A young German scholar sits with wire-rimmed glasses at a van der Rohe desk in a converted warehouse loft. Atop the desk sits a Powerbook and a small, steel lamp, the room's only source of light. Here, the man sequences clicks, squeals, and an occasional melodic chime into algebraic patterns to create a sound as minimalist as his living space. If he's feeling extravagant, which is rare, he may insert a warm drone beneath the squirming pulse. It's dance music you can't dance to, and therefore, intelligent.

This stereotype has long permeated the IDM community, and with good reason: it's considerably accurate. Countless auteurs release hundreds of minimalist IDM records every month, and with each new LP, the form seems to grow more predictable. Minimalism has seen its share of classic records, but electronic music moves quickly, and its genres invariably die quick, merciful deaths. Minimalist IDM isn't buried yet, but it's a limited formula. And you can only do so much with a formula before it becomes stagnant.

Tigerbeat6, the label run out of Oakland, California by that impossibly clever electro-brat Kid606, is one of the first IDM labels to take The Big Step Forward. Their concept: stripping intelligent dance music of its intelligence. Often resorting to outright silliness, and sometimes parody, Tigerbeat6 is doing for clicks and cuts what Ninja Tune did for jungle in 1997. That is, making it fun. Damn fun.

Tigerbeat6, Inc. celebrates the label's incorporation as a legally recognized business entity with two discs of uncontrolled mayhem. Artists from several labels-- including the groundbreaking Mille Plateaux imprint, Planet µ, and Domino-- lent some of their unreleased material to this 44-track compilation. But the spotlight shines bright on Tigerbeat's artists, whose music is so fractured and hyperactive it could practically be termed ADDDM.

Kicking off with Gamers in Exile's highly melodic and Macintalk-laced "I am a Decent Man," the comp begins on a note that strikes a balance between the few "serious" tracks here and the general wackiness that infiltrates the bulk of the album. Then, we're flung headlong into "kick'SC" by Fossil (aka Pea Hix of Optiganally Yours), a just-totally-insane 1½ minutes that uses thunking drum, sea-sawing bass and manipulated vocal clips as percussion that pauses every four seconds to let Hix clue us into where, exactly, he's going to kick us ("I'm gonna kick you in... in the face/ I'm gonna kick you... um... in the face/ I'm gonna kick you in the stomach/ I'm kick you, SC").

And it just gets weirder from there. Cex's "Furcoat" features a wack parody of the MTV Music Awards before launching into a hilarious hip-hop rap ("Who's the man with no clothes, underwear, furcoat, chillin' in tha alley?"). Knifehandchop's "Sun Jammer is My Favorite Pokemon Trainer" blatantly infringes on the copyrights of DMX's "What's My Name." bLectum from bLechdom's "aLways frank" lays down squirting bass and lo-fi beats for a faux-Le Tigre smackdown whose lyrics, provided by Adult Rodeo's Mephany Stankins, scream: "Always, Frank/ You're fucking up!"

And speaking of Le Tigre, Johanna Fateman herself contributes a beautiful, shimmering track from her electronic side project Swim with the Dolphins, which sounds not a bit like the band she made her name with. DAT Politics ricochet piercing tones off rubberband walls in the joyfully bouncy "#21." Max Tundra goes Casio with the seemingly boombox-recorded samba/slapbass hybrid of "The Bill," and Stilluppseypa gives us the eerie interstellar tones of "Nice Things to File Away."

But not all of these tracks are drenched in lunacy. Noriko Tujiko hands in "White Film," a gorgeous track off her Mego-released Shojo Toshi album in which her lush, multitracked vocals gradually merge into a dense chorus of harmony-saturated bliss. D84's "Rock-its-hip" incorporates a female vocal sample that seems to have come out of the early 20th century. Brad Laner provides a post-rockin' 1994 cover of Can's "One More Night" by his old band, Medicine. Kid606 offers a seven-minute glitch/noisefest with an almost trip-hop beat called "You Just Don't Understand" that eventually becomes submerged in dense washes of shoegazing guitar.

What more can I say about this? It's fucking brilliant! In a world where 90% of dance music heralds itself as "intelligent" and "mathematical," it's refreshing to find an electronic label that can't discern the difference between "there" and "they're" in their press releases. With this compilation, Tigerbeat6 officially establishes itself as the future of IDM. With sonic assaults of unfettered craziness and a roster diverse enough to put even Warp to shame, Tigerbeat6 reveals minimalists for the stuffy, gel-haired geeks they truly are. Let's have some music, boys.

-Ryan Schreiber, September 21st, 2001