Plaid and IDM Circa 2017

Perhaps the early IDM act Plaid got advance word that Pitchfork.com was about to post (today) a list of “The 50 Best IDM Albums of All Time,”but either way the duo of Ed Handley and Andy Turner (they generally list themselves in the opposite order, but alphabetization gets the best of me) surfaced this past week with a free two-track released. It’s streaming at soundcloud.com/plaid and available as a gratis download at warp.net. Both tracks, “Bet” and “Nat,” are beat-heavy exercises in syncopation, off-kilter time signatures, and dodgy atmospheres. In other words, pure Plaid. (Oh, and I wrote about Plaid’s Not for Threes as part of that Pitchfork top-50 effort.)