1995, a rented apartment, one dying sound card
The card was broken.
He recorded it anyway.
Lionel Cohen moved to Toronto in the mid-90s with a synth, a secondhand PC, and just enough gear to start recording. Partway through his first sessions, the machine's soundcard began failing — a driver conflict that clipped the sample rate, smeared the pitch, and dropped whole beats into silence at random.
Most people would have swapped the card and started over. Cohen kept the tape rolling. Rather than fight the malfunction, he built around it, layering synth lines over whatever the hardware handed back and letting the stutters, aliasing, and dropouts become the rhythm section. Over the following months he produced twenty tracks this way, naming each one for exactly what it was: a test, run once, never quite repeatable. Experiment 01 through Experiment 20.
This was before "glitch" had a shelf tag at the record store, before IDM had a Wikipedia page. It was one guy in a Toronto apartment, treating a hardware failure like an instrument.