I don’t know if all of this fits into the concept of electronica, but it’s all electronic, so here are some of my favorites (one or two have been mentioned above, so I’m seconding these) …
The Echoing Green The Winter of our Discontent Iris Awakening Covenant Northern Light Anything Box Worth Depeche Mode Violator Depeche Mode Black Celebration mesh Who Watches Over Me? VNV Nation Empires Assemblage 23 Failure Apoptygma Berzerk Welcome to Earth Empirion Advanced Technology BT Movement in Still Life
FWIW, Interface, I was going to recommend Movements in Still Life as well. Considering the first half the album is Big Beat and the rest is more hardcore clubby, I think it goes into the generic Electronica genre rather than Dance, altho you could make the case for that as well.
see, here’s the way I see it. I’m not a huge electronica fan, and that means that the electronica I do listen to has to be either A) very popular, or B) very influential, like influential enough to goose the cortex of non-electronica musicians. So, while I can’t say anythng about your selections (I’m sure they’re all very fine), please don’t trash talk what I like, K?
What about Yaz and The Eurythmics? It’s not like they invented the two-person band idea, but it was kinda new having one singer, and one keyboardist/programmer. Actually, Yello and DAF were doing it too.
Then there’s Thomas Dolby who made it cool to do everything yourself.
The whole idea that you can neatly divide music into genres is flawed, IMO, so I doubt that this exercise has much value. For example, you’re lumping together hundreds of years of progress in many different styles under the heading “Classical”, but meanwhile microcategorising contemporary music into “rock”, “modern rock”, “blues”, “new wave”, and so on. Someone born before maybe 1920 might categorise all these recent types of music as “late 20th century pop” or something. Are they really more different from each other than, I don’t know, Palestrina is from Tchaikovsky?
Apologies, that comment should have been posted in ultrafilter’s main Essential Music Library: Project Planning thread. I had both threads open, posted to the wrong one.