Hacker News Reader

Comment by marxisttemp | Hacker News Reader

Everyone here is talking about rock music, but electronic music was also just on fire during the 90s. No decade since has come close to the perfection of the 90s across so many genres of electronic music. House, gabber, jungle, so many electronic genres are still just trying to reach the peaks they hit in the 90s.

I say this as someone who was 5 years old at the turn of the millennium, so this isn’t some sort of nostalgia filter.

View on HN

I agree, the lack of social media, secrecy in production techniques, dawn of digital technology, big names in synthesis pouring millions into r&d was an amazing combo, and most importantly production heavily sampling and dubplate culture....hard to replicate that!

Any recommendations?

I tend to listen to a lot of electronic music, and am always looking for new recommendations myself. My taste for 90s stuff has typically run more toward Eurodance/Eurobeat and House and J-pop for more recent things.

Here are some random recommendations:

Daft Punk

Anything on the "Blade" soundtrack

Pretty much any Eurobeat featured in the anime Initial D. e.g. Dave Rodgers, Manuel, Fastway, Go2, m.o.v.e.

2 Unlimited - Get Ready, Twilight Zone, Tribal Dance, No Limit

Technotronic - Pump Up The Jam

Le Click - Tonight is the Night

La Bouche - Be My Lover

Mr Vain - Culture Beat

Black Box - Ride on Time, Strike it Up, I Don't Know Anybody Else (technically 80s, early house music)

The Shamen - Move Any Mountain

Livin' Joy - Don't Stop Movin'

Bonus, more recent: Destination Calabria (Alex Gaudino, Crystal Waters)

Bonus, 1979: Kraftwerk's album "The Man Machine"

Based on Daft Punk/Blade/(80s & 90s electro) [but not eurodance/j-pop]:

WBBL: https://soundcloud.com/wbbl

A.Skillz: https://soundcloud.com/a-skillz

Last Cat Knight: https://soundcloud.com/lastcatknight

Freddy J: https://soundcloud.com/freddy-j

Awesome, this is great stuff! Thanks!

Speaking of Move Any Mountain:

'Songs For Acid Edward' by Mr.B The Gentleman Rhymer Seven Rave classics. In five minutes. On the Banjolele.

+1 for Initial D Eurobeat. (RIP Manuel)

Future Sound of London - Dead Cities, was my first exposure to electronic, as an American. They are hard to describe, but are labeled as more psychedelic ambient with bits of techno, trip hop, and progressive house music thrown in. Each album is fairly different from the others, and there is a lot of experimentation that feels unique even in 2025 (at least to myself). I'm a big progressive music fan, or any genre, so they scratch an itch for me when it comes to electronic music.

I am biased as a Londoner but it UK Garage is/was a wonderful subgenre of house from the 90s, a uniquely London blend of genres including Chicago house. Infectious stuff. It was a precursor to later genres like Dubstep and Grime which are so popular today.

Spotify has some good playlists. Rosie Gaines 'Closer than Close' and Artful Dodger 'Movin too Fast' or 'Woman Trouble' are good starting points.

Darude - Sandstorm

We have been enjoying Massive Attack. The same culture that hatched Banksy is my kind of folks and the music has a good edge, IMO.

For modern stuff, I've enjoyed SomaFM's Groove Salad out of San Francisco. They have net streams directly accessible in VLC, so the processor burning Web app is utterly unnecessary.

That same culture also hatched Portishead (just down the road from Bristol), which was pretty much the apotheosis of trip-hop. It's also the second home of reggae in the UK (after London), which has quite a bit to do with its musical vibe.

Be sure to go back and forth between Groove Salad and Groove Salad Classic, which is the more 90s-2000s version. There's not a lot of people putting out stuff with the "classic" feel anymore, which is partly why Rusty renamed it, and started a newer, modern channel.

SomaFM was incredible, I probably used more bandwidth on their streams than almost anything else for a good year at home. And iirc, this was during dial-up days!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com