Chris Clark, Mira Calix, N>E>D, Visuals by Flat–e

Warp Records was founded in 1989 by Rob Mitchell and Steve Beckett, owners of a record store in Sheffield. With first releases of Tricky Disco, Nightmares On Wax and LFO the label established its own individual sound, advancing on the tracks laid out by Detroit Techno and Chicago House and rapidly becoming very popular among DJs and enthusiastic buyers of club music. Standard violet covers and abstract LP designs by graphic designers from Designers Republic visually illustrated the disappearance of auctorial identity behind the music and its mechanical ways of production. Following the programmatic acronym “Weird And Radical Projects”, the compilation series ‘Artificial Intelligence’ marked the gradual abandonment of exclusively club-oriented sounds and the turning to a more complex and no longer danceable music.

The Duo Autechre for instance combined the distilled funk of early hip-hop or electronic albums with synthetic sound fractals and accelerated the dissolution of the strict metre obligatory in electronic pop music. With his albums “Selected Ambient Works Vol I & II-2” and “I Care Because You Dou”, Richard D. James - alias Aphex Twin - became the first (and maybe last) superstar of “intelligent dance music” - meanwhile established as a subgenre. James’ cover portraits marked the end of a faceless art policy, but he also increasingly freed his music from the limitations of pre-programmed hard and software. His track “Donkey Rhubarb” was orchestrated for Warp by Phillip Glass; the London Sinfonietta included pieces by Aphex Twin in their repertoire, as well as works by Squarepusher and Mira Calix, also publishing under the Warp label. Squarepusher developed his individual style from a mixture of Drum’n’Bass breakbeats fragmented down to their tiniest splinters and a masterly played E-Bass inspired by jazz rock. Mira Calix combines the recurring patterns of electronic dance music with “found sounds” and techniques of “musique concrète”.

At the end of the 90ies, Warp gradually extended its repertoire towards a stylistically unidentifiable authors label. Meanwhile, the label’s catalogue includes representatives from all kinds of diverse movements: rock (Broadcast, Vincent Gallo), folk and psychedelica (Savath & Savalas, Gravenhurst), and hip-hop (Anti-Pop Consortium, Req) appear alongside free and experimental approaches based on electronic popular music (Two Lone Swordsmen, Autechre, Prefuse 73). Moreover, since 2003 the sublabel Lex has become a platform for hip-hop.
Eric Mandel