Chiastic Slide – the glitch blueprint – endlessly imitated, deconstructed and worshipped, now a quarter of a century old and still capable of shaping the narrative.

We’ve said it before, but the period that followed Chiastic Slide was a weird one in electronic music, there were just no other records that shaped IDM in quite the same way. This rubs people the wrong way, but you have to imagine the level of influence Chiastic Slide exerted. – when we opened our shop in 1998 there was just a seemingly relentless and endless flow of records made in its shadow – we even spent a weird afternoon watching on as sean grabbed a stack of them and played them on our listening deck, offering quick appraisals of things like EOG on Djak-Up-Bitch (he was into it) and Funkstörung (erm, cant remember). Anyway – we were just over saturated with the stuff.

25 years later Chiastic Slide’s influence is just as evident, but the gap between its rhythmic genius and the legions of imitations seems almost laughably wide. ‘Tewe’ flows with the kind of liquid energy that’s completely at odds with the monochrome, staccato constructions you’d find on something like a Markant record, while the industrial clank on ‘Cichli’  connects directly to Alan Wilder and Martin Gore’s mallet-on-sheet-metal brilliance in a way we just didn’t clock at the time.

And on it goes – ‘Recury’ is a submerged sci-fi tearjerk of the highest order, ‘Pule’ is pure, arpeggiated synth voodoo, ‘Rettic AC’ is like some alien concrète flashback, ‘Calbruc’ stop-motion turntablist attack – it’s just all a perfect vision of some imagined future that hadn’t quite finished rendering yet.