Jega
The ambitious intent of the Detroit kids who invented techno back in the late 1980s was to use computers to begin an endless evolution of dance music–or, as Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton put it in their 1999 book Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey, to answer the question: “If house is just disco played by microchips, what kind of noise would these machines make on their own?”
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Of course, in pop music every action inspires a flurry of reactions. The subgenre known as IDM, or intelligent dance music, which takes its name from Warp Records’ legendary 1992 collection, Artificial Intelligence, has moved techno not just off the dance floor but out of club life completely. Instead of just coming up with slight variations that would add adjectives like “deep” or “progressive” or “ambient” to the genres that already filled the record crates of big-name DJs, IDM producers like Autechre and Aphex Twin punched a hole in the wall of the chill-out room and wandered off into unknown territory.
Jega’s career started in 1995, when close friend and fellow techno experimentalist Mike Paradinas (aka µ-Ziq) encouraged him to buy some gear and try his hand at recording some of the computer experiments he had been conducting. Jega’s first recordings were stark, melodic IDM tracks released on a series of EPs in the mid-90s on the Autechre-affiliated label Skam. He diversified a bit for his first LP, 1998’s Spectrum, (initially released on Skam and distributed in the U.S. via Matador a year later), which sounds like a futuristic children’s cartoon sound track, foraging through everything from drill ‘n’ bass to Japanese pop to big-band jazz. The mix of sweeping sound washes, cute synth-pop jingles, abrasive rhythms, and mechanical sound effects harks back to both Aphex Twin’s early ambient works and the breakbeat noise workouts of his later records.
