Baroque with details, and teeming with the voices and instrumental contributions of over 20 collaborators, producer Chino Amobi’s 2017 opus Paradiso drew direct inspiration from epic narratives like The Odyssey and Dante’s Inferno, along with complex video games like Final Fantasy 7. Like many of his peers making conceptual electronica, Amobi’s ambition sprawls laterally into parallel forms. As he explains from his Richmond, Virginia home, he envisions merging Paradiso with his current project—a book/soundtrack titled Eroica, based on his fine arts master thesis—and developing the composite into spin-offs in other media: a film, a graphic novel, a play, an art exhibition, even garment production. “It’s like these layers upon layers,” he says.

I’m not exactly sure when I first noticed that electronic music’s conceptual bent had gone into overdrive. But at some point during the 2010s it seemed like a steady stream of press releases started arriving in my inbox that read like the text at the entrance of a museum exhibit. I also noticed that the way I would engage with these releases actually resembled a visit to a museum or gallery: often listening just once, while reading reviews and interviews with the artist that could be as forbiddingly theoretical as a vintage essay from Artforum. These conceptual works rarely seemed like records to live alongside in a casual, repeat-play way. They were statements to encounter and assimilate, developments to keep abreast of. Their framing worked as a pitch to the browsing consumer, not so much to buy the release but to buy into it.

Conceptronica isn’t a genre as such, but more like a mode of artistic operation—and audience reception—that cuts across the landscape of hip music, from high-definition digital abstraction to styles like vaporwave and hauntology. Concept-driven projects offer a way for artists to compete in an attention economy that is over-supplied while reflecting their enthusiasm for a vast array of ideas. Most of the leading conceptronica artists have been through art school or postgraduate academia, and they’re comfortable speckling both their work and their conversation with references to critical theory and philosophy. During our interview, Chino Amobi brings up everyone from the black studies and performance scholar Fred Moten to the ’90s cyber theory collective CCRU. Hyperdub producer Lee Gamble likewise enthuses to me about the inspiration sparked by listening to an unofficial audiobook of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, a deliriously dense philosophical work about capitalism, desire, and schizophrenia.

This high-powered discourse contrasts with the relatively down-to-earth vernacular of ’90s IDM luminaries like Aphex Twin’s Richard D. James and Luke Vibert, whose records were more likely to be daubed with puerile humour and porn references than concepts from poststructuralism. Another major difference between conceptronica and old-school IDM is that the latter could be used as a relaxing background shimmer, a spur to unthinking reverie rather than intellectual musing.

Fluent in the critical lingua franca used in art institutions and academia worldwide, conceptronic artists know how to self-curate: They can present projects in terms that translate smoothly into proposals and funding applications. Which is handy, because what sustains these artists is not revenue from record releases but performances on an ever-growing international circuit of experimental music festivals, along with subsidized concerts at museums and universities. Often trained in the visual arts rather than music theory, conceptronica artists increasingly resemble a figure like Matthew Barney, whose work involves multiple media and is staged on a grand scale, more than IDM pioneers like Autechre, whose focus has always been overwhelmingly on sonic experimentation.

Despite these differences, ’90s IDM and ’10s conceptronica are similarly positioned in terms of their relationship with the electronic dance mainstream. IDM was a minority-interest adjunct to the drug-fueled rave culture. Its producers took aspects of functional styles like techno but muted their dance imperative to create something that worked as introspective home-listening. Or they would push the formal features of genres like jungle—the chopped, sped-up breakbeats—towards dysfunctional extremes, making them both challengingly avant-garde and slapstick silly.