London 93 Feet East, 20th January 2004

This is, so I’m told, Intelligent Dance Music, or, if you’d rather, IDM. The sheer smugness of this moniker defies belief, supposing as it does that all other forms of dance music wear the dunce hat while dribbling quietly in the corner. As I walk into the venue I’m overwhelmed by the IQ of the audience, who gather quietly in groups, using differential equations to calculate the area under a curve which they have painstakingly plotted in an exercise book. Support act Chevron provides the soundtrack for the maths homework. Resplendent in an old t-shirt, he bends double over a laptop as a thundering blend of kick drums slam out of the PA in a variety of lopsided time signatures. IDM pays no heed to performance values; there are no high-kicking dancing girls, no pyrotechnics, not even an enormous 70s synthesizer draped in cables and resembling an ancient telephone exchange. Technology has advanced. These days you may as well be watching someone doing their accounts, and for all we know, Mr Chevron might be.

Aaron Funk, tall, bearded, son of Mr and Mrs Funk and sole member of Venetian Snares, takes to the stage and stands quietly behind a mixing desk as bursts of Elgar’s Cello Concerto appear, fizz and disappear. The crowd, 98% male and 76% spectacled, look up from their graph paper, troubled by the absence of tricky beats. They don’t have to wait long, as the classical intro morphs into another sequence of deafening, clattering drums; repetition is avoided at all costs and toe-tapping abilities are tested to the max. If you’re not in the room at the beginning of the track, and you’re not counting furiously, you’re fucked. Concentrate. One person moves an arm, up and down. A couple more, standing at the sides, begin to dance, bravely attempting to anticipate the next downbeat – but the only person who knows where it currently lies is Aaron Funk, who demonstrates this perfectly by punching the air in precisely the right place. Everyone else follows suit a fraction of a second later. Yeah! James Brown talked about the essence of dance music being “on the one”, but Venetian Snares are, from my estimations, on the three point seven eight.

The music is brutal, uncompromising and painstakingly constructed. There’s an incredible amount of effort, ingenuity and weeks of solitary confinement required to assemble these relentless, bone-rattling tracks, but why is Aaron Funk actually here? He could have saved himself a flight from Canada and just sent us the CD, and his presence seems designed purely so we can offer him nods of congratulation as he wipes his brow and swigs from a bottle of beer. As the beats build, our Venetian Snare begins to shake his long, red hair furiously, and from a distance it looks like Carol Decker from T’Pau being plugged directly into the mains – a quite, quite beautiful image.

A girl turns around in the crowd, with a grimace on her face, suggesting that she harbours a deep distrust of her boyfriend’s taste in music, and that she’d probably rather be watching T’Pau. She bids him farewell, but he has little time for her, right now – he’s in the process of being deeply, deeply intelligent. A man nearby, in regulation specs, leaps in the air without warning and smacks his head on a low ceiling. He goes to sit down for a bit.

Hilariously polite stage invasions begin, one person at a time, as our chest cavities are pummelled by the swooping, irregular bass which threaten to radically disrupt our pulses. More and more people climb onto the stage, and suddenly, at the moment Aaron Funk disappears from view, it starts to make perfect sense. A mass of people, galvanised by impossibly unpredictable music, to dance exactly how they want, when they want, at the speed they want. No-one looks stupid, because everyone looks stupid. But, of course, highly intelligent at the same time. IDM. It’s the great leveller.