hey tomer, there are some pretty whack dudes out there like Amon Tobin... Id actually recommend looking at the NinjaTune Label Website... there tend to have alot of more IDM and slightly more engaging electronic music. Squarepusher is interesting, he does jazz bass on top of Drum N Bass tracks... some of his tracks sound like video game music, but I think the sounds themselves have alot of potential... its the organization which I find lacking.
I would recommend listening to 'Gaspard de la Nuit' by Maurice Ravel... if you want to listen to a piano piece which uses alot of harmonies which are FAR beyond normal tonic harmonies... but also readily translate themselves to electronic music. I say this because, though Ravel uses what could be construed as standard harmonies, he tends to use every note in every chord as its own voice... in other words, instead of chords creating a texture... like A minor to B minor.... he takes the individual notes and blurs between them by using lots of neighbor tones... and thats why you hear lots of A minors with B and D suspensions stuck in the sound.
I think this is a better way to look at electronic music construction because it transcends the boring and tired conventions of Am-G-F-G-Am... and other harmonic structures of that nature. Just listen to tracks with TONS AND TONS of delay... each line is its own voice, and they coalesce into a mass of sounds that is neither A minor nor any seeming form of harmonic material... it only SEEMS like Aminor... you play an A-C-E but the effects can create a Ravel like sound cluster... another piece of listening... get a hold of Ravel's Daphne und Chloe Suite no. 2... thats a sick piece of music.
Also check out Gyorgy Ligeti... he is the greatest living composer because he is the final death knell to tonality... he organizes his sounds through ways that... finally... seem to do away with the very overplayed chordal resolutions that seem to center around the contrast of juxtaposing the harmonic spectra of the tonic versus the dominant (which, coincidentally, happen to be diametrically opposed... curious thing to notice that babies, when played sounds, naturally like sounds with fifths and octaves... anything else, even pleasant sounding thirds, are interpreted as dissonance. - another note - back in the the 1600's, the major and minor third were thought to be ugly dissonances, much like we seem to find the tritone (1-#4 / b5) to be disconcerting... though that has changed over the last hundred years, just listen to Bartoks second violin concerto where the whole piece is built, not around the 1-5, but rather, around the tritone)
But geting back to Ligeti... listen to the San Francisco Polyphony and Lontano -
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...19821?v=glance
thats a mindblowing CD... and a must for anyone who wants to understand where Music REALLY stands... I could describe it but words pale to the music itself, just listen, and listen to it with the volume up... its the most spacey, weightless, horrifying, and brilliantly liberating music of the last 50 years... listening to Ligeti alongside the second great 'composer' of the twentieth century (anglo-american popular music) gives one, in my opinion an adequate basis to to understand where we lie, and to begin to create new music that has a power and beauty that transcends the seemingly empty ritual uses of music which we use it for now (like using Trance as a form of escapism or pop music like a form of candy bar)
Great music to me, neither satiates with empty calories nor does it escape, rather, like the Beatles, it engages us, and calls us to question our world around us, and also, when truly great, shows us one man/groups perspective on reality, and the ways through which they encounter and embrace the world around them... music acts as an answer to the struggles of life.
Ive got my own music, but Im not gonna post it till I have a whole band playing alongside the music, but I might post some of my Virus improvs if you are interested. Peace!
-BlakeLight