The 31 Best IDM and Experimental Electronic Artists of All Time

IDM (Intelligent Dance Music) and experimental electronic pushed the boundaries of what electronic music could be — strange, cerebral and utterly original. These are the artists who defined the frontier.

1. 1
   Aphex Twin

   British producer Richard D. James who defined IDM with emotionally complex, sonically extreme electronic compositions.
   1000pts
2. 2
   Autechre

   British duo Sean Booth and Rob Brown who pushed IDM to its most abstract, mathematically complex extremes.
   971pts
3. 3
   Mu-Ziq

   British producer Mike Paradinas whose wide-ranging output spans beatific melody to abrasive sonic chaos.
   624pts
4. 4
   Clark

   British producer Chris Clark who creates dense, layered electronic music blending brutality with melodic beauty.
   624pts
5. 5
   LFO

   Leeds duo Gez Varley and Mark Bell who were early IDM pioneers with a primitive, powerful electronic sound.
   624pts
6. 6
   Plaid

   British duo Ed Handley and Andy Turner known for warm, melodic, harmonically rich IDM on Warp Records.
   624pts
7. 7
   Monolake

   Berlin project of Robert Henke, co-creator of the Ableton Live software, known for precise, sound-design-driven electronic music.
   560pts
8. 8
   Matmos

   Duo of Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt who build electronic music from unusual sources, from surgery recordings to washing machines, and worked with Björk.
   485pts
9. 9
   Seefeel

   British band who fused guitars and electronics on Too Pure and Warp in the 1990s, a bridge between shoegaze and IDM.
   485pts
10. 10
    Flying Lotus

    Los Angeles producer Steven Ellison, founder of Brainfeeder, who blended IDM, jazz and hip-hop on albums like Cosmogramma.
    485pts
11. 11
    Fennesz

    Austrian Christian Fennesz, whose guitar-and-laptop album Endless Summer became a landmark of glitch and electronic ambient music in 2001.
    485pts
12. 12
    Alva Noto

    German artist Carsten Nicolai, whose minimal digital glitch works and collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto bridged sound art and electronic music.
    485pts
13. 13
    Boards of Canada

    Scottish duo who brought warmth, nostalgia and emotional depth to electronic music far removed from the dancefloor.
    485pts
14. 14
    Tim Hecker

    Canadian composer of dense, distorted ambient works such as Ravedeath, 1972 and Virgins, where beauty and noise blur together.
    485pts
15. 15
    Jon Hopkins

    English producer whose Mercury-nominated album Immunity fused pulsing techno with ambient piano and field recordings.
    485pts
16. 16
    Actress

    British producer Darren Cunningham known for abstract, lo-fi electronic music at the intersection of techno and IDM.
    397pts
17. 17
    The Black Dog

    Sheffield collective who were among the earliest IDM pioneers on Warp Records in the early 1990s.
    397pts
18. 18
    Amon Tobin

    Brazilian-British Ninja Tune producer known for cinematic, sampledelic compositions that pushed IDM in new directions.
    397pts
19. 19
    Oneohtrix Point Never

    Brooklyn producer Daniel Lopatin whose synth collages on albums like Replica and Garden of Delete reshaped experimental electronic music in the 2010s.
    397pts
20. 20
    Biosphere

    Norwegian producer Geir Jenssen, whose arctic ambient albums Substrata and Patashnik are classics of electronic listening music.
    397pts
21. 21
    Speedy J

    Dutch producer Jochem Paap, whose 1993 album Ginger was part of Warp's Artificial Intelligence series that helped define IDM.
    397pts
22. 22
    Squarepusher

    British producer Tom Jenkinson known for hyper-fast drum programming and jazz-influenced electronic experimentalism.
    397pts
23. 23
    Kid606

    Venezuelan-born American producer Miguel Depedro, a pioneer of glitch and breakcore and founder of the Tigerbeat6 label.
    397pts
24. 24
    Four Tet

    Kieran Hebden, whose folk-sampling albums such as Rounds and later dancefloor work made him one of electronic music's most respected producers.
    291pts
25. 25
    Venetian Snares

    Canadian producer Aaron Funk known for violent, polyrhythmic breakcore music of staggering complexity.
    291pts
26. 26
    Telefon Tel Aviv

    New Orleans duo whose meticulous, glitch-laden debut Fahrenheit Fair Enough became an IDM touchstone of the early 2000s.
    291pts
27. 27
    Holly Herndon

    American composer who processes her own voice into electronic choirs and trained an AI 'baby' called Spawn for her 2019 album Proto.
    291pts
28. 28
    Arca

    Venezuelan artist Alejandra Ghersi known for confrontational, body-focused electronic music and high-fashion collaborations.
    0pts
29. 29
    Luke Vibert

    British producer known across multiple aliases for wildly eclectic, often humorous experimental electronic music.
    0pts
30. 30
    Oval

    German project of Markus Popp that pioneered glitch in the 1990s by building music from skipping, deliberately damaged CDs.
    0pts
31. 31
    Global Communication

    Mark Pritchard and Tom Middleton, whose 1994 album 76:14 remains one of the landmark records of ambient electronica.
    0pts

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