Originally released in 2000 on Raster-Noton. Back then, the had been started just a few years earlier by Frank Bretschneider, Olaf Bender, and Carsten Nicolai, a fusion of Rastermusik and Noton, and they’d already issued a slew of artmusik classics, including William Basinski’s »shortwavemusic« and Kim Cascone’s microsound masterpiece »blue cube«. But the raster-static-series, that packed up each release in an anti-static bag usually used to store RAM modules and circuit boards with a piece of colored card, really stood out as a temporal marker, both aesthetically and sonically. »Cliphop« was the fifth entry in the series (other releases came from Alva Noto and Opiate, Taylor Deupree, Senking, and CoH), and it landed mere months after »Clicks_+_Cuts«, Mille Plateaux’s milestone compilation that defined the nascent glitch genre for many listeners. Of course, by that time there had been threads running through the scene – from early practitioners like Oval and Ryoji Ikeda, and prescient computer music wizards like Kit Clayton – but it hadn’t been fully defined until this point.

Swedish producer Tilliander meanwhile had started his path as a synth nerd, making techno with an arsenal of analog synths and drum machines, but after hearing Pan Sonic he ditched the gear and set his sights on the computer. »Cliphop« was his first album as Mokira, and it characterises the era so well because it sounds exactly as it should – using a sampler bank filled with sounds that’ll be familiar to early millennials and gen x-ers, Tilliander created his hard-swung, techno-via-Timbaland grooves from the aggravating background noise of the late ’90s. While artists like Jan Jelinek and Pole used analog failure to fuel their respective projects, Tilliander, Sutekh (Rrose’s old project), and Kid606, for example, shredded sounds that recalled crashing desktop architecture and failing DAWs, using the bitrate-challenged belches and crunches as drums. The post-»Chiastic Slide« wave of IDM was sat, spliff in mouth, over the other side of the room – it was pretty glitchy too, at times, but wasn’t quite as intentional. Glitch-y, not ›glitch∫.

iDEAL presents this new version of »Cliphop«, remastered by Tilliander himself, to coincide with a book on the album from Swedish author Johan Jacobsson Franzén – and it couldn’t have come soon enough. Although Tilliander would go on to produce a sturdy canon of very different music, »Cliphop« might well be his most influential, most enduring statement. Alva Noto’s »Transform«, a stylistically very similar set of R&B- and hip-hop-inspired glitch variations that amplified his notoriety as a producer, arrived a year later, flanked by Mille Plateaux’s »Electric Ladyland (Clickhop Version 1.0)« compilation. As soon as the technology had caught up it was all over, but we can still feel the aftershocks.