It is both ironic and revealing that a significant subgenre of electronic music is called 'glitch', a word that, in its original sense, refers to a minor technical malfunction.
In a similar vein, a click was, and remains, the bane of all vinyl addicts, a flaw in an otherwise perfect listening experience that digital technology was supposed to eradicate for good.
With the advent of CDs came the promise of click-free audio but merely introduced us to other irritants The skips and stutters of defective discs produced hitherto unheard distortions; contaminations that gave a lie to the promise of technological perfection.
A moral that can be drawn from all this is that precision in music is neither a realistic nor a healthy goal. After all, that which is without fault or blemish may be technically perfect yet still be creatively barren. A glitch may be an impurity but , in machine-made music, it is what helps to keep it sounding human.
The German label, Mille Plateaux, have, since 1993, been in the forefront of educating listeners into the beauty and energy of glitch.
In 2000 they released the first volume of their Clicks and Cuts compilations. This, and the further volumes, introduced names like Kid 606, Fennesz, Vladislav Delay, Pan Sonic and Pole to a wider audience and put glitch firmly on the musical map.
These compilations were realisations of a 1995 mission statement in which the label presented itself as self appointed promoters of "virtuality, noise, machinism and digitality". In this manifesto, they also explained how programmers, designers and musicians had formulated a new sound where "the inessential emerges" and in which " clicks, glitches, so called mistakes, become sound."
In other words, these crackles and 'faults', which in purely logically terms would be treated as elements to either discard or at least gloss over were seen as fundamental to how the music sounded.
It is not too far-fetched to see this conscious foregrounding of errors as a metaphor for the 21st century in which all the promise of technological infallibility is constantly eroded by human failings, natural disasters or a combination of both.
But it has to be said that what was the sound of the new in Y2K has, after a decade of accelerated culture, come to seem a little old hat. It is significant that, this was also the year Kid A was released, an album which almost single-handedly wrenched electronica out of the shadows of the underground into the full glare of the mainstream.
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The blunting of the cutting edge aspects of this music may have played some part in halting the momentum of Mille Plateaux. In any event, the first incarnation of the label went bankrupt in 2004 and after a brief but unsuccessful re-launch in 2006 ( by Disco Inc. Ltd) its fate seemed sealed until a second resurrection trading as Total Recall with Berliner Marcus Gabler at the helm.
And as if to emphasise the stress on continuum the Clicks and Cuts compilation series is now maintained to reach its fifth incarnation.
Its subtitle, 'Paradigm Shift , signals a desire to mark a fresh start, however. The stress is on a new generation of young artists rather than familiar names. Moreover, the label describes the content as having "a significantly higher amount of melodic and compository details than its predecessors".
This pledge is borne out by atmospheric tracks like Loom's Isolex 03 and the fractured piano of Ametsub's Repeatedly both of which are marked by a warm ambient glow. In addition, the meditative textures of Marow's e.coli and Scrypt by Yu Miyashita are highly reminiscent glacial tones of Geir Jennsen's Biosphere.
However, if you expect to be gently lulled into an uninterrupted state of radiant bliss the disjointed loops of Kiyo's Bear In.Warm-Noiz and the broken beats of BAKETO by Manathol are enough to destroy the calm.
Melody is not at the heart of Aoki Takamasa's ghostly RN4-09 either, nor is it central to Wyatt Keush's Object 02 where the sounds are like an robotic typewriter which has taken on a life of its own.
Glitch is now a multi-facetted label that could denote anything from Indie-rock with a few token electronica add-ons to more hardcore noise experimentation. With this eclectic yet accessible sixteen track collection Mille Plateaux show us a middle way by highlighting one hour's worth of the more introspective and cinematic aspects of the genre.
Inevitably, it won't have anything like the impact of the first volumes but it is still a worthy addition to the series.
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