This blog has now closed. Please visit my new blog, Stepreo.

Archive: Aphex Twin

20 years of Warp Records

15 September 2009 21:59

Categories: *, Entertainment, General, Music, Personal

Warp20

A series of posts

This month the seminal Warp Records label is celebrating its 20th anniversary. There is a heap of festivities planned, and I am expectantly waiting for the very awesome looking Warp20 box set to arrive in the next week or so.

They have a lot to celebrate. The label has personified the cutting-edge of electronic music for most of its existence. Few labels can claim to have been so seminal, and remain so strong for so long.

I discovered Warp at the beginning of this decade. I had already been developing a taste for experimental and electronic music, but before getting internet access I had no way to explore it. I had heard bits and bobs about Warp, but my first real exposure was when I saw the band Broadcast on one of those late-night music programmes on Channel 4. I remember very little about it, but I think the song that mesmerised me so much must have been ‘Illumination’. Here is a video of the band performing it live in 2005.

Once we got the internet, I was able to explore further. When I visited the Warp Records website, ‘Eros’ by Tortoise was playing on its front page. It was one of the most amazing and unique things I had ever heard.

The mixture of soaring sci-fi electronic sounds, intricate multi-layered drumming and funky guitar playing transformed my expectations of what music could achieve. Compared to the standardised indie-rock I had previously been listening to, hearing something as distinctive as this was an utter revelation.

I knew I had to continue on the path of discovery. Given that Tortoise shared the same label as Broadcast, there could be no starting point other than Warp. I was also quickly. attracted by Warp’s striking visual identity, which was largely shaped by The Designers Republic.

As I investigated the artists of Warp on the label’s website, I was surprised and delighted to discover a huge variety of new (to me) and exciting music. It is no surprise that today many of my favourite albums are ones released by Warp in 2001, when I was 14 and discovering all this amazing, diverse music.

But the Warp I discovered was already very different to the Warp that began in 1989. Back then, the promise of label founders Steve Beckett and Rob Mitchell was for the Sheffield-based Warp to be a “recognised, credible, uncompromising dance label”. Inevitably though, a label cannot survive 20 years without evolving.

Between 1992 and 1994 the label released the seminal series of albums including the eponymous compilation Artificial Intelligence. The idea behind the series was to showcase “electronic listening music” which designed more for home listening than the dancefloor, or more for your head than your body. This series contained music by musicians that were later to become huge: Richard D James (best known as Aphex Twin), Autechre, Black Dog Productions (containing the members of Plaid), Alex Paterson (from The Orb), Richie Hawtin among others.

The cover of Artificial Intelligence depicts a robot reclining in an armchair with copies of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Kraftwerk’s Autobahn lying on the floor — an indication of Warp’s ambitions. The label became the most famous outlet of what is known as Intelligent Dance Music or IDM.

The IDM moniker makes everyone cringe. Few of the best IDM artists think of themselves as IDM, and the artists that describe themselves as IDM are usually not worth listening to. Musically, it might be fair to describe it as dance music’s equivalent of progressive rock. It was the necessary next step, but is denigrated by those who think it is too pretentious and impossible to enjoy.

Like prog rock, IDM had a limited shelf-life and it peaked around the turn of the decade. Electronic music as a whole is not the money-maker it once was. So Warp have further diversified. In the words of Steve Beckett, “probably the first sacrilegious move” was to sign Seefeel in the mid-1990s. They are a more conventional band with guitars and drums, associated with shoegaze as much as techno.

More non-techno artists followed, including the jazzy trip-hop act Red Snapper, 1960s-influenced Broadcast and, er, the downright odd Jimi Tenor (I never really got that one). There was also an increased focus on hip-hop with the likes of Prefuse 73 and the Antipop Consortium. Later, there was a distinctive move towards more conventional rock. This was most notable, controversial and successful with the chart-friendly indie-rock band Maxïmo Park.

Today Warp has artists as diverse as its history suggests. It probably remains best-known for electronic music leaders such as Aphex Twin, Autechre, Boards of Canada and Squarepusher. But on the same roster you can find electro-rock shape-shifters Battles, folk-rock bands like Grizzly Bear, the increasingly soul-oriented Jamie Liddell, hip-hopper Prefuse 73, indie band Maxïmo Park and even the satirist Chris Morris. Oh, and in addition to music they also now make films.

This diversity has been good and bad. Undoubtedly Warp lost its way a bit a few years ago as it struggled to find its feet after electronic music waned in popularity. But even after twenty years, Warp remains a path-finding label that anyone interested in experimental pop music should keep an eye on.

