Bytes

Bytes is another classic album from Warp's sadly missed Artificial Intelligence series, coming from the hearts and minds of Black Dog Productions, a London-based musical collective and techno commune. At the time, their Discordian approach to electronic music bridged the gap between club-based techno enthusiasts and bedroom-based computer geeks. The combination of Ken Downie's fetish for Egyptian iconography and Arabic music with the mighty production talents of Ed Handey and Andy Turner (who later went on their own as Plaid) produced quite an engaging album; Bytes took the repetitive and atmospheric sounds of European techno and disrupted them with intricate polyrhythms and abstract melodies, breaking out of the 4/4 mould and embodying the spirit of jazz without coming across as snobbish or excessively complex. --Matthew Corwine