It’s 20 years since Steve Beckett and the late Rob Mitchell, with the help of Robert Gordon, released Forgemasters’ ‘Track with No Name’: the first record on their label Warp. Over the following two decades, Warp has supported some of the most innovative electronic musicians to have come out of the UK, including Aphex Twin, Autechre, Black Dog, Boards of Canada, Russell Haswell, LFO, Nightmares on Wax, Mark Pritchard, Seefeel and Andrew Weatherall. The label has released one-off albums by fellow travellers such as US/Canadian techno producers Richie Hawtin and Kenny Larkin, and developed an international roster of musicians including Anti-Pop Consortium, Battles, Jimmy Edgar, Grizzly Bear and South Africa’s DJ Mujava. In recent years it has run a film production wing, and the online music shop Bleep.com (notable for selling mp3s without the digital rights management technology used by iTunes to prevent copyright infringement).
Born in Sheffield in 1989 one year after acid house exploded and changed UK underground music forever, it’s often been said that Warp carried the baton from the city’s preceding generation of musical pioneers – early 1980s bands such as Cabaret Voltaire, Heaven 17 and Human League, groups that used electronics to slingshot music out of the guitar-locked cul-de-sacs of punk. Certainly throughout the 1990s Warp’s output helped define British dance music, setting an alternative agenda to the terminally backwards Britpop revivalism that was to dominate the era. Although the label’s influence has waned a little in its second decade, and its back catalogue acquired a few blemishes along the way (the less said about Maxïmo Park – sorry losers in the race with Arctic Monkeys to be this decade’s Northern kitchen sink-chroniclers – the better), Warp has distinguished itself as a label that lives in the present; at a remove from British pop music’s deathly retro treadmills, its legions of whingeing singer-songwriters and spoilt-brat pretend soul divas.
Featuring five CDs, three 10-inch records and a 192-page, full-colour book, Warp20 (Box Set) is a rambling stroll down memory lane rather than a catalogue raisonné. It opens with the ten all-time favourite tracks as voted-for by the label’s fans; the woozy funk of Aphex Twin’s ‘Windowlicker’ comes top of their list, still sounding as fresh as it did on its release in 1999, followed closely by Boards of Canada’s cheerily wistful ‘Roygbiv’ (1998). (Hedonism and melancholia are woven deep in Warp’s DNA.) This is complemented by co-founder Beckett’s own personal selection, plus 20 cover versions of Warp songs by label artists, 11 rare and unreleased cuts, an hour long magpie collage of material from the back catalogue and – only for the real DJ geeks – a handful of lock-groove loops for mixing with. Warp has always been conscious of its looks, over the years employing the talents of The Designers Republic, Julian House, Build, Universal Everything and Kim Hiørthoy to shape the label’s visual identity, and Warp20... comes packaged in a box set created by YES, with photography by Dan Holdsworth.
With the possible exception of the book, which features the artwork for every release on the label, this is by no means a one-stop-shop guide to Warp. However, what’s notable is the singular nature and variety of so much of the music here, from the restless adventurism of Aphex, through the icy landscapes of Autechre and Seefeel to Jimmy Edgar and Jamie Lidell’s sleazy but puckish house, or Boards of Canada and Broadcast’s hazy retro-futurism. Influences can of course be checked and noted throughout the compilation, but if the key artists gathered on Warp20... sound like anything, it’s by-and-large only themselves. Like Factory, Industrial Records, Rough Trade and Postcard before them, Warp has successfully forged a sonic sensibility that is uniquely its own; largely because this is music that has grown up in tandem with the creative technology that enables it, rather than move in ever-decreasing circles of obsession with rock’s back pages, genuflecting before its holy trinity of guitar, bass and drums.
When voting online for tracks to be included on Warp20..., fans were encouraged to leave thoughts about what the label meant to them. Over 20,000 personal stories and messages about Warp songs were left by the public; testament to the desire for music that defines the present rather than defers to the past.
