The most recognizable images behind electronic music aren't exactly the most artistically profitable, let alone representative:

The raver kid with a pacifier and bottle of Rx fun.

The aging hippie who likes to use the word "chill" excessively.

And, of course, the absolutely Euro-America club lizard who likes to dance around Manhattan to the same songs everyone made fun of in "A Night At The Roxbury."

What's interesting is that remarkable, artistic electronic music is reaching a watershed era and way too many people are sleeping through it. It's not just the past few years that have been vital, tight and ridiculously impressive, it's the fact that some of the golden artists of the past few decades are finally, and rightfully, moving into history.

Everyone, from Neptunes to Big & Rich to Interpol, has gotten fat from the weird boundary pushing German and British lab nerds did back in the '70s. Dusselldorf's Kraftwerk and their industrial "robot rock" taught American and British rock bands how to make the studio experience more brittle and stark. England's Brian Eno showed everyone that pop could still sound like pop - even after it played with some digital angles for a while.

Today we're immersed in it like the air we breathe; the universe of American pop music is obsessed with electronics and the digital properties of sound. Whether you reject or adore it, it usually plays a major role in the way music is crafted. The White Stripes, The Postal Service, 50 Cent and Wilco, major bands as diverse as it gets, all would have drastic shifts in their sound if it weren't for the tinkering synthesizer geeks and studio-philes in past years.

For some artists, this relationship to the seemingly inhuman, impersonal side of music never ends. They use computers and other tools to achieve what's at the heart of all music: expression of human experiences through sound in unique, specific way. Electronic music uses what's easily labeled artificial or inauthentic to mold resonant forms of expression.

That isn't a defense of a genre (no genre needs a defense), though some, like this one, need clarification. And like all other genres, there are plenty of weak spots. The ultra-cool shield of electronic music has its dents: the woozy, endless nausea of low-grade trance and those bleating, stop-start club songs where an anonymous foreign woman shrieks about something related to dancing. You know, those songs from club scenes in "Sex and the City."

Which of course means that I've seen "Sex and the City" enough to remember the music.

Awesome. I feel great. That's a nice one, Evan.

But seriously, the vital electronic music we've been missing for the past few years is layered, instantly accessible and thrilling. It's a wide-open world: trip-hop, drum and bass, jungle, ambient music all coincide, and what's more, they've all been around for some time now.

So, again, in the interest of fairness, here are some electronic outfits that have helped me get a stronger sense of what the genre can do:

Massive Attack sounds like syrup dripping down a champagne glass: slow, achingly smooth and almost ominous. Don't blame them for the cascade of also-rans who are cropping up these days (cough - Zero 7 - cough), because their run of albums, Blue Lines and Mezzanine are both gems A-- was so effortless and haunting no one could make "lounge" music so visceral or enduring ever again.

"Skittering" is an understatement when describing the music of Aphex Twin. A dominant force in the mid-'90s United Kingdom, this one-man outfit fractures drums and basslines at near the speed of sounds. He can make blizzards in your headphones. An intense and yet somehow peaceful trip through these quark loops of sound is possible. Depends on just how high your tolerance is.

Prefuse 73, the most contemporary act on the list (his masterpiece, One Word Extinguisher, was released in 2003), might also be the most palatable. Scott Herrin, the man behind the Prefuse moniker (among others he uses), uses a glitch style of electronica that breaks up the different rhythms of loops as much as it freezes and melts patterns of sound. If that reads awkwardly, trust me, the tempo shift is smoother than a May breeze, and the blend of drums, vocal samples and crashing digital synths become a warm narcotic.

Though the more inhuman and cold weeks of the year are crawling back day by day, there's one interesting solution: an insulated cocoon of digital atmospherics. Try it, couldn't be worse than the Christmas albums around the corner.