When I discovered Warp in 2001, the range of styles on offer was already massive. But each artist was notable for being interesting and innovative. It was easy to view the Warp label as a mark of quality, no matter what the genre was.

Long may it continue. There is absolutely no question that Warp Records transformed my outlook on music more than anything else. I am looking forward to the next 20 years of innovative music.

Over the next week or so I will write about 20 of the most interesting Warp albums from its 20 year history.

« — Next in series »

5 comments

The Designers Republic

31 January 2009 20:15

Categories: Entertainment, Games, Music

The other day I learnt from my brother that the graphic design company The Designers Republic went out of business earlier this month.

My interest in graphic design is not particularly heavy. But the interest I do have in it has all stemmed from my exposure to the work of The Designers Republic. Their work was usually bold and eye-catching; unconventional and experimental. It is exactly the sort of thing I appreciate in all forms of art. They were sometimes uncompromisingly experimental, yet they made it make sense. Their designs were often beautiful and pleasing.

My first exposure to the work of The Designers Republic was probably the elements of Pulp’s visual identity, which tDR produced when the band was at the height of its powers. Like Pulp, The Designers Republic was proud of its Sheffield roots and would often reference the area in its work.

Later, I would come across The Designers Republic again when it created the visual atmosphere for the wipEout series of futuristic racing games. wip3out in particular was exquisitely presented. Even though “futuristic” design typically dates horrendously, ten years on I think wip3out stands the test of time fairly well. To this day it remains my favourite video game ever.

This video below contains the intro sequence to wip3out, introducing the player to the industrial urban world of 2116 and the (anti-gravity) F7200 Race League. There are also striking corporate identities for each of the fictitious teams. There follows a spot of gameplay — a short eliminator round at the Mega Mall circuit — which shows just how important The Designers Republic’s influence was to the game.

An archived version of the wip3out website, also designed by tDR, is still available to browse.

The earlier wipEout games do not stand the test of time quite so well. Perhaps because it used very similar designs throughout the early-to-mid 1990s, most notably for the band Pop Will Eat Itself, the style seems firmly rooted in the 1990s.

My exposure to tDR’s work increased when became interested in electronic music, particularly the output of Warp Records. Warp’s striking visual identity was one of the things that attracted me to the label, and it was a perfect fit for the experimental, forward-looking techno music that Warp used to specialise in.

Like tDR, Warp has its roots in Sheffield, so the original relationship was one of expediency. But the fit was so good that in a lot of ways Warp and tDR are inseparably intertwined in the eyes of some. But in later years, tDR designed very few record sleeves for Warp at all.

In fact, the only one from recent years that I can think of is the artwork for Autechre’s Quaristice, which was recently featured in the excellent music artwork blog Sleevage. The extravagant brushed steel limited edition of Quaristice was probably the last tDR-designed product that I bought. It is a truly exquisite piece of work. I have my own photos of it, but the photographs on Sleevage give a much better idea of the stunning quality of it.

But it was difficult to escape the fact that tDR was producing less and less for one of its most iconic clients. In fact, I had knowingly seen hardly any tDR work at all over the past few years, and a lot of people came to see tDR as lazy. Sometimes their work was a bit too minimalist, to a cheeky extent (see, for instance, the track-by-track artwork for Quaristice).

But a number of their designs were very striking, and I own a lot of t-shirts that were designed by tDR. Since being exposed to their work I have made a conscious effort to make anything I design (like this blog) look good. For a brief period of my life, I even seriously considered going into graphic design as a career (before concluding that I probably wouldn’t be any good at it).

Even though The Designers Republic closed down this month, its influence will always be felt. tDR spawned a million copycats, and the course of artwork related to electronic music in particular has been changed forever by tDR.

Anyway, many of tDR’s best designers over the years have moved on (see, for instance, Universal Everything or Build). And tDR’s founder, Ian Anderson, has pledged that it will return in some form or another. The Designers Republic is dead, long live The Designers Republic indeed.

Over the years, tDR has produced some of my favourite album artwork. I’ve gathered some of them below the fold.

Click for more »

5 comments

Was Sébastien Tellier robbed?

27 July 2008 01:40

Categories: Entertainment, Internet, Music, Personal, Technology

One to file under “why on earth didn’t I think of that?”. Ewan Spence has analysed each of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest entries in Last.fm.

