At this moment in time, experimental electronic music has never had it so good. After a period of time in the 90s and early 2000s when the term “IDM” was rife, and a dearth of ideas led to ever diminishing returns, highly challenging experimental fare is in abundance. Why then, does it so often seem as if we’re actually starved of genuinely original electronic music? Although the internet has arguably led to much genre cross-pollination, a lot of what we get is just subtle riffing on established sounds; in the case of Tri Angle artists How To Dress Well, Holy Other and oOoOO, it’s an admiration of contemporary R&B motifs. Tri Angle’s artists make it feel very much like a label of the internet age – they all seem to be isolated, sometimes anonymous figures whose interaction with the wider musical world is performed remotely via the internet rather than by interacting with other human beings on a local level. It often seems that Tri Angle is a microcosm for what is happening with electronic music as a whole – when we can learn all we need from a terminal in our bedrooms, where’s the impetus to forge localised bonds and create music with other human beings?

Read the rest of this entry »