Because that’s what you really want to know, isn’t it? It is mid-April, and ever since Christmas you have been on the edge of your seats thinking, what music really got Duncan’s toes tapping in the arbritary selection of 365 days we elect to call “2010”? Well your luck is in, because I am going to tell you right now, while neatly ignoring everything that has happened in 2011 so far.
So here are my five of my top ten releases of 2010, in no particular order. The other five will appear in a separate post to be published next week.
Squarepusher has always existed in an extra dimension, deftly able to make his albums sound like they can be performed live, while clearly being studio creations. Building on previous albums, Just a Souvenir introduced the ‘fantasy band’ concept, cementing the vision of ‘live’ music that could never be played live.
Shobaleader One is supposedly the realisation of the fantasy band. The band seems to be made up. It’s the concept of Gorillaz mixed with the gimmicks of Daft Punk. But the music sounds like Squarepusher’s.
While parts of the album seem naff, I can’t help but enjoy this music — and still marvel at Squarepusher’s inventiveness.
Autechre — Oversteps
As if we needed reminding, Oversteps was a reminder of why Autechre are considered to be at the forefront of electronic music. In fact, it seems like a shame that seemingly no-one is able to make music that comes close to what Autechre achieve.
For instance, take the track ‘ilanders’. Who else could come up with those crazy unique beats, mixed with that bad-ass bassy melody, and make it sound so right? I hope Autechre are documenting their techniques so that they are not lost.
For me, Oversteps is Autechre’s best work since 2001′s Confield. If you know how much I love Autechre’s music, you will understand just how excited I was by this album.
Machinedrum — Many Faces
I had lost touch somewhat with what Travis Stewart had been up to since his releases as Machine Drum on the excellent Merck label, which shut down a few years ago.
I was delighted to learn about this release, which sees Machinedrum expand beyond the glitch-hop of his earlier releases and move into massive electro-house — and beyond. It’s the “many faces” of Machinedrum, geddit?
Great fun to listen to, and my favourite musical surprise of the year.
Field Music — Field Music (Measure)
An increasinly rare slice of thoughtful and intelligent rock music.
Field Music manage to produce surprising and perhaps unconventional music without heading towards pretentiousness. And their music clearly takes cues from music of the past, without ever ending up sounding derivative.
The music of Field Music has always been well-constructed and melodic. But mixed in with the bouncy angular tunes that we are accustomed to from Field Music, is a helping of more subdued songs.
Moon Wiring Club — A Spare Tabby at the Cat’s Wedding
This is a delightful slice of electronic music. It is spooky, haunted genius. Fitting neatly into the hauntology scene, it is seriously wronged-up and unlike anything you have heard before.
Amazingly, Mister Moon Wiring Club makes all of this music using MTV Music Generator 2 for the PlayStation 2. This does give the music a slightly templatey sound, with rather odd-sounding beats. But this gives Moon Wiring Club a very strong signature sound that is not replicated by anyone else. It amazes me that music like this is made on a PS2!
In keeping with the confusing nature of the music, the CD and vinyl editions are substantially different to each other. And the second pressing of the CD comes with a different cover.
I have realised that I’m easily entertained. I have a pile of CDs that I bought back in October but still haven’t got round to listening to. There are a couple of DVDs that I bought before Christmas that I still haven’t watched. And I’m struggling to play all the games I’ve bought in the past few months too.
What am I doing that means I have so little spare time? I would say that it’s all because I currently spend so much time commuting to work (generally around three hours per day, or two if I’m lucky). But my chief means of entertainment while travelling, listening to podcasts, has also been causing me undue hassle due to the rising backlog sitting in my iPod waiting to be listened to.
I guess it’s lucky that one of the biggest problems in my life just now is the fact that I have too much interesting and fun stuff to listen to. But I have genuinely found it a tricky balance to get right, and am trying out creative ways to organise my spare time more efficiently as a matter of priority.
Having too many podcasts to listen to has been the case for as long as I can remember. It’s a bit like having an RSS reader, and before you know it, you have subscribed to so many RSS feeds that you never get them all read. This is okay as long as you don’t let anything get too out-of-date before you get round to it.
