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Archive: Broadcast

20 Warp albums — part 2

19 September 2009 02:21

Categories: Entertainment, Humour, Media, Music, Radio, Television

Warp20

A series of posts

  1. 20 years of Warp Records
  2. 20 Warp albums — part 1
  3. 20 Warp albums — part 2
  4. 20 Warp albums — part 3
  5. 20 Warp albums — part 4
  6. 20 Warp albums — part 5
  7. Warp20 (Box Set)

Continuing my look at 20 Warp albums from Warp’s 20 years. For other articles in this series, please see the table of contents to the right. Albums are presented in randomised order.

Broadcast — The Noise Made by People

The Noise Made by People coverThis was the first Warp album I ever bought, and it remains a favourite of mine to this day. Broadcast’s music is heavily steeped in 1960s influence, and comparisons with Stereolab are commonplace (and not inaccurate). But they sound anything but derivative.

The Noise Made by People has a dark and slightly creepy aesthetic. Most of the album creeps along at a rather slow pace. Then there are Trish Keenan’s almost robotic vocals. The music itself — largely based on 1960s-style electronic instruments — could almost be transmitted directly from that decade, complete with unsettling background noise.

Put together, this all gives the music a rather otherworldly vibe. It is as though you are listening to a ghostly music that has been trapped in the airwaves since the 1960s and has only just escaped.

Funnily enough, the real life story of the recording of this album is similar to the picture I have just described. It is said that Broadcast struggled with the recording of the album, and it took three years to make. Perhaps this is another reason why it sounds clinical, though it’s all the more captivating for it.

Since The Noise Made by People, Broadcast have reduced in size to become just the core duo of Trish Keenan and James Cargill. In turn, the music has become less dense and more raw, and has lost the otherworldly qualities of their earlier material. Although Broadcast is still a good band, I feel that they were definitely at their peak with this album.

This video for ‘Come On Let’s Go’ captures the aesthetic of the album really well:

Tortoise — Standards

Standards coverMany feel that Tortoise were at their strongest in the 1990s. I did not discover them until 2001, so maybe I am biased in that sense. But I think that the band was at the height of its creative powers with Standards.

Quite simply, it was one of the most unique-sounding albums I had ever heard and remains one of my favourite listens to this day. The effortless fusion of punchy rock, cutting-edge electronic music, multi-layered drumming and jazz makes this an extraordinarily bold album that captivates you from start to finish.

If ever there was an album that was definitively not just ‘going through the motions’, it is surely Standards — despite its title. This record documents Tortoise standing on the very edge of what is possible with rock music. I find it impossible to become bored of this album. There is so much going on in so many layers.

Each instrument would be fascinating to listen to on its own (this was proved when the rhythm section of Tortoise released an album of drums and little else called Bumps). Each band member is doing his own thing. And yet, everything here makes a perfect fit.

Nothing Tortoise have produced since then has come close to reaching the standard of Standards. But then again, few albums by any bad do.

This is the video for the attention-grabbing album opener, ‘Seneca’:

Seefeel – Succour

Succour coverI only discovered this album a few years ago — probably over a decade after it was originally released. But I am glad I opted to buy it. The music is from the place where ambient, shoegaze, indie and techno all converge. The allure of Seefeel comes from its mixture of ambient-style drones and textures, techno-influenced minimalist drums and guitars, and the dreamy, processed vocals of singer Sarah Peacock.

Although superficially it feels like a pure techno / IDM album, the use of guitars and live drums was unusual for a Warp release at that time. This is what led Steve Beckett to recently single it out as “the first sacreligious move”.

Musically, Succour is a fabulous success. But if you thought this was the evidence that guitars could happily sit in a techno environment, think again. Apparently due to Mark Clifford’s efforts to push the band in a more electronic direction, the old artistic differences emerged and the band only lasted a few years after the release of Succour.

In a way, I feel as though I have missed out by not experiencing this music when it was first released. It must have been so incredibly exciting, at the cutting edge, when it was released. It would be interesting to hear what this band would come up with today.

Incredibly, Seefeel have recently re-formed. Initially this was for a one-off gig as part of the Warp20 celebrations. But there are now hints that Seefeel have also been in the studio. I can’t wait to hear any results that might come out of this.

Chris Morris — Blue Jam

Blue Jam coverChris Morris, as one of Britain’s most influential satirists, probably needs little introduction. But few may immediately associate him with Warp Records. But Warp has been the outlet for a lot of his material, including the CD releases of the radio series On the Hour and his Bafta-winning short film My Wrongs #8245-8249 & 117 among other bits and pieces. Warp Films is also backing his current project, Four Lions.

But his first CD on Warp was a compilation of sketches from his experimental radio programme, Blue Jam (which was later turned into the television series Jam). This was a dark comedy, equal parts disturbing and funny. Unusually, the sketches were surrounded by a constant backdrop of ambient music (much of which was originally released on Warp) from the likes of Aphex Twin. Perhaps even more unusually, the show was originally broadcast on Radio 1. It inhabited a late-night slot which fitted with the programme’s surreal, woozy and nightmarish style.

The series contained a mixture of music and comedy; of the surreal and the disturbing; of sketches and monologues. Most of it was a world away from his previous material, though from time to time Morris would drop in one of his infamous interviews. Here, he flummoxes posthumous Diana biographer Andrew Morton.

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20 years of Warp Records

15 September 2009 21:59

Categories: *, Entertainment, General, Music, Personal

Warp20

A series of posts

  1. 20 years of Warp Records
  2. 20 Warp albums — part 1
  3. 20 Warp albums — part 2
  4. 20 Warp albums — part 3
  5. 20 Warp albums — part 4
  6. 20 Warp albums — part 5
  7. Warp20 (Box Set)

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.

