In the second half of the 1990s, a new style was born in Europe that employed digital events (such as the "glitches" of defective compact discs) to produce disconcerting ambient music and even "dance" music.

The career of Manchester-based disc-jockeys Sean Booth and Rob Brown, better known as Autechre (22), actually comprised two careers. The first one was about dance music whose beat had been deformed and suppressed, melted into a watery substance, emptied of its narrative content, but relatively warm and organic. The smooth and detached tones of Incunabula (1993), perhaps the most austere and implacable album in the history of dance music, coined a new form of ultra-minimal techno that was expanded on the more colorful Amber (1995), insinuating those minimal/artificial sounds in the most obscure orbits of the subconscious, and on the more claustrophobic Tri Repetae (1996), that resorted to metallic sounds and subsonic frequencies. These works were inspired by Steve Reich's minimalism, Kraftwerk's robotic trance, and Brian Eno's ambient music, but their emotional content (if any) was radically different. Chiastic Slide (1997) was the dividing line, the discontinuity that caused a phase shift. The menacing texture of digital beats, repetitive noises and dejected melodies mutated into alien beings with a life of their own. Autechre's second career, best represented by LP5 (1998) and Confield (2001), was about dissonance, icy ambience, irregular rhythm and non-linear development. Both careers were characterized by austere, meticulous, intricate sound design. Autechre's tracks often seemed labyrinthine mirages: the closer one went, the more lost one felt.

Glitch music originated from Germany. Markus Popp's Oval (1) had the idea of applying the avantgarde technique of musique concrete to the static, droning, ethereal fluxes of ambient music. Systemisch (1994) "composed" tracks by using the "glitches" of defective compact discs as an instrument (an adaptation to the digital age of the ideas of Czech artist Milan Knizak). The "mechanical" effect of compositions such as Do While (1996) was akin to the aesthetics of Futurism. Oval's Popp and Mouse On Mars' Jan Werner pursued a similar strategy of accident-prone electronic music under the moniker Microstoria on works such as Init Ding (1995).

Another precursor was Pita (2), the project of Austrian electronic musician Peter Rehberg, who contributed to formalize the "glitch" aesthetics with Seven Tons For Free (1996), a concerto for pulse signals, and Get Out (1999), which was the cacophonous equivalent of a romantic symphony.

Finland's digital composer Mika Vainio imported the wildest forms of electronic music (Pierre Henry's musique concrete, Morton Subotnick's dadaistic electronica, Suicide, Kraftwerk, Throbbing Gristle, Einsturzende Neubauten) into the format of ambient dance music. Brian Eno's Before And After Science was the main influence on the surreal vignettes of Metri (1994) and Olento (1996), credited to Vainio's solo project 0 (or, better, the symbol used in computer science for the digit zero). Pan Sonic (3), mostly a duo of Vainio with Ilpo Vaisanen, specialized in samples-driven minimal techno. Their albums Vakio (1995), Kulma (1997) and especially the poetic A (1999) evoked futuristic wastelands roamed by faint signs of life (digital beeps, echoes, scrapes, warped beats, clicks, clangs, radio frequencies) amid a lot of silence. The "arctic" beat became their trademark. The four-disc set of Kesto (2004) was both a compendium of state-of-the-art techniques (the vehicle) and a Dante-esque journey from organic and violent structures to chaotic stasis (the message). In a sense, this album was also a compendium of the civilization of 2004, a representation of the contemporary zeitgeist, of the state of humanity. It was not an album for people to listen to, but a message to be decoded by future generations. The albums credited to Mika Vainio in person, such as Onko (1998) and Ydin (1999), revealed the avantgarde composer of cacophonous concertos. There was beauty in the monotonous minimalism of Vainio's art, just like in haiku and epigrams.

Alva Noto (born Carsten Nicolai in Germany) was one of the composers who switched to the computer. His audio installations, documented by albums such as Prototypes (2000), employed techniques as diverse as minimalistic repetition, abstract soundpainting, musical pointillism and industrial noise, but, ultimately, subscribed to a notion from Physics, that the vacuum is alive and that reality hides in the interstices of the spacetime grid.

Vladislav Delay (11), born Sasu Ripatti in Finland, employed slow-motion, glacial, watery, organic pulsations, often with an undercurrent of Terry Riley's minimalist repetition, to craft the digital landscapes of Ele (1999). Multila (2000) specialized in distant tremors of breezes that pick up glitches along the way. Anima (2001), his 61-minute masterpiece, was a prime example of digital soundscaping that draws inspiration from both musique concrete and industrial music. Melodic fragments and disjointed noises coexisted and blended into each other in a sort of "call and response" format. Delay's alter-ego Uusitalo performed four lengthy techno suites on Vapaa Muurari Live (2000) that sounded like techno's version of Terry Riley's minimalism, while Luomo was Ripatti's the creative disco/house project, documented on Vocalcity (2000). Delay pursued its ambient dub/glitch aesthetic with surgical precision on The Four Quarters (2005) and Whistleblower (2007), works of meticulous production and cryptic coldness, while Uusitalo's Karhunainen (2007) did to techno what Luomo had done to house.

