Luke Slater - Nothing At All - Mute Records Ltd. - UK Techno

Information on the UK Techno Genre

UK Techno contains techno releases on UK record labels.

Several subgenres were created

Intelligent techno

In 1991 UK music journalist Matthew Collin wrote that "Europe may have the scene and the energy, but it's America which supplies the ideological direction...if Belgian techno gives us riffs, German techno the noise, British techno the breakbeats, then Detroit supplies the sheer cerebral depth". By 1992 a general rejection of rave culture, by a number of European producers and labels who were attempting to redress what they saw as the corruption and commercialization of the original techno ideal, was evident. Following this the ideal of an intelligent or Detroit derived pure techno aesthetic began to take hold. Detroit techno had maintained its integrity throughout the rave era and was inspiring a new generation of so called intelligent techno producers.

As the mid-1990s approached, the term had gained common usage in an attempt to differentiate the increasingly sophisticated takes on EDM from other strands of techno that had emerged,including overtly commercial strains and harder, rave-oriented variants such as breakbeat hardcore, Schranz, Dutch Gabber. Simon Reynolds observes that this progression "...involved a full-scale retreat from the most radically posthuman and hedonistically functional aspects of rave music toward more traditional ideas about creativity, namely the auteur theory of the solitary genius who humanizes technology...".

Warp Records was among the first to capitalize upon this development with the release of the compilation album Artificial Intelligence Of this time, Warp founder and managing director Steve Beckett has said
“ ...the dance scene was changing and we were hearing B-sides that weren't dance but were interesting and fitted into experimental, progressive rock, so we decided to make the compilation Artificial Intelligence, which became a milestone... it felt like we were leading the market rather than it leading us, the music was aimed at home listening rather than clubs and dance floors: people coming home, off their nuts, and having the most interesting part of the night listening to totally tripped out music. The sound fed the scene.”

Warp had originally marketed Artificial Intelligence using the description electronic listening music but this was quickly replaced by intelligent techno. In the same period (1992–93) other names were also bandied about such as armchair techno, ambient techno, and electronica, but all were used to describe an emerging form of post-rave dance music for the sedentary and stay at home. Following the commercial success of the compilation in the United States, Intelligent Dance Music eventually became the phrase most commonly used to describe much of the experimental EDM emerging during the mid to late 1990s.

Although it is primarily Warp that has been credited with ushering the commercial growth of IDM and electronica, in the early 1990s there were many notable labels associated with the initial intelligence trend that received little, if any, wider attention. Amongst others they include: Black Dog Productions (1989), Carl Craig's Planet E (1991), Kirk Degiorgio's Applied Rhythmic Technology (1991), Eevo Lute Muzique (1991), General Production Recordings (1991), New Electronica (1993), Mille Plateaux (1993), 100% Pure (1993), and Ferox Records (1993).