Warp: Pushing The Envelope For 20 Years

"I want every object we put into the world to have a positive impact and have a reason for being there and to represent excellence"

The electronic heartbeat of the Steel City

The pile of compact discs stands about as high as an extended hand. I rattle through them one by one, feeding the chrome into my hungry player. What do we have here? There’s the sultry electroacoustic folk of Grizzly Bear; the crunchy hip hop fragments of Flying Lotus; Bibio’s uplifting, poignant instrumental vignettes, rendered in fritzed C90 lo-fi; Clark’s dayglo Techno, a smoking plate of wonky, melted silicon chips; Maxïmo Park’s literate, angular post-punk; the Stravinskyan orchestral headrush of Tyondai Braxton’s Central Market; and the witchy, surrealist pop of Broadcast’s collaboration with The Focus Group. A torrent of eclectic audio, apparently with no single defining aesthetic, released over roughly a six-month period. And it’s all cutting-edge stuff, too, each one slicing out a different niche market: not likely to set foot in the national charts, but then again brimming with a stylistic confidence that’s lacking in so much of the dour, sour-faced ‘experimental’ underground. And all these are products of one record label, one wide-eared enough, and with the broadness of vision, to remain receptive to all these crosscurrents of contemporary sound for the past 20 years: Warp Records.

Intelligent Dance Music (IDM)

I spool back in memory to other previous piles of Warp releases that have landed on my desk over the years. A decade ago, it would have been albums by Plaid, Mira Calix, Jimi Tenor, Boards Of Canada, Plone, longstanding Warp artists Nightmares On Wax, and the three double CD compilations, clad in the house shade of mauve, that marked Warp’s first ten years. Fifteen years ago, the average Warp batch represented the then futuristic sound of ‘intelligent techno’, the bedroom-produced abstract electronica that’s come to be known as ‘IDM’ (Intelligent Dance Music): Autechre, The Black Dog, Speedy J, B12, Sabres Of Paradise, Richard Kirk, Kenny Larkin, and the absolute pinnacle of the genre, Selected Ambient Works II by Aphex Twin. And at the beginning, way back in 1989… well, I wasn’t actually writing about music then, although I vividly remember my first encounter with a Warp record around that time. Sheffield duo LFO’s signature tune, ‘LFO’, invaded the Top Of The Pops screen like an alien virus, a blank shutter of terse electronic bodyrock that shifted the paradigm away from the prevailing flowered-up acid house hits of the time towards something as yet unimagined; as grey and faceless as its Designers Republic sleeve artwork.

Like most independent labels, both Warp and fellow indie Rough Trade were started out of altruistic fervour and idealistic zeal. More than simply profit-churning business schemes, these were boutique labels run as creative, curatorial endeavours. The strength of the idea was so good that the labels became the recognised centre of their respective scenes, significantly raising fans’ and critics’ expectations. And with heightened reputations comes the inevitable transition from establishment-baiting iconoclasm to becoming an institution in your own right – a position loaded with contradictions.

From Humble Beginnings

Warp began as a three-man operation run from the tiny back room of a Sheffield record shop. In 1999, it left Sheffield far behind to operate out of a sleekly functional 1930s warehouse close to Hampstead Heath in north-west London. The open-plan office space keeps several overlapping businesses ticking over. There’s the record label itself, with all the machinery of production, artist and repertoire, promotion and marketing. There’s the website, www.warp.net. Warp was one of the first British labels to recognise the outreach potential of the web in the innocent mid-90s, designing a multi-coloured interactive portal that took them to an international audience. Allied with that is www.bleep.com, a mail order service that offers free trial streaming audio to its customers. At its launch in 2004, it permitted high-quality downloads of entire tracks – the first mail order company to do so. In its own office is Warp Films, the separate company founded in 1999. The movie division has facilitated the development of full-length and short film work by Shane Meadows, Chris Morris, video auteur Chris Cunningham and many more. The synergy is total: Warp Films can make video promos for Warp Records artists, who can supply music for Warp Films soundtracks… you get the picture. The bottom line is, Warp has made itself practically a one-stop shop supplying content for such things as advertising, movie soundtracks and TV stings.

"these were boutique labels run as creative, curatorial endeavours"

Tucked away in one of the messy storerooms of their London office is a massively heavy, two-metre high wooden representation of the Warp logo – a lightning flash across a geometric projection of a planet – rendered in thick chipboard and spray-painted a greenish shade of silver. This was once a record shop sign, fixed to the wall above the premises on Sheffield’s Division Street where Steve Beckett and Rob Mitchell worked behind the counter. Beckett and Mitchell had been students in the city and, in the late ’80s, had both been in failed indie rock bands called Lay Of The Land and Aitch. Along with another important local player, they were about to reinvent themselves as pied pipers of the new Northern bleep techno scene.

Warp Records – the shop – arose at the front of a building that also housed the legendary FON studios, where Rob Gordon worked as an in-house engineer and producer. Born into a Jamaican family, Gordon had gained impressive local status as a wizard of the mixing desk, a sonic alchemist who could make a record sound fantastically sharp, overseeing its genesis all the way from the sound booth to the mastering plant. The Warp label was formed by all three of them, and the first release, by an impromptu group called The Forgemasters, comprising of DJ Winston Hazel, Sean Maher and Gordon himself, was a 12-inch entitled ‘The Track With No Name’. Now an impossibly rare collector’s item, it’s the stuff that myths are made of.