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White Noise — An Electric Storm

6 October 2007 01:45

Categories: Entertainment, Music, Nostalgia, Television

An Electric Storm cover art 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.

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Another reason to like Battles

17 June 2007 22:11

Categories: Entertainment, General, Music, Nostalgia, Personal

The Guardian has quite an interesting article about “classic” albums that do not warrant the hype (via DJ Martian). I wonder if that has one eye on the 10th anniversary of the release of OK Computer?

One interesting album on the list is Dark Side of the Moon, as nominated by Cornershop’s Tjinder Singh. I was just thinking recently about how Dark Side of the Moon is probably not Pink Floyd’s best album. Then someone brought it up in a conversation I had. Now this!

But the one that really made me happy was the inclusion of Is This It by The Strokes. Ian Williams of Battles wrote a paragraph about its mediocrity. Everything he says is spot-on.

I recently wrote about how I loathe indie music. I noted that the turning-point came when I was about 15 or 16 in 2001 — the year that Is This It was released. Never was an album title so apt.

There was so much hype surrounding The Strokes, it seemed impossible to believe that they would be anything but good. But when a friend made a CD-R of the album for me, I hated it so much that I returned it!

Is This It was so bad that it actually gave me a headache. It was so unbelievably conservative, derivative and certainly anything but “alternative”. The sheer monotony of the entire album made me depressed.

While I am often willing to give an album more than one chance on the basis that repeated listens can reveal hidden treats, I have refused to listen to Is This It a second time. It was obvious that this album had absolutely nothing to offer. And I didn’t want to risk getting a migraine.

As if to top it off, Is This It — if memory serves — lasts barely more than half an hour. This makes it an absolute fucking rip-off if you buy it at a normal album price. I expect an EP to be that long. Half an hour is roughly the length of a single that is released in the pretty much ubiquitous CD1 + CD2 format.

In short, Is This It lacked breath, depth and length. The personification of one-dimensional music. The prospect that The Strokes were the future of guitar-based music absolutely horrified me. So I turned my back on it all.

At the same time I discovered bands like Broadcast and Tortoise. I spent many evenings that year exploring the Warp Records website, avidly listening to the audio clips of their releases. A door had been opened to an amazing world where exciting and innovative music was being made.

Six years on, I am still listening to exciting and innovative music released on Warp — in the shape of Battles.

For an alternative view on The Guardian article, here is Richard Havers.

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2006 has gone

1 January 2007 16:48

Categories: Admin, Blogging, Current affairs, Entertainment, Games, General, Music, Nostalgia, Technology, Television

Well a happy new year to you, now that we are actually in it. I notice that a few bloggers (like Will) have been posting their top five posts. I can assure you that the five most-viewed posts of the year will not have been my five best posts of the year. They will just be the ones that have attracted Googlers the most.

But no surprises as to what was number 1:

  1. Big Brother’s Big Saviour. This post about Russell Brand stormed to the top of all sorts of mucky Google searches after some person in the comments mentioned Imogen’s sex tape. Disgusting. This page accounted for over 10% of all visits to this blog this year!
  2. Richard Hammond. Descended into a debate about whether it’s disrespectful to dislike somebody (Steve Irwin) even though they’re dead.
  3. Weekend mornings are meaningless once again. Simon Amstell left Popworld, but most people were only interested in searching for pictures of Miquita Oliver.
  4. Another new Freeview channel. This post lays into smileTV, Freeview’s mankiest channel. People arrive at this page looking for information on Freeview channels. I imagine this post is a good advert.
  5. Countdown to PS2’s Formula One 06. I’m still a little bit peeved that the actual review I wrote for this game is nowhere near as popular. Gah.

A few posts from 2005 were actually more popular than some of these, but they don’t count right because we’re talking about 2006.

The ‘popularity contest’ plugin, which also takes into account things like comments and whatever else, comes up with a slightly different result:

  1. Big Brother’s Big Saviour
  2. Another new Freeview channel
  3. Weekend mornings are meaningless once again
  4. Time Trumpet. I can’t even remember what I wrote in this post.
  5. MySpace UK seems to have launched. Check out the comments full of emos who are shocked at the way I diss their Space.

So there you have it. My five (or seven) best posts of the year. I wouldn’t recommend it. Although I can deduce that April was a stupidly popular year. Hmm. I will try and get some kind of Reddit- / Digg-style voting plugin for this blog. That would probably be much better.

Okay, how else can I look at last year? What music I’ve listened to. I know I still haven’t posted my top ten albums of 2006 yet. I promise that is coming. But Last.fm offers a handy way to track what you listen to, and a glance at the rolling year chart on this day allows me to have a look at what I listened to over the past year. This will change tomorrow, so it’s worth taking a note of, if you’re interested in that kind of useless information.

  1. Boards of Canada (851)
  2. Radiohead (674)
  3. Pulp (624)
  4. Broadcast (615) — I don’t remember listening to this much Broadcast?!
  5. Autechre (607)
  6. Squarepusher (588)
  7. The Fiery Furnaces (579)
  8. Tortoise (472)
  9. Aphex Twin (384)
  10. Prefuse 73 (366)

Perhaps the most surprising thing (apart from how high Broadcast are) is how low Autechre are. For the most part though, this isn’t too different to my all-time top ten on Last.fm.

As for the tracks chart, apart from two tracks that appeared on two different releases (thus probably getting twice as many listens as they otherwise would have), all of my top ten is made up of tracks from Florida by Diplo and Everything Ecstatic by Four Tet. I got both of those albums for last Christmas. So that is probably proof that I don’t spend nearly as much time on the computer as I used to. The chart will probably look completely different at the end of the month.

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