However, the mild annoyance of having a huge backlog of podcasts became a major problem recently when, almost without noticing, I ended up being four or five weeks behind on almost every podcast I listen to. This became a major problem with the current affairs podcasts I listen to, particularly just after the General Election had taken place. They had almost all been rendered completely out of date!
So since the election I have been on a drive to listen to more podcasts, weed out the ones I don’t really like, and prioritise the more newsworthy ones. Before, I had around 260 podcast episodes downloaded but not yet listened to. Having unsubscribed from and deleted a few podcasts, I have got that number down to 170, where it seems to have stabilised.
It took me about a month to do it, but I have managed to catch up with all of the podcasts that I deem to be “current affairs”, and have even sub-divided this into high-priority and low-priority sub-categories. Apart from F1 podcasts (which have always been consumed fairly quickly), these are now listened to first.
Of the podcasts that are less centred around the news, I have split these into a ‘B’ and ‘C’ list. Bs are podcasts that either I really enjoy or I think I should listen to. Cs are podcasts that I have assigned the lowest priority to. I am on the verge of unsubscribing from some of these.
I start listening to these podcasts if there are no current affairs ones waiting, with one C being placed after every two or three Bs. Just now, the oldest of these is from way back on 2 April — ten weeks ago. It is certainly interesting to see whether or not I really miss listening to these podcasts.
It certainly feels like I have become a lot more organised, even though there are almost 40 hours’ worth of podcasts waiting to be listened to. And that is just in this list alone.
I haven’t even mentioned the comedy podcasts, which I listen to as part of a different routine. I listen to one Adam and Joe podcast per week (on a Monday, to cheer myself up, geddit?). Then during whatever bits of time I have on Monday or Tuesday I listen to Iain Lee or Barry from Watford. This is a huge backlog of its own, but because the Iain Lee ones are generally around 10 or 15 minutes long, it’s easy to squeeze them in here and there.
There is so much cheap (in fact, free) entertainment that there is simply too much interesting stuff to get through it all. I recently calculated that the amount of podcasts I was downloading amounted to 1½ hours of listening every day. No wonder I was struggling.
It is worth being a bit more discerning with how I spend my spare time. But it is always difficult to make the decision to stop listening to a particular podcast. I have been listening to some of these for three years now. But a bit like a favourite shirt that’s worn out, I’m not sure I can actually bring myself to chuck it out.
Warp Records celebrated its twentieth anniversary this year with an extravagant box set, Warp20 (Box Set). Measuring in at 10 inches × 10 inches × 3 inches, it truly is a thing of beauty. Packed in there are five CDs and five 10 inch records, full of Warp goodness old and new.
It was not cheap either, so was only for the most fanatic of Warp followers. Luckily for Warp, there are plenty of fanatical followers — myself included.
Warp20 (Chosen)
Also released separately as a 2CD album on its own, Warp20 (Chosen) is designed to be a collection of the best of the first twenty years of Warp Records.
The first ten tracks, making up disc one, were chosen by voters on the internet. As such, the top ten is sadly predictable. You really could have forecast in advance the inclusion of the likes of ‘Windowlicker’, ‘Roygbiv’ and ‘My Red Hot Car’ in the top three.
The inclusion of most of these tracks was surely never in doubt. Certainly, the top eight are bona fide Warp classics (I am not so sure about Jimmy Edgar’s ‘I Wanna Be Your STD’ or Clark’s ‘Herzog’, but I can understand their inclusion). There is also a noticeable skew towards the late 1990s / early 2000s. Only one track, LFO’s ‘LFO (Leeds Warehouse Mix)’, is from before 1998.
It is clear that the current fans of Warp Records — at least those who voted in the internet poll — are a bit like me. They were not around for the birth of the label, and cling on to the late 1990s IDM explosion as Warp’s classic sound. I think this is Warp’s best period too, but I would have preferred a greater variety in the first disc.
Luckily, the second disc is on hand to provide some of that variety. Label boss and co-founder Steve Beckett chose a further fourteen tracks which make up disc two. While all the usual suspects are again present and correct (giving the likes of Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada and Autechre two appearances on the compilation), other periods and genres are given rightful recognition.
