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During the first half of the 90s, the sort of music that I listened to was pretty standard for the time. It was a period when most of my exposure came from radio and television which were pretty much authoritarian methods of informing people of new music. They were just vehicles of the major record labels to flog the latest mainstream releases. As a result, my tastes gravitated toward fairly typical guitar-driven stuff that was common in North America at the time.
When the second half of the decade came along, things changed significantly. I started college and became friends with people a few years older than me who were exploring all sorts of music that never got played on the radio. I also started exploring the web for the first time. These two things introduced me to all sorts of new music. One genre in particular that I became increasingly interested in was electronic music. I wasn’t really all that into dance music. It was fine, but didn’t resonate with me a whole lot. Eventually, I came across a style that was quite different. It was electronic, but more intended to for people to sit down and listen to, rather than something that was played in a club. It was eventually christened by many with the rather unfortunate moniker of “Intelligent Dance Music” aka IDM, a pompous name if ever there was one. Nevertheless, the people actually making the music were doing stuff that really pulled me in.
The musicians doing this really felt like they were forging their own path. What they were producing wasn’t really being heard anywhere else. If anything, they were inspiring others to try similar things. By the end of the 90s, I was primarily listening to this sort of music. I had CDs from several different artists all doing their own thing. What tied them all together was that many were having their works published under the same label: Warp Records.
I was listening to quite a lot of a few specific musicians / groups: Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Autechre, and Squarepusher. They were the most popular acts on the label at the time and were making big waves. Autechre was basically what first got me into the genre. A lot of what I heard from them was a bit gentler, and created all sorts of images in my mind as I listened. They were creating music that took me places in ways I hadn’t experienced before. From there I started to pay a lot of attention to Aphex Twin. His music was all over the place from soothing ambient tracks to cacophonous, glitched out chaos. He also just did a lot of weird, borderline uncomfortable stuff with his pieces that was quite intriguing at the time.
Boards of Canada eventually became my favorite band on Warp. They were big on analogue synths which have this really nice, soft quality to their sound that I’ve always liked. Part of what they’ve consistently done over the years is create a sound reminiscent of background music found in educational documentaries of the 70s and 80s. It’s a weird thing, and not what someone would expect to take off in any way, shape, or form. Here we are, though, a quarter century or so later, and the duo became quite popular in electronic music circles. They haven’t released a studio album in about eight years, but there are still plenty of fans out there, myself included, who would very much like more from them.
Meanwhile, Squarepusher has been who I would listen to when I wanted to shift gears a bit. The other bands I mentioned tend to be a bit more on the relaxing side as far as listening conditions go. A lot of Squarepusher’s stuff is at the other end of the spectrum: far more uptempo, lots of break beats, even getting aggressively glitchy at times. There’s a totally different energy to his music, but it’s still very unique in its own way.
There have been plenty of other acts on Warp Records over the years, but these are the four major ones that I’ve listened to the most, and that initially drew me to the label. One could argue that Warp releases developed a bit of a same-i-ness to them over time, but that seems to simply because they were willing to create an incubator for electronic musicians to experiment however they liked. Moreover, they were contemporaries which meant they listened to each other’s stuff, and they talked to each other to an extent, influencing one another.
Over time, the label would move on, with changes happening in the early 2000s as to the sort of bands it would sign. One of the label founders died in 2001, which likely impacted things to an extent, but the label still wanted to find people trying to do things a little bit different. However, they were looking for new sounds, as even the higher ups there recognized that a similar sort of sound was starting to calcify in their releases by the late 90s. They shifted things a tad too much for my tastes, bringing in bands with a much more acoustic instrumentation, and who often even had vocalists. It was a bit too much of an about face all at once for me, and I drifted away from the label for a time. I will give them credit, though. They were the first label to release their music digitally and made sure all of it was DRM free when they opened up Bleep in 2004. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but in retrospect, it’s a refreshing choice compared to what basically every other label was doing at the time.
By the time the 2010s came along, there were more musicians showing up on Warp that were more up my alley. They were signing long established musicians like Brian Eno, which I’d grown a taste for, but the one that really caught my attention was Bibio. First, I know that sounds very contradictory having just said that I didn’t like the acoustic, vocally driven bands appearing on Warp in the 2000s. Nevertheless, what Bibio was doing struck a chord with me. Songs like “Take Off Your Shirt” and “À Tout à L'heure” were really quite enjoyable. He was doing some interesting things with instrumentation that had caught my eye. Moreover, he also released some minimalist ambient tracks that I still regularly listen to (I’m listening to “CAPEL CELYN” as I write this).
With this renewed interest, I decided to see what else Warp was doing and what I’d missed. That’s when I came across Flying Lotus (I don't think he's associated with them anymore, but he was for a time at least). His stuff is a mix of instrumental hip hop, ambient melodies, and some interesting beats to carry things along. Mark Pritchard has also caught my attention. I really enjoy how he juxtaposes sparse instrumentation with a fairly pronounced beat in more recent works. The way these two elements play off of one another really resonates with me. His older stuff is great too. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s full on ambient music, but it leans heavily in that direction. It’s interesting how he plays with the various instruments’ presence to change the tone of a song.
After that hiatus from Warp in the 2000s, I find myself coming back again. They still have quite a few acts that I very much enjoy. This isn’t to say I’m some sort of record label fanboy. There’s plenty of other stuff that I like. I just wanted to write about about one in particular that really set a lot of things in motion as far as how my musical tastes have developed over the last 25 years. To this day, I still love listening to this sort of stuff. The likes of Boards of Canada, Autechre, Aphex Twin, and Squarepusher will likely always be at the top of my list for musicians that I really like. They were my gateway to a new type of music, flavoring my tastes at a formative time in my life. More current stuff is great too, of course. The music on the label is definitely not for everybody, but I love it. It’s stuff I regularly recommend to people looking for something a little bit different, and I very much appreciate how the folks at Warp have tried to nurture this over the decades.
- Pennywhether
pennywhether@posteo.net
(April 23, 2021)