For those who don’t know, Last.fm is a smart website that tracks your music (or podcast) listening habits. It can generate recommendations for you, but I joined the site almost four years ago. Back in those days when it was called Audioscrobbler (before it merged with Last.fm which was a separate website with a slightly different purpose) so I’m just there for all the wonderful stats about my taste in music. (In case anyone’s interested, my profile is here.)

Ewan Spence took a look at the stats for each of the songs in this year’s ESC to see how they measured up. Regular readers may remember that I wrote a post a couple of months back debunking the theory that the ESC is dominated by political bloc voting. So I was pleased to see Ewan Spence’s analysis which suggests that broadly the most popular songs as measured by Last.fm are also the songs that tended to do well in this year’s ESC.

However, there is one mega outlier. And it’s a groovy French man who is way out in front on the Last.fm chart — Sébastien Tellier.

If you remember my post about bloc voting in the ESC, you might also remember that even though there is no political voting, I concluded that France woz robbed. I wasn’t the only one either — I saw that quite a few people liked Sébastien Tellier’s song in particular.

I still see people discussing him from time to time. In fact, I have one friend who likes to talk about Sébastien Tellier quite often. He refers to him as “the hairy Jarvis Cocker”. From what I can gather, Sébastien Tellier had built up quite a following prior to Eurovision. His latest is his third album and is produced by one of the guys from Daft Punk. And back in the day he toured with Air.

Ewan Spence suggests there might be some tricky goings-on with Tellier’s numbers such as a Last.fm player on his website or something. I think it might be down to the fact that Sébastien Tellier is quite popular, so actually merits the attention on Last.fm. In fact, I have contributed to Sébastien Tellier’s numbers on Last.fm as I bought the album Sexuality on the strength of his Eurovision song ‘Divine’.

So, was Sébastian Tellier robbed? Yes and no. Simple following alone can’t explain the discrepancy. While Tellier has some fans, the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest — Russia’s Dima Bilan — is a major pop star with several number ones across eastern Europe.

I think it might have a lot to do with the type of person who uses Last.fm though — i.e. people who really, really like music. A slightly odd French electronic artist is just the sort of thing that would probably appeal to your average Last.fm user more than the average person on the street for whom music is like wallpaper.

Take a look at the this week’s Last.fm chart. Like Ewan Spence’s chart, it bears a vague resemblance to actual popularity, but with a few oddities along the way.

Where, for instance, is the UK’s biggest selling artist of the year so far, Duffy? 166th — behind a lot of pretty obscure artists (by which I mean people I’ve never heard of). I bet if you did a televote Duffy would be near the top.

The point is that Sébastien Tellier is great. But it was a bit like the French equivalent of the UK entering Aphex Twin (213th in Last.fm, ahead of the likes of Christina Aguilera, Norah Jones and Lily Allen) — right down to having everyone on stage looking like him. It would be great, but most would be left scratching their heads.

So hurrah for Sébastien Tellier. Eurovision may have ignored him, but that is understandable. Those on Last.fm can handle its odd French electronic music. One more time!

2 comments

What I listened to in 2007

4 January 2008 02:09

Categories: Entertainment, General, Internet, Music, Personal, Technology

Music of 2007

A series of posts

I am a bit late with my ranking of albums of 2007. I know it’s the new year and it’s not very fashionable to be looking back once the new year has begun. But unlike some people — who publish their lists in early December or sometimes even mid-November — I like to wait until the end of the year until posting my end-of-year list.

Unfortunately, it is taking a bit of time for me to finish off the post. You know how I like to witter on. Plus, ahem, I still haven’t received a rather important album from 2007 through the post.

In the meantime, some stats porn from my Last.fm account to give you an idea of what I listened to in 2007.

A few caveats here. I got an iPod sometime during autumn, which means that I now scrobble my out-and-about listening habits, which wasn’t possible when I used my iRiver. As such, my obsession with Battles early on in the year only registers a little bit, whereas the purchase of Radiohead’s In Rainbows in October is visible for all to see.

Okay, on to the graph. I have written before about the rather fun LastGraph service. I have decided to create a LastGraph of my 2007 listening. Of course, it isn’t restricted to music that was released in 2007, but it does give a flavour of my listening habits over the year.

I’m afraid it isn’t easy to see the detail in this image, but as you can see it is rather large enough as it is. If you click on the image, you will be able to see the full-blown PDF file, if you are really all that interested. (Warning: The PDF is a big file — 2.64MB.)