Ultimately, though, while there are a couple of gems here that I didn’t previously own, Warp20 (Chosen) is a bit redundant for me, and no doubt for almost everyone else who bought this box set. If you are such a great fan of Warp that you are going to shell out eighty quid or so, you almost certainly need no such overview to the label.
Perhaps of more value is the fold-out poster of comments posted by the internet users who placed their votes, providing (relatively) qualitative information to accompany the raw top ten.
Warp20 (Recreated)
This is the surprise highlight of the package — a double-disc album of Warp artists covering classic Warp tracks. It shows you how far Warp has come in the past ten years. For its tenth anniversary, Warp released an album of Warp artists remixing classic Warp tracks.
But with a more diverse range of artists on its roster, and plenty of artists with a different set of skills, it seems as though it makes more sense to ask artists to do covers rather than remixes. The results are pleasingly wonderful. Clearly, when you take maverick musical geniuses and ask them to take on the works of other maverick musical geniuses, the results are going to be deliciously skewed and entertaining.
The album opens with Born Ruffians covering Aphex Twin’s classic humorous tracks from the mid-1990s, ‘Milkman’ and ‘To Cure a Weakling Child’. The band’s stripped down approach works surprisingly well. The vocals are shouted out as though from the rooftops, rather than being distorted by electronic effects, adding to the comedy effect.
Another surprise highlight is Maxïmo Park’s take on ‘When’, originally by Vincent Gallo. This is a wonderful piece of dark synth-pop. Hopefully it signals a new direction for Maxïmo Park, whose sound has otherwise become stale.
Meanwhile, Jamie Lidell’s version of Grizzly Bear’s ‘Little Brother’ is just as beautiful and organic as the original. It is another instance of an artist revealing something otherwise unheard in his audio arsenal.
But the real highlight of the album is ‘Phylactery’ by John Callaghan, which is based on Autechre’s ‘Tilapia’. This transforms one of the first signposts of Autechre’s foray into increasingly unique and obscure electronics into a wonderfully wonky pop song.
One instance where a remix may have been a better idea is when Luke Vibert tackled ‘LFO’. The results are actually rather good — undoubtedly a Luke Vibert take on a classic Warp track. But it certainly lacks the punch of the original. This makes it a slightly trudging, though intriguing, listen.
Overall, though, Warp20 (Recreated) is a marvellous document. It reveals sides to Warp artists that hadn’t been revealed before. It’s like peering into the fourth dimension of an already-extraordinary label.
Warp20 (Elemental)
This disc contains an hour-long mix of 65 Warp tracks, created by remix maestro Osymyso. A similar mix, by Buddy Peace and Zilla, was released five years ago along with the WarpVision DVD. Although Osymyso had five years’ worth of extra material to work with, I am less fond of his effort. Nonetheless, the creativity involved in creating such a mix, containing a diverse array of Warp music from the past twenty years, still astounds me.
Warp20 (Unheard)
Moving on to the vinyl in the box set, we have three ten inch records made up of eleven previously (sort of) unheard tracks. Incidentally, these are smartly presented with a minimalist design and debossed text.
The selection kicks off with Boards of Canada’s immersive ‘Seven Forty Seven’. This is not, strictly speaking, unheard. It was originally featured in an interactive Boards of Canada website several years ago. But it is the first time it has been presented as a track itself. It is so good that I can’t work out why it hasn’t been released before.
This is followed up by the equally exciting ‘Oval Moon (IBC mx)’ by Autechre. Named after IBC, the Manchester-based pirate radio station through which Autechre first made their name, this is real old school stuff. Having been produced in 1991, it is almost as old as the Warp label itself! And it’s excellent.
After these two stonkers, the rest of the collection does not quite stand up to the same level. But it is still a good listen. Fair efforts from Clark, Plaid and Flying Lotus are included, along with classic unreleased material from Elektroids and Nightmares on Wax.
