As mentioned a few weeks back, I’ve been catching up on Orbital, an electronic duo that I passively listened to in the 90s. I was vaguely familiar with a lot of their earlier singles like “Halcyon + On + On”, “Chime” and “Lush 3”, but it was 1996’s “The Box” off their album In Sides that caught my attention, especially with its otherworldly and unsettling music video featuring the always intriguing Tilda Swinton as a time-traveling alien visiting the grimier parts of East London. It’s one of my all-time favorite videos of the 90s and was one of the many influences for the Bridgetown Trilogy.

While listening to them, it got me thinking about my experience with electronic music in the 90s. Even then it had all sorts of different genres and names: techno, house, EBM, electronica, chillwave, trip-hop, and everything in between. If I had to pinpoint when I first started paying attention to this kind of stuff, it was hearing “Chime” on the techno show on WFNX during my freshman year in college. It intrigued me, because it wasn’t exactly the melodic synthpop of the 80s that I was so used to, but nor was it the vaguely creative club music that producers like Stock-Aitken-Waterman were churning out on the regular. To me it was somewhere in between: creative enough that you could groove to it at the clubs, but you could also chill out to it in the comfort of your own home. [Mind you, this was also during the height of rave culture so you could do both while completely blissed out, heh.]

Another track that stood out for me, of course, was Moby’s “Go” with its use of Laura Palmer’s Theme from Twin Peaks as the music bed. Creepy and weird yet somehow hypnotic and groovy. This was well before his huge breakthrough with 1997’s Play.

Trip-hop didn’t quite gel with me right away, as it didn’t get a lot of play on the local alternative stations in Boston at the time other than Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy”, which also got a lot of attention for its hybrid of dance, soul, and heavy vibe. It wasn’t just about the lyrics or the melody, it was also about the mood, and that kind of thing always captured my attention. It also helped that its one-continuous-take video was so simple yet so cinematic. A lot of the best electronic music in the 90s strived to capture that.

I could go on, of course, but this is merely an overview, so perhaps it’s time for me to do another WiS series!