The first 2007 releases to register in the graph are Field Music’s Tones of Town and Shining’s Grindstone. Battles’s Mirrored makes a small appearance in March, but as I said it is much lower than you would expect if you knew how much I genuinely listened to the album.

Besides Ceephax and Air, nothing too much of interest happens until June. Then comes Björk’s Volta. Not soon afterwards comes the magical week which saw the release of albums by Justice and Simian Mobile Disco. Also registering here are album I bought by Cornelius and Stereolab, although these weren’t from 2007. (Incidentally, this period shows a sustained reduction in the amount of music I listened to, reflecting how unusually busy I was during the summer.)

In August you can see the biggest patch of the year — The Future Sound of London, from when I bought From the Archives volumes 1–3. After that comes another huge patch of Blur, a period where I bought a few albums of theirs and even wrote about them on this blog. A bit of an obsessive period.

Soon enough pretty much everything is crowded out by In Rainbows. If you look carefully towards the end of the year you can also see The Fiery Furnaces, Gescom and Burial.

In terms of charts, here is how my rolling year chart for artists looks like.

Radiohead — 811 plays
The Future Sound of London — 613
Autechre — 602
Pulp — 567
The Fiery Furnaces — 549
Boards of Canada — 538
Blur — 530
Aphex Twin — 453
Squarepusher — 428
Battles — 425

And for tracks, In Rainbows pretty much dominates. Not bad considering it’s only been out since October. Battles and Shining also get a look in here. Justice, Björk and The Fiery Furnaces also feature in the top 50.

I’ll post my thoughts on the music of 2007 over the next week or so.

« — Next in series »

3 comments

White Noise — An Electric Storm

6 October 2007 01:45

Categories: Entertainment, Music, Nostalgia, Television

Despite my interest in electronic music, my collection — shamefully — doesn’t contain very much from before the 1990s. The only ones that I can think of from the top of my head are an album of music from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, some Brian Eno and Steve Reich. A recent purchase makes me wonder if I should be buying more old electronic music.

White Noise was the idea of David Vorhaus, a classical double bassist with an interest in electronics. After attending a lecture, he approached members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop — Delia Derbyshire (creator of the famous Doctor Who theme tune) and Brian Hodgson (who created the sounds of the Tardis and the Daleks). Together, they worked for a year on An Electric Storm, perhaps one of the most seminal electronic music albums there has ever been.

Incidentally, Delia Derbyshire was a genius in her own right. On an album showcasing Music from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Derbyshire’s work stands out. ‘Time to Go’ takes the famous pips of the Greenwich Time Signal and turns it into a cacophony of blips and bleeps before descending into farts, burps and squirts. I wonder if it inspired David Lowe?

‘Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO’ is my favourite though. An utterly mad piece of music centring around a mad robotic chant. It sounds like it could have been created by a trippy early 1970s rock band, but it was made by a geek in a lab. There is a clip about this particular piece on this page about the BBC documentary ‘Alchemists of Sound’.

Back to An Electric Storm though. Listening to it, you can tell that it is not a recent work. It contains the sort of tricks used by the Radiophonic Workshop. But in a way this is what amazes me the most about it. This album is almost forty years old, yet it sounds more amazing than a great deal of the electronic music made today.

It’s all the more impressive when you consider the multiple hurdles the group had to clear. Having signed a contract with Island Records, they realised that they didn’t know how they were going to record the album. The first works were made by sneaking into the studios of the Radiophonic Workshop. But making an entire album this way would have been too risky. They had to build their own studio and using home-made equipment.

The album was made in an era before the widespread availability of synthesisers. Most of the noises were made by tape manipulation, a laborious task. The technique sounds a bit like an audio version of stop-motion animation. An original sound (from, for instance, Vorhaus’s bass) would have to be sped up or slowed down for each and every note. Even echo effects were achieved by rather crude means — playing two identical tapes out of phase.

A particularly ambitious song, ‘The Visitation’, took three months to make. Recording was taking so long that they faced legal action from Island and had to finish the album overnight. That the track in question — ‘Black Mass: An Electric Storm in Hell’ — doesn’t sound as though it was particularly rushed boggles my mind.

And what did White Noise receive for their toil? The album sold a paltry 200 copies in its first year, and the group made just £280. Luckily for us, and for electronic music as a whole, it gained traction in subsequent years and became an underground classic. This year it was remastered and re-released.

