Everything seems fair game in experimental/IDM electronic music. But, from my listening experience at least, musicians in this genre do not speed up or slow down a tempo. Sure, maybe a tempo shift once in a while, but I never hear accelerating/decelerating.
Any idea what the reason is?
4 to the floor techno is rooted in primitive repetitive tribal trance-inducing rhythmic drumming.
The body, soul and brain identify recurring patterns and sync themselves to the beat; acoustic variation and syncopations then tickle the senses.
Swing: moderated clustering of beats at intervals within a bar whilst retaining the overal rhythmic structure, further titilates the groove, garnering a sense of mojo, shuffle and funk.
Speeding up and slowing down would break that booty-shaking lock to the clock, weakening the sense of physiological oneness with the rhythm.
At least that’s how I think of it whenever Triple Trouble by the Beastie Boys comes on 
Crikey! I though “Triple Trouble?, What album is that on?”
You just made me realize I never got past Hello Nasty!
I guess you could increase the tempo gradually just fine. But fluctuations in tempo would probably break the spell pretty quickly
IDM isn’t really that experimental – the D in IDM stands for Dance and wide shifts in tempo are hard to dance to.
If you’re not bound to the genre, check out Second Woman and Woulg
As dj lance said…Try it! You might like it…
Write a 12 minute doof that increases from 120bpm to 128bpm over 12 minutes…
You might re define a genre…!
Im sure i have a nazenbluten track somewhere that increases speed 3 times…its motivating or was when i was 20…it would drive me bonkers now…ill look for it…
Oh my god in 1996 this used to get me sideways…i cant even work out how i danced to this…ha…its nasty!!
Its best to close your eyes, play it really loud, and alow it to bludgen you to death
A few tempo changes, in 96…it was effective…
because people on dancefloor would hate it.
and people on substances would hate it even moar.
everyone who tried knows.
All time classic :
Ohmygod, that piece plastered a mad frozen grin on my face for at least 20 minutes. thx!
…oddly fitting in an office environment btw, #;#
DJs wouldn’t be too fond of any tempo fiddling, so that’s a factor for anyone doing vaguely commercial stuff.
For experimental music absolutely anything goes
Modern music is locked to tempo and groove and any change would be disorientating so I guess fine to change tempo if that’s the desired effect. Or maybe you want to drastically change feel and mood of the track and I’m sure there are examples of this. I guess though it’s not the norm in electronic dance music
To those saying that people need a steady tempo to dance to, are people actually dancing to Autechre, Emptyset, Richard Devine, et al? I feel the whole dance thing is out the window with some of these artists.
Isn’t adapting tempo DJ’s job ?
Yes, of course. We once smashed our school party’s with Afx and AE. Totally cleared the dance floor. Just that we had more room to dance. None of the poppers even considered this as music, but we had our fun.
There are free forms of dancing as there are free forms of music. Take the one you prefer, that’s all.
Take Metall for example, they spin their head like crazy. Is this dancing? Is this Dance Music? Who wants to judge that?
Autechre have intricate beats, unusual time signatures but the majority of their tracks have a steady tempo and a lot’s of them are in fact simple 4/4…
Last R.Devine ( insert list of expensive gears here ) release is more of freeform so yeah hard to keep track…But wasn’t risp ep/lp rythmically structured ?
Emptyset…Almost pure freeform but who knows if someone on watmm didn’t already play their track faster only to find it’s all Rihanna’s processed in Paulstretch ? 
Artist like J Dilla or Burial have been far further in term of unsteady tempo…
Man, that whole album is just aces.
Hah - You’re right. A tempo change is easy enough to deal with…Though these days any kind of drift or increase or whatever you’d end up ‘correcting’ in software
having been to a show - yes! well, people try to dance. it’s a funny sight.
this was always the gold standard for me in terms of mind-bending timefolding, especially everything beyond the 4 minute mark - listen on the right kinds of entheogens, and you might start intuitively understanding the underlying equations of the universe. is the tempo changing? or is the tempo staying steady while the beats get increasingly denser? or is the entire track somehow folding in on itself? all of the above?