When I heard about the imminent DVD release of the 1982 cult movie Liquid Sky, I was thrown back to a vanished age I hadn’t quite realised had vanished. And I’m not referring to the early 80s when the film was made – although that too is a weird place, where aliens can arrive in New York City in search of heroin, infiltrating a trashy urban club underworld of electro-squalor, abjection-chic and bisexual androgyny. No, I’m talking about the mid-90s, when I watched the film at the small independent Lux Cinema – the art space that helped to transform East London’s Hoxton area from no-go zone to the hipster paradise it is now – only to close down due to unsecured rent rises. At that point, Liquid Sky to me was the name of a pair of small clubs in New York and Cologne, plus an associated record label, which was putting out some remarkable raw, acid-bitten techno records. It also made sense of Air Liquide, the name of the electronic music duo of Dr Walker and Jammin Unit, two mysterious and mercurial figures whose names, in a variety of aliases, had been cropping up on a range of records and white labels since around 1991.

Reliving those years reminded me how different things were nearly 25 years ago. Far from the current spate of retromania, the cutting edge was exactly that, a burgeoning flood of desktop powered electronic music whose every new iteration seemed to speak of things to come rather than things that have been. In the mid-90s, the internet was an infant. Today’s social media and market-driven online culture requires you to be the person you really are. The mid-90s was still a digital wild west, devoid of two-step authentifications, multiple passwords and ‘likes’. Everything was freely given over for grabs. The remix was paradigmatic: tracks frequently submitted in multiple versions, authorship subdivided and atomised into a globally distribute collective consciousness. In this utopian open studio, artist aliases ran amok. It’s incredible, re-reading some of the key texts of that era in electronic music, how much energy we spent as writers just keeping track of who was who. Discogs.com now does a better job of keeping track of the aka trail of producers like Germans Jammin Unit, Khan and Wolfgang Voigt. In those days you had to do a lot of detective work, reading the clues in the names as they morphed from 12" to 12".

It’s a long time since I listened closely to much of this material, but it’s sobering to think that the time distance between now and its 1994–97 heyday stands in a similar relation as the mid-90s did to krautrock, progressive music and the early days of ambient. Given the enduring rarity of many of the releases, it all feels equally worthy of a critical rediscovery.

The articles chosen below trace the development of a critical style around the genre we loosely dubbed electronica and shows its international spread.

Rob Young: Worlds Collide (The Wire 142, December 1995)

“Don’t call it Ambient, because most of this stuff travels and hypervelocities and staggering gaits hardly explicable/believable in ballistic/osteopathic terms...” There was a lot crammed into this rather breathless genre piece that tried to map out an emerging landscape, with the creative remix projects of Lo Recordings as one tentative foothold.

Simon Reynolds: Mille Plateaux (The Wire 146, April 1996)

The Frankfurt based Mille Plateaux label was one of the consistently enthralling imprints of the 90s, pumping out visceral and tactile music underpinned by hardcore Deleuzian theory. Simon Reynolds’s epic encounter with Achim Szepanski, Mille’s mercurial and eventually maligned founder, was a key moment in bringing it all out in the open.

Rob Young: Cologne Central (The Wire 159, May 1997)

In one head spinning week I managed to interview Can in their original studio and tack on a round of interviews with the prime movers from an extraordinary underground electronic and experimental scene shaping up in Cologne. Billetted at the A-Musik record shop in a concrete basement in the Belgian quarter, I tried to connect the dots between the abstractionists like Pluramon (Marcus Schmickler), Microstoria (Mouse On Mars meets Oval) and the A-Musik label, and the more beats-driven Liquid Sky scene of Dr Walker, Air Liquide and pre-Kompakt Wolfgang Voigt. There was no PR structure around this stuff, so you just had to kind of breeze into it all, talk to people and build the connections.

David Toop: Pete Namlook (The Wire 197, September 1994)

We used to receive about ten CDs a week (it felt like) from the Fax label, run singlehandedly by the late producer Peter Kuhlmann (aka Pete Namlook). In retrospect he seems among the first to have taken advantage of the creative anonymity of electronic music, practically reinventing his artist name with each new project or collaboration. Another key to Fax was in the name: this label was a Gesamtkustwerk, dedicated to connecting people around the world, identifying those who spoke the same sonic language, and plugging them into an ongoing continuum of your own making.

Rob Young: Khan & Jammin Unit (The Wire 155, January 1997)

These guys popped up in so many different configurations and across so many different projects, it was hard to decide when and how to pin them down for a magazine article. This one was notionally hung on UMO (Unidentified Musical Object), a super-obscure one-off release on the Liquid Sky label whose looming menace still sounds amazing. Not the most forthcoming types, so I found myself working to fill in the gaps.

Peter Shapiro: The Illbient Alliance (The Wire 154, December 1996)

In another of our 90s genre overviews, Peter Shapiro nailed the brief flare-up of an underground New York scene that pitched dub, hiphop, sampladelia and electro into a dystopian sci-fi dumpster and set it on fire beneath the Brooklyn Bridge.

Tony Herrington: Bedouin Ascent (The Wire 131, January 1995)

London based Kingsuk Biswas existed in a class of one and his self-produced music at the time sounded utterly alien, appearing to set atoms vibrating around unfamiliar rhythmic nuclei, while the ghosts of Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett lurked over his shoulder. Tony Herrington’s one-pager distilled what I gather was a small fraction of a very long exchange that ranged over quantum physics, chaos theory and god knows what else, but it offers a glimpse of the grand designs that artists were often pouring into this music. Interview kinda cloudy…