The dance music of British dj Matthew Herbert replaced drum-machines and synthesizers with beats and melodies manufactured out of random noises of everyday life, an idea pioneered on Around The House (1998), that employed the sounds of household objects, and transferred to the song format with the electronic jazz ballads of Bodily Functions (2001) and Scale (2006). Herbert refrained from simply sampling instruments. Each melody and rhythm was meticulously constructed in studio. Herbert shared with Matmos the honor of having pioneered the use of "organic" samples (noises, not instruments) to compose dance music. The sound of everyday life became not only the source but also the meaning of his art.

Matmos (2), the San Francisco-based electronic duo of Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt, pioneered the use of "organic" samples (noises, not instruments) to compose dance music. More importantly, Matmos (1997) bridged three levels of the electronic avantgarde: the chaotic and atonal bleeps and squeaks of the electronic poems of the 1960s, the dilated and warped structures and rhythmic patterns of the German avant-rockers of the 1970s, and Pierre Henry's "musique concrete" of the 1950s. A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure (2001), based on sounds taken from hospitals, was even playful and effervescent. In the meantime, the duo had experimented with traditional instruments on The West (1999), a work that basically "remixed" the history of the United States and let a "human" quality transpire through the dense jelly of the digital "arrangement".

France's Tone Rec (1) also harked back to French musique concrete of the 1950s. Digitized noise, hypnotic loops, raw statics, dub-like bass lines, and post-techno beats populated Pholcus (1998).

Ryoji Ikeda (1) wed LaMonte Young's living drones and Pan Sonic's glitch electronica on his trilogy of +/- (1997), 0 Degrees Celsius (1998) and Matrix (2000).

Nobukazu Takemura concocted jams of minimal glitch techno such as Pendulum , on Funfair (1999), credited to his alter-ego Child's View, On A Balloon, on Scope (1999), and Souvenir In Chicago, on Sign (2000), with members of Tortoise.

Boards Of Canada (1), i.e. the duo of Scottish electronic musicians Michael Sanderson and Marcus Eoin, were among Autechre's most original followers, capable of secreting the sound of Geogaddi (2002), straddling the border between ambient, new age, glitch and hip-hop music.

Kid 606 (1), San Francisco-based digital composer Miguel Trost-Depedro, topped Matmos' madness on Down With The Scene (2000), an edgy and convoluted collage art of white noise, sampled voices and frantic breaks.

Joshua Kit Clayton (1), also from San Francisco, added dub-like echo effects and robotic rhythms a` la Neu to the usual blend of stormy electronics, found sounds and digital glitches Nek Sanalet (1999) and especially Lateral Forces - Surface Fault (2001).

Neina (Japanese keyboardist Hosomi Sakana) proved to be a subtle follower of Oval with Subconsciousness (2000).

Digital minimalism

Bernhard Guenter (13) was the link with the classical avantgarde. The guru of digital, dissonant minimalism, he sculpted sub-atomic soundtracks that picked up the sounds from the crevices between one quantum event and the next one. His Un Peu De Neige Salie (1993) and Details Agrandis (1994) were works of musique concrete that manipulated noises of ordinary life to the point that they became unrecognizable, and then turned them into cold, dark, monolithic structures of silence, terrible depths from which there emerge unidentified and barely-audible bursts of "implied sound". Time Dreaming Itself (2000) and Then Silence (2001) opened a new phase of sonic exploration, "active" rather than "passive", and frequently reminiscent of Morton Feldman. Redshift - Abschied (2002) bridged this hyper-minimal music and chamber music.

The microscopic exploration of the space between sounds and silence conducted by Washington-based disc-jockey Richard Chartier, particularly on his fourth solo album Series (2000), highlighted the relationship between digital minimalism, "silence music" a` la Bernhard Gunter and "deep listening" a` la Oliveros. "Micro-textured" albums such as Of Surfaces (2002), Tracing (2006) and Incidence (2006) simultaneously austere and angelic, were fundamentally studies in what one does not hear when listening to music.

New York-based composer Taylor Deupree redefined digital minimalism as a form of sporadic musique concrete, like a panorama that is periodically disturbed by brief catastrophic events, on Occur (2001).

Inspired by the desire to communicate with the otherworld via the microsounds hidden in silence, Swedish composer Carl Michael von Hausswolff achieved a noble fusion of glitch, ambient and cosmic music on Stroem (2001).

Australian guitarist Oren Ambarchi explored minimal events, silence and static sound on Suspension (2001) by manipulating the sounds of his guitar via a number of electronic and digital devices. Overdubbing live instruments and manipulating them with a mixing board, Ambarchi achieved the fragile melancholia of Grapes From The Estate (2004) and Pendulum's Embrace (2007).

Japanese techno veteran So Takahashi crafted the ambient glitch electronica with spare beats and found sounds of Nubus (2000).