Editors' Letter

Alarming as it is for those of us who might like to believe that 2007 was only ten years ago, we're now a quarter way through the 21st century. That's a lot of music, so what better time to capture it all under one roof?

Truth be told, we've always felt that electronic representation in critics' lists skewed too narrow. Where were the headsy club tools that never left DJs' bags? What about the mixes that reimagined the possibilities of the form, even if they only ever existed in the cloud? How many ingenious sub-genres and micro-movements went amiss? And why are brilliant contributions outside of the Global North so easily overlooked?

So we set about making our own to accurately represent the evolution and progression of modern electronic music. After thousands of votes from hundreds of gracious contributors, Resident Advisor's creative and editorial teams certainly had their work cut out. Many months later, we arrived at 200 Tracks, 100 Records and 50 Mixes that capture the past 25 years.

A few ground rules about how it's going to function. Firstly, we've set a hard cap for total entries per artist and sought to avoid duplication as much as possible. If an album lands on Records, it's unlikely any song from that release will appear on Tracks, and vice versa. There are a few casualties ("Miura," we're sorry!), but it's allowed us to reach across the lines of genre and geography like no RA list before.

A pair of Further Selections accompanies each ranked release. Drawn from longlisted options as well as team tips, these are no boilerplate algorithmic suggestions; as you traverse the lists, bear in mind that any one of these picks could have made the cut. The exception comes when you hit the top 20, which we consider more or less singular.

In order to pen a story of the quarter-century, we've also welcomed back staff and contributors from across RA's lifespan to write, as well as calling in the thoughts of some of the best journalists and cultural historians in the field.

And finally: the face of electronic music looked very different on January 1st, 2000, compared to today. This made faithfully representing a culture that has often shown stubborn resistance to change a quandary. We've come a long way for the better, but still have a way to go to attain the balance and inclusion we should all strive for. There are artists across these lists whose politics and actions we disagree with, even outright condemn, but whose music was too influential at the time of release to discount. To revise that reality isn't the way we decided to document music history for this project.

With all that said, we hope you enjoy the lists as much as we enjoyed compiling them. Fetch any rave boomers who consider the halcyon days over in 1999 their slippers: it's been an exceptionally good 25 years for electronic music.

– Carlos Hawthorn, Gabriel Szatan & Rachel Grace Almeida