboy Slim. This whole honest company deserves the closest attention of lovers of good music (not at all because of bad nostalgia for school discos, as, say, in the case of the plebs-ravers of Scooter), and we recommend starting the study from the second album The Prodigy.
The second full-length album of the brainchild of the most real monster of the second wave of industrial Trent Reznor Nine Inch Nails. The strange history of the recording, the interesting fate of the songs – and just the unique and mesmerizing sound of new industrial music. Influenced all industrial metal from Neue Deutsche Härte and Powerman 5000 to Marilyn Manson to, of course, EBM and its derivatives.
A milestone in the development of IDM – “smart dance music” as it was awkwardly dubbed by music critics. Actually, there is almost nothing danceable in these sounds, which organized another musical revolution in the nineties of the last century. Together with the mad Irishman Aphex Twin, these Englishmen have truly brought a new dimension to the music. And the first two albums of the duo still remain the standard of atmospheric electronics. And for fans of sound intellectual exercises, there are the rest of Autechre’s works, as well as products of daring fun Aphex Twin and related projects. And then you can move on to the rich and varied emerald legacy of Brian Eno.
