Weird times in the world means we need more oddball music

Would you spend £120 on a box set comprising eight hours of whirrs, boinks and clangs that sound like a robot trying to psyche you out? Plenty of people have: Autechre’s sprawling release of tracks made for their NTS Radio residency has shown just how deeply fans will engage with vast quantities of very, weird music. And Autechre are far from being the only artists putting freaky, psychedelic irregularity into our world. Just look at the albums reviewed in one recent issue of Mixmag: among the Maceo Plex and Paul Kalkbrenner records are some outrageously individualist creations – not just Autechre’s shapeshifting labelmate at Warp, Oneohtrix Point Never, but the Aymara-Bolivian-American ‘decolonising’ activist musician Elysia Crampton, and the Tibetan-Swiss producer-singer-songwriter Aïsha Devi. Every one of these releases is full of inhuman, processed voices, genres dissolving and flowing into one another, cryptic and disturbing psychological and political messaging, and all-round general mindfuck.

But these things aren’t way out on the fringes. They really are in Mixmag’s world. OK, no, you’re not going to set your local sweat-pit alight by dropping a 25-minute Autechre cosmic drone. But for all their sonic ambition and awkwardness, the duo remain a pair of old acid-inspired ravers from Manchester, with all the mischievous underground spirit that implies. Elysia Crampton’s collisions of Atlanta trap beats, shimmering electronica, raw noise and broken glass aren’t easy listening, but like her allies in abstraction – people like GAIKA, Rabit, Yves Tumor and this month’s cover star, Lotic – it is still, uncontrovertibly, music for underground parties. Aïsha Devi’s record might be a discombobulating spiritual acid trip in itself, but it’s also a thrilling, Blade Runner-ish experience, and (crucially) it’s on Fabric’s Houndstooth label, which consistently puts out the very weirdest sounds next to club bangers by people like Paul Woolford. Oneohtrix Point Never’s album is a full-on brain-melter, but he’s certainly not a marginal figure. Just look at his collaborators: Iggy Pop, David Byrne, James Blake, Sofia Coppola...

And all of this is vital to the very nature of club music. You don’t have to be an electronica dweeb to appreciate that, either. Club culture has always been a place to fly the freak flag high. After all, David Mancuso, whose Love Saves The Day Loft parties sowed the seeds in New York for the birth of disco and DJ culture as we know it, wanted his parties to be a sanctuary for freaks and misfits, and clubbing and raving has always carried that spirit with it. Dance music thrives on accommodating both anonymity and flamboyance, regularity and thrilling experimentation. Leaving aside the pharmaceutical exploration, clubbing and raving are about experiencing things, people and ideas you never normally would. Whether that’s witnessing the excesses of Berghain, watching the dawn in a strange country, or just dancing alongside a local oddball in your home town club.

Which is why electronic music can produce such wild individualists. From Aphex Twin to Jeff Mills to Björk to Goldie, our world has nurtured some of the biggest, strangest and most flamboyant characters of all, and, of course, some of the furthest-out music. And as dance culture gets ever more globalised, the boundaries between what is experimentalist and what is mainstream get more blurred, too. Alright, EDM is still mainly the province of obvious spectacle, but step outside that and even in the global DJ first division, there’s plenty of oddness. Ricardo Villalobos’s music sounds like nothing on earth, while Nina Kraviz can bring hardcore acid, Aphex Twin glitch-outs and the mysteries of Drexciya to mass audiences. At dance music festivals you can see the likes of ANHONI and Fever Ray performing on the big stages next to your favourite rappers or DJs. And further below the surface, industrial techno, constantly rejuvenated by labels like Perc Trax and Leyla, keeps a flow of vicious noise circulating through the global club ecosystem – while shattered club music variants on labels like PAN, NON, Halcyon Veil, Fade 2 Mind, Objects LTD and dozens of others pumps out awkward, intriguing sounds, laden with questions about race, sexuality and more.

“When the going gets weird,” as Hunter S Thompson famously put it, “the weird turn pro” – though even Thompson might have baulked at just how weird the world of self-driving cars, Cambridge Analytica and Donald Trump is now getting. But if our culture has any value, its in its ability to fight back with its own weirdness. And where ‘the weird’ in Thompson’s time often just meant white dudes with high drug tolerance and a cowboy hat, 21st century club culture is – for all its commercial pressures – once again creating spaces where weirdos of all shapes can be part of the avant-garde. Of course, not everyone has to be that – just as not everyone wants to listen to eight hours of Autechre jams on repeat – but even if your personal tastes don’t get wilder than a four-to-the-floor beat and staying up a little past your bedtime, you should still be proud to be part of a wider culture that waves its freak flag high and free.

Joe Muggs is a freelance writer, follow him on Twitter