Black Dog Productions

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Adopting the British symbol for imminent doom as their name, The Black Dog are often credited with "inventing" the IDM style of music, in producing a style of dance music equally enjoyable in the comfort of one's living room. While their work was showered with praise from a great number of club DJs, the DJs themselves rarely had the courage to play their tracks on the dancefloor. ^{[cleanup needed April 2007]}

The group was founded by Ken Downie along with Ed Handley and Andy Turner, who had already been producing music under the Plaid moniker. In 1989, they were unable to find a label to back their releases and had to start their own, Black Dog Productions. Their first full-length album, Bytes, was released in 1993 on Warp Records, the label later to publish records from some of the most notable of IDM artists, such as Boards of Canada and Autechre. Their music was often produced under a number of different names, such as Close Up Over, Xeper, Atypic, I.A.O., Balil and Discordian Popes. These were often names for the different projects of the three artists.

Later on, Ed and Andy broke off from Black Dog Productions, to work full-time on Plaid. Ken Downie continued working The Black Dog on his own for a while, taking it easy, later to return to music production with Richard and Martin Dust, owners of the label "Dust Science Recordings". Since, they have released four EPs and one full-length album, Silenced, on Dust Science and have started to play live again. They released a single called Riphead on Soma, which will be re-issuing Parallel and the three Black Dog Productions EPs as 'Book of Dogma', to be released on March 26, 2007 [1]