Meanwhile, the plodding and uneventful ‘Sixty Forty’, originally from a 2003 Peel Session, is probably the most disappointing Broadcast song I have ever heard. The collection is rounded off with ‘As Link’, a new Seefeel track, whetting appetites for their rumoured comeback.
Warp20 (Infinite)
Musically, the box set is rounded off with a couple of records made up entirely of locked grooves. There are fifty loops in total, plundered from Warp’s back catalogue. It is an interesting experience to experiment with them for a bit, but probably of limited use to anyone who is not a DJ.
Warp20 (1989-2009) — The Complete Catalogue
The final item in the box is a large book that documents the artwork for every release on the Warp label. It is interesting to leaf through and assess how the label progressed over the years, and recall the memories of hearing all of this wonderful music for the first time.
Warp Records is almost as well known for its strong visual identity as for its music. There is some fantastic artwork in the Warp catalogue. While this book is not at all the best way to appreciate the artwork, it does serve as an excellent historical document cataloguing Warp’s classic covers.
By now you may have heard of a website called Muxtape. In a way, I’m surprised it hasn’t been shut down already. It’s probably the most blatantly illegal website since YouTube. Technically, I guess, you’re meant to own the copyright to everything you upload to the service. But of course that’s not what most people use it for.
Muxtape is an enticingly simple website that lets you make a little playlist of tunes, a bit like a mixtape. Webware jokes, as if you would remember mixtapes! Meanwhile, David Title ponders if you have to be between the ages of 29-45 for the mixtape to mean anything to you!
I’m 22 (almost typed 21 there… can’t bear the adulthood), and I love the romance of mixtapes. It is like instant nostalgia. Cassettes are meant to be naff, and they are to an extent. But holding a tape is quite special, like holding a past future in your hands. Defects such as tape hiss, wow and flutter are as acceptable as surface noise. They add to the quaint beauty of the cassette.
And here is the thing. I used to make mixtapes. Then one day I decided to “upgrade” to CD-Rs. The CD-Rs would surely be more reliable and durable, right? Pah. The CD-Rs I bought were defective. For some reason iTunes (or the CD-R, I don’t know which) was making the audio of each track start two seconds before the access points. I wasted 4 CD-Rs trying to fix it, to no avail. Then it was reported to me that the CD-R wouldn’t even play! Annoying or what? The packet of faulty CD-Rs still sits beside me unused.
For all of their faults, cassettes are at least more reliable in the medium term than this. I have come to the decision that CD mixes are a bit like sending someone a letter but typing it out rather than handwriting it. You still put in the hard graft constructing it, but it is still somehow less personal, less human.
Of course, Muxtape is nothing like a mixtape. Indeed, it is probably even worse than a CD. As has been pointed out by David Title, a real mixtape is:
hours of love and care and cursing your slipping on the pause button. It’s recording little personal messages between the songs. It’s handwritting the titles and artists in painfully small print. It’s an act of love.
Muxtapes cannot even be personal. The terms (whatever they’re worth, given the dubious legality of the service) restrict you to one account only — and that’s a public account.
Nonetheless, that cute picture of the C90, the blocks of colours, the oh-so-fashionable massive Helvetica font (not that I’m guilty of that one) and the sheer simplicity of Muxtape is enough to reel you in and get you to make your own.
I should point out that if you like any of the tunes on my Muxtape, I think you should buy the album (the ‘Buy from Amazon’ link on Muxtape is a new addition today — a handy hint). I bought all of these. In the case of John Cage, I bought four different performances of it. In the case of Autechre, I bought the album twice.
Incidentally, there is an interesting take on the legality or otherwise of Muxtape at WebJam. The fact that Muxtape does not provide you with an easy method to download the music may be its saving grace. Besides, the cat is out of the bag. In the same way as shutting down Napster didn’t stop peer to peer filesharing, closing down Muxtape will only lead to several new clones of it.
On the simplicity of Muxtape, it is appealing — but it does make it rather light of features. There is no search function and even Google is blocked from indexing pages on Maxtape. Instead, you are presented with a random list of Muxtapes. Apart from that, you have to rely on word-of-mouth to find anyone’s Muxtape.