It is a genuinely pioneering record. Today an artist is labelled ‘experimental’ just for using a farty synth. But White Noise were actually pushing the boundaries and creating something truly amazing. It’s incredible to think that something so ambitious for its time should actually stand the test of time this well.

The album opens with the intriguing ‘Love Without Sound’. Vorhaus’s intention was to release this as a single to try and convert the population to electronic music. The result is a song that is equal parts accessible and impenetrable.

John Whitman’s vocals are other-worldly and detached. The music is a surreal, part-humorous, part-unsettling cacophony of clicks, clacks and warbles. This cleverly interacts with female laughs and moans. Despite the wide and unpredictable range of sounds, the resulting collage makes perfect sense, in its own surreal way. Think the “ho-ho, he-he, ha-ha” bit in ‘I Am the Walrus’, but lasting for an entire song.

This is followed by ‘My Game of Loving’. This track features a famous section of mad tumbling drums laid on top of a kaleidoscopic orgy which is comically followed by snoring. The sex-frenzy is sonically interesting, but make sure you don’t have your iPod too loud or you’ll get some funny looks on the train.

This track particularly reminds me of two more recent electronic acts. The spliced tabla-style drums remind me very much of Asa-Chang & Junray, while I would be amazed if the orgy section didn’t inspire some of Aphex Twin’s more humorous moments. This is not to mention Stereolab and Broadcast, who are influenced by White Noise as a whole.

The humour continues on the next track, ‘Here Come the Fleas’. While today’s electronic musicians are perceived as being serious, beard-stroking types, ‘Here Come the Fleas’ reminds you of the comedy potential of electronic music. The song lays into a lazy slob’s poor hygiene standards. The middle of the song is dominated by a brilliant section that would have made a cool guitar solo. It would have been so easy just to pick up a guitar and do it, but they had to go the hard way and make it with tapes, didn’t they?

That is on the “happy” side, known as ‘Phase-In’. People must have thought that this pioneering electronic music is a barrel of laughs. They were in for a shock when the turned the record over for the ‘Phase-Out’ side. The smiles and laughter are wiped away and the listener is treated to something that approaches the horror genre.

‘The Visitation’ — the track that took three months to make — is, for me, the highlight of the album. This stunning piece is about a couple of lovers who are torn apart by a motorcycle accident. As the girl screams, “please don’t go”, the motorcycle crashes. The spirit of the man who was killed tries to communicate with his weeping girlfriend, but is unable to.

It’s quite spine-chilling really. The music is genuinely haunting and really paints a picture of a dark, rainy night on a remote road where the motorcyclist is killed. It uses stereo to brilliant effect as well.

The singing and narration also creates the right mood. The spirit’s voice echoes spookily, while the singer is the coldly neutral bearer of bad news. When he sings, “Her lover’s not asleep, he’s DEEEAAAAD”, it makes the hairs on my neck stand up.

As I said, it could actually be a horror film. It would make a cracking piece of radio drama. This could be one of my favourite pieces of music. An eleven minute journey into a horrifying affair — it’s impossible not to feel sad listening to it.

Listening to An Electric Storm, there is no doubt that it is a unique product of 1969, the like of which could never be made again. Pitchfork’s review of the album says:

White Noise’s landmark 1969 album An Electric Storm might not the first thing most people think of when considering 1960s music, but there are few records anywhere tied more intrinsically to the moment of their creation. Recorded in the months immediately prior to the widespread availability of keyboard-based synthesizers, An Electric Storm might be one of the most painstakingly crafted electronic recordings of all time. Pieced together on improvised equipment via innumerable tape edits, this remarkable album is at once futuristic and unavoidably date-stamped, serving as a fascinating audio snapshot of a bygone era in sound generation and recording technology.

This was a time before the widespread use of synthesisers and computers, but at a time where there was a lot of enthusiasm and ambition for electronic music. I can’t help thinking that it’s just a little bit too easy to make electronic music today. It is impossible to imagine anyone except the bravest / maddest of souls dedicating a year of their lives laboriously fiddling about with tapes when they could just use their laptop to embark on a sonic adventure.

Given just how mind-bending this early electronic music is compared to a lot of today’s identikit techno, I can’t help but wonder if advances in technology have restricted musicians as much as liberated them.

If you are remotely interested in electronic music, I would recommend this almost as a must-buy. Not only is the music amazing, but it is also a real insight into the painstaking approaches of electronic musicians of the past (the sleeve notes are brilliantly educational in this regard). It really is true to say that they don’t make them like they used to.

Comments closed

doctorvee