The Designed Disorder / Various

The Designed Disorder are an IDM promotion and production alliance who emerged in ’98 and steadily expanded a fan base for their shows in the Los Angeles area. Autonomous Addicts is their debut offering that contains artists from Warp, E.L.M. and Tigerbeat6 amongst others. It is exciting to hear the work of many lesser-known artists in a very specific genre and the music is mostly excellent, but the album is letdown by a lack of variation. Each track is as bleak and moody as the next, perfect as a soundtrack to some futuristic post-apocalyptic robots-take-over-the-world movie, but it fails to provide a complete anthology by the lack of anything ambient like Autechre or uplifting like some Aphex Twin. For those unfamiliar with IDM this album makes it sound like a one-trick pony, while the devout will recognise the quality but eventually tire of the compilation as a whole.