It’s just as well some clever fellow has created a smart Last.fm / Muxtape mashup (via Qwghlm). Enter in your Last.fm username and it will find Muxtapes containing artists that you like. Awesome.
In the meantime, it’s worth remembering that Last.fm itself has provided its own playlist service for years now, and it is on much more solid legal ground. There are some annoying restrictions — of course, you can only choose from the tracks that Last.fm has on its servers. Plus, perhaps even more frustratingly, the music is shuffled. This robs you of one of the joys of putting together a mixtape: getting the track order right. Catch my Last.fm playlist here.
If there is a musical act I like more than Radiohead, it is Autechre. The release of Autechre’s new album, Quaristice, bears some resemblance to Radiohead’s attention-grabbing In Rainbows release. It also bears a lot of the hallmarks of my predictions / observations about the apparent future of the music industry which I wrote about earlier this month.
I has already been known for a while that a new Autechre album was due out on 3 March. But on Tuesday it was announced via an email to subscribers to the Warp Records newsletter that Quaristice was available to buy as a digital download immediately.
This is the second time in as many months that Warp has sprung a surprise. They did it last month by releasing Clark’s Throttle Promoter EP with no prior warning, along with the announcement of a new album, Turning Dragon, just a month away. It is a pleasant change given that Warp seem to like announcing an album several months in advance and switch the publicity machine into overdrive (and the recorded music industry wonders why people just illegally download albums instead of waiting).
Of course, I had to buy it straight away. Unfortunately, Bleep was struggling to cope with demand. After spending far too long trying to get the zipped download to work, I eventually resorted to laboriously downloading the album track by track. The whole process took over three hours. Ironically, it would have been a lot quicker and easier — not to mention cheaper — to just illegally download it.
On top of the immediate digital release, a limited edition version of Quaristice was announced. This is interesting because Autechre have never had a ‘limited edition’ version of one of their albums released alongside a standard edition. I don’t know if that was because Autechre didn’t like the idea or if Warp thought it wouldn’t be worth it. But whatever, this move seems to back up the observations I made a few weeks ago — the limited edition is becoming much more important for the recorded music industry.
The limited edition Quaristice sounds swish. It comes with a second CD of alternative versions of tracks from the album housed in a rather luxurious-sounding package:
The double CD set comes in a Designers Republic styled, photo-etched, 0.4mm steel slipcase with foil blocked inner gatefold wallet.
It comes at an equally luxurious price — £24.99. And postage is £5! Limited to 1,000 copies, it sold out really quickly, so I feel lucky that I didn’t hang around like I often do. I speculate that they could have easily sold 5,000.
The MP3s cost £6.99 (if I had opted to go for the lossless Flac files (which I didn’t because they are not iPod-compatible), it would have cost £8.99). As such, I have spent £36.98 on Quaristice — almost as much as the £40 Radiohead ‘discbox’.
Before In Rainbows I had never spent anything like £40 on an album. Now I have done it twice in the space of a few months. What a sucker. Who said it was impossible to make money from recorded music any more?
All-in-all, it is a very clever move by Warp. I have bought every Autechre album that’s ever been released for around a tenner. With a couple of sly moves they have managed to just about quadruple that. And judging from the trouble I had downloading it and the fact that the limited edition sold out so quickly, it has happened at least a thousand times over. The accountants at Warp must be happy today.
(Needless to say, I will be reviewing Quaristice when I get the chance.)
Also released separately as a 2CD album on its own, Warp20 (Chosen) is designed to be a collection of the best of the first twenty years of Warp Records.
This is the surprise highlight of the package — a double-disc album of Warp artists covering classic Warp tracks. It shows you how far Warp has come in the past ten years. For its tenth anniversary, Warp released an album of Warp artists remixing classic Warp tracks.
Moving on to the vinyl in the box set, we have three ten inch records made up of eleven previously (sort of) unheard tracks. Incidentally, these are smartly presented with a minimalist design and debossed text.
If there is a musical act I like more than Radiohead, it is Autechre. The release of Autechre’s new album, Quaristice, bears some resemblance to Radiohead’s attention-grabbing In Rainbows release. It also bears a lot of the hallmarks of 
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