1001 Albums
en
Create account

54 albums · 1968–2021

Electronic music, from krautrock and synth-pop to house, techno, ambient, drum and bass and today

· 2 min read · by 1001 Albums

A bald man in a dark suit and tie standing behind a laptop on a black console, lit from the front against a dark stage
Jeff Mills in a black shirt bending over a silver Vestax mixer, turning a knob, a record spinning on the turntable beside itFour Tet at a table of decks and cables on a stage in pink light, a round screen of lights beside him and the crowd below
A member of Kraftwerk on stage in Ferrara, Italy, July 2005. Photo: Daniele Dalledonne, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. · Jeff Mills mixing records on a Vestax mixer, 2010. Photo: Angie Linder, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. · Four Tet playing at City Hall, September 2015. Photo: Julio Enriquez, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Electronic music is made with synthesizers, drum machines, samplers and computers. It came out of the radio and university studios of the fifties and sixties, and in the seventies Kraftwerk in Düsseldorf, Tangerine Dream in Berlin and Jean-Michel Jarre in Paris made whole albums with synthesizers.

Around 1980 Gary Numan, the Human League and Depeche Mode took the synthesizer into the charts as synth-pop. In the mid-eighties house came out of the clubs of Chicago and techno out of Detroit, and the raves in Britain brought the ambient house of the Orb and the albums of Orbital and Underworld. Goldie and Roni Size sped up the breakbeats into drum and bass, and Aphex Twin, Autechre and Boards of Canada made the IDM of the Warp label. Burial, Four Tet and Floating Points are some of those who carry it on today.

The list has 54 records from 1968 to 2021. It leaves out the singles and DJ mixes, where much of house and techno was made, trance and EDM, and the first electronic music of the fifties and sixties, Wendy Carlos's Switched-On Bach among it, which Deezer does not have. About 51 hours of music, 5 days of a few records each.

By genre

Electronic 69%Pop 9%Punk & New Wave 7%Other 15%
  • Electronic 69%
  • Pop 9%
  • Punk & New Wave 7%
  • Other 15%

The genres named most: electronic, synth-pop, ambient, idm, new wave, downtempo.

The colours of the covers

A stripe for each cover, in the colour Tidal picks from it, sorted by hue; the greys at the end.

Where the music comes from

Music from 8 countries: United Kingdom 32, United States 8, Germany 6, France 3, Japan 2 and 3 more. The deeper the colour, the more albums: one, two to four, five to nine, ten and more.

The 1960s

The 1970s

The 1980s

The 1990s

The 2000s

The 2010s

The 2020s

More lists

Lists of Genres first, then others; all of them on the blog. The blog.