Tapping into the underground technotronic continuum that stretched from the warehouses of Detroit and Chicago to the subterranean parties of the newly liberated Berlin, ‘bleep’ made dancefloors feel like gateways to a future bathed in the utopian glow of micro-technology. And just as, 20 years earlier, progressive rock had emerged as the intellectual version of psychedelia, so Warp’s next generation of artists converted this new dance music into a purely headphone, home-listening experience.

Artificial Intelligence

The notorious Artificial Intelligence series was launched with a compilation in July 1992, and for the next three years cemented Warp as the standard bearer for a distinctive brand of electronic music. As well as tracks by international artists like Richie Hawtin, Speedy J and The Orb’s Alex Paterson, the album featured abstract (but not ambient) music from the Cornish genius of Aphex Twin,Mancunian duo Autechre, and the enigmatic Black Dog. Packaged with Phil Wolstenholme’s distinctive 3D digital images of cyborgs chillaxing with headphones and a spliff, Artificial Intelligence became an umbrella that extended over 10 releases, including two compilations and eight single-artist albums. The series was marketed as “electronic music for the mind created by trans-global innovators who prove music is the one true international language”.

"I remember walking back to my house after he had died and looking at clouds and feeling how magical life is. I felt a lot more weight on my shoulders, as there was instantly twice as much work"

The Artificial Intelligence concept made Warp’s name, at home and abroad, but also quickly became a burden. A more purist label might have continued, faithful to the sound and its fanatical fans, until diminishing returns and changing fashions relegated it to the margins. But in the mid-’90s, Warp – now run by Beckett and Mitchell, after a falling out with Rob Gordon – began to show the skilful ability to sniff the zeitgeist and adapt to changing energies in music culture that have kept it in business for two decades. There was a childlike, playful quality to releases by Squarepusher, Mira Calix and Plaid, while the music of the young Scottish duo Boards Of Canada and Broadcast was shot through with nostalgia for the kind of futures promised in children’s TV and science textbooks of the 1970s, and that never quite materialised.

By the turn of the century, the concentration of the UK’s film and music industries in London made Warp’s location in Yorkshire increasingly isolated, and Mitchell and Beckett were spending less and less time in the office, as they were on the road attending gigs and meetings elsewhere. “Me and Rob spent our lives going up and down the motorway or trainline,” says Beckett, “and Rob was away from his wife and kids a lot, so he wanted to be seeing them every evening. Also, we got bored with Sheffield: it just felt really small and often negative.” By then, only a small proportion of their artists were actually based in Sheffield; when the office finally upped sticks, the family nature of the label unravelled. And when Rob Mitchell died of cancer, aged 38, in October 2001, after an 11-year partnership with Steve Beckett, the company reached a watershed moment: to cut loose, or continue the mission? “It was one of the key points in my life,” affirms Beckett. “I see everything as before and after that point. Ever since then my life has just opened up, and I’m just so grateful to be alive.

Projects and Achievements

The state of Warp reflects the reality that, a decade into the 21st century, purely electronic sounds can no longer remain the only forward-looking, experimental or creative sector of contemporary music. As a label with a substantial and influential history behind it, expectations continue to run high around Warp output. But the problem of being continually judged by reference to its past achievements seems, at last, to be fading away. Warp’s youngest fans today must be people who were only born around the time it was set up in 1989, who are now reaching their twenties at the same moment as the label. Anyone young enough to have spent the early ’90s in the nursery is therefore less likely to have any lingering respect for the factions and subcultures of club culture at the time. Some of the most recent signings – Gravenhurst, Grizzly Bear – reflect the resurgence of a folk-rock influence in indie music; crazed singer Jamie Lidell continually reinvents the soul-torch tradition; and the extravagant, multicoloured crunk and wonky constructions of Hudson Mohawke and Rustie have arrived from the bleeding edge of progressive club culture.

Meanwhile, Warp has brokered some high-level collaborative projects which have taken it into areas far from its lo-fi, underground origins. Between 2003–05, Warp held a showcase multimedia festival at the gorgeously modernist Vasarely Foundation complex in Aix-en-Provence, in the south of France. It was a meeting of aesthetics, the architect’s bold and sharply chiselled forms perfectly complementing the spatial dynamics of Warp’s radical digital musicians. Perhaps most intriguingly, Warp’s partnership with the London Sinfonietta – an orchestra specialising in ultra-contemporary and avant-garde classical repertoire – has resulted in unexpected career developments for the likes of Squarepusher and Mira Calix. The Sinfonietta have played orchestral transcriptions of recordings by Aphex Twin, Squarepusher and others, and premiered Mira Calix’s NuNu, a composition involving contact-miked insects, live on stage. Warp Films, meanwhile, have won two BAFTA awards (for Shane Meadows’s This Is England and Paddy Considine’s short Dog Altogether), and produced Meadows’s new feature, Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee, as well as Chris Morris’s full-length desert war satire Four Lions.

The Warp X offshoot offers a radical new model for film production, concentrating on low-budget, high-quality pictures appealing to niche markets. Forthcoming titles in the Warp X strand include a documentary about the long-running alternative music festival All Tomorrow’s Parties, composed entirely of video footage shot by the public; Paul King’s imaginary road trip Bunny And The Bull and, most ambitiously, She, A Chinese, by Xialolou Guo, shot in China, about a young Chinese woman who abandons her rural village for the big city.

In all areas of its endeavour, diversity and mobility have been Warp’s key strengths, as well as an ability both to jump on new trends and to cultivate longer-term artistic careers. More importantly, it has always run on intuitive lines rather than sharp, calculated business logic, which is the secret of its success.

There’s no Warp sound, but there is a very tangible Warp state of mind. Says Steve Beckett: “I want every object we put into the world to have a positive impact and have a reason for being there and to represent excellence.”