Warp at 30: we have been reasonable people for decades
June 20, 2019 8:25 PM   Subscribe

Get hyped for days of warped music! Warp Records turns 30 soon, and is celebrating with a multi-day take-over of NTS Radio (Wikipedia), starting on 21 June 2019 at 12 PM BST (TimeBie converter). The 60-hour line-up is on Warp.net (direct image link; Imgur link for posterity), and I've pulled together a random live set from each of the musicians* on the line-up, in case you can't tune in (or can't wait), plus some more links to read along while you listen.

Here are YouTube videos (unless otherwise noted), and mostly longer sets from the musicians and other artists, pulled from Warp's roster and beyond,* who are set to perform on NTS:

Friday 21 June

12.00 Mark Pritchard (24th June 2016, on NTS)
13.00 Mount Kimbie (live on KEXP, 2013)
13.25 Bibio (Petals - Live Session, 2016)
13.36 Nightmares on Wax (Warp Records Presents on Groovetech Radio, 2002-08-23)

16.00 Broadcast (Live KCRW 25/01/2006)

17.00 Kwes. (performing "36" and "Rollerblades" live on KCRW; full audio from Morning Becomes Eclectic, 2013)
18.00 Plaid (Soundcloud, mix from Feb 2019 for Bleep + Warp Records)

19.00 Aphex Twin (Live Mexico debut @ Ceremonia GNP 2019, Toluca, Mexico 7 de Abril 2019)
19.30 Death Grips (live in Austin, TX at Mohawk, March 26, 2019)
20.00 Oneohtrix Point Never (Hudson Mohawke Presents 'Chimes' Live Set | Ray-Ban x Boiler Room 005, 2014)
21.40 Shayne Oliver / HBA (fashion designer)
22.00 Danny Brown (live at Primavera Sound 2019)
23.00 Autechre (live - Quirky - Brixton - 16. 06. 1994)

Saturday 22 June

00.00 John Stanier (Battles live at Lowland Fest 2007)

01.00 !!! (chk chk chk) (live on KEXP, 2017)
03.00 Hassan Rahim (collection of live sets from NTS)
04.00 Tim Saccenti ("An immersive collection of personal and professional images" from an artist "known primarily for his immersive music videos and stylized musician portraits" from 2013)
06.00 Ezra Miller
07.00 Broadcast (Come On Let's Go - live on Jools Holland BBC 2000)
08.00 Clark (Boiler Room x Bloc live set, 2015)
09.00 Paul White (Boiler Room live show, 2013)
10.00 Lonelady (live on KEXP, 2015)
12.00 Kelly Moran (10 minutos en Madrid, 2019) + ‘Halogen’ (live performance, 2019)
13.00 Bibio (KCRW Morning Becomes Eclectic, full set, 2013)

14.00 Special Request (Boiler Room x Dekmantel Festival 2018) Tribute to LFO (ForumHotel _Sep.20.2014 Warp25)

16.20 Adrian Sherwood (live in the Boiler Room, 2012)

17.00 Leila (Boiler Room London live set, 2015)
18.00 Hudson Mohawke (Boiler Room London live set, 2017)

19.00 Bonehead
19.30 Evian Christ (live at Flow Festival 15/8/2015)

21.00 Squarepusher (live in Moscow, June 11, 2018)
22.00 Flying Lotus (Live at FORM Arcosanti 5/11/2018; and Flying Lotus' new stage set up for his 3D Live Show, from Red Bull Music, 2012)
23.00 Ryuichi Sakamoto (with the Neo Geo Ensemble -- Beauty Tour 1990)

Sunday 23 June

00.00 Ryuichi Sakamoto (Ryuichi Sakamoto & Taylor Deupree St John's Sessions x Boiler Room live set, 2014)
00.30 Mira Calix (Boiler Room London DJ Set, 2017)
02.30 Plaid (Live Sprout Session, 08.07.14 - live audio, fixed image)
03.30 Rian Treanor (Boiler Room x Genelec Helsinki, 2018)
04.30 DJ Nigga Fox (Boiler Room X RBMA Lisboa DJ Set, 2015)
06.00 Aphex Twin (live at Coachella Music & Arts Festival 2019, Weekend One Mojave Tent)
08.00 Kelly Moran (In Parallel - Live In Paris 2019)
09.00 Primitive Art (live / Hundebiss showcase / Milano June 11 2013)
10.00 Lorenzo Senni (Boiler Room x Genelec Helsinki, 2018)
11.35 Weirdcore (shares a rare insight to his visuals for Aphex Twin for Nicer Tuesdays, 2017)
12.35 Bibio (With The Thought Of Us Live at Taico 2017, Nagano, Japan)
13.00 Gonjasufi (live at UT Connewitz, 18 04 2017)

14.00 Winston Hazel (Forgemasters) (Boiler Room Sheffield DJ Set, 2018)
15.00 Gaika (live - HKCR, 2019)
16.00 Extinction Rebellion (news coverage of the climate change activists, 2019; official site) x Brian Eno (live in Naples 26-05-2007)
17.00 Chris Taylor (Grizzly Bear at Primavera Sound Festival 2018 / Cant on KEXP, 2011)
18.45 Darkstar (live in Berlin, 2016)

20.00 Kelela (Paradiso Noord 13-12-2017)
21.00 Boards of Canada (Live at Warp 10th Anniversary Party, 1999)

23.00 Autechre (live - Quirky - Brixton - 16. 06. 1994)

* As James Murphy would say, I'm losing my edge and I don't know who all the artists are. From what I've been able to find, some don't seem to (usually?) be musicians or selectors, so I couldn't track down any music for an example of what they might play.

• X • X • X •

Warp(ed) Records History

1999: Warp 10: Influences, Classics and Remixes, Wikipedia article covering the 10th anniversary compilations 2007: A Warp History in 30 releases, a list on Rate Your Music

2009: The Dummy Guide to Warp Records at 20, with a good summary of the label's history to that point

2014: Warp25 - Celebrating 25 years of Warp Records, a website with an overview of Warp's celebration events + Warp's own YouTube playlist of 31 clips

2019: WxAxRxP

• X • X • X •

Ranked Lists of Music

X - Dummy Mag gets Plaid's top 10 Warp Albums, with a cheeky bit of commentary, for Warp's 30th anniversary

XX -- Warp Records: 20 Essential Albums from Treble Zine staff, celebrating Warp's 20 year mark

XXX --- [ I can't find a "Top 30 for 30" article ]
posted by filthy light thief (40 comments total) 48 users marked this as a favorite
 
Aw yeah.
posted by Artw at 8:30 PM on June 20, 2019


Bonus links of unknown quality: Hits 2019 Warp Selections – A Weekly Mixtape by Warp Records (1 hour) + Top 40 Warp Selections – A Weekly Mixtape by Warp Records (1 hour) -- these may be rips of past Warp Selections - A Weekly Mixtape on Spotify, ported to YouTube by an unknown user.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:38 PM on June 20, 2019 [1 favorite]


Boards of Canada tweeted about this and everybody lost their minds. We shall see what it means...
posted by mykescipark at 11:12 PM on June 20, 2019 [1 favorite]


...and apparently it means something called Societas x Tape.
posted by mykescipark at 12:15 AM on June 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


Dammit I have things to do today.
posted by ardgedee at 2:42 AM on June 21, 2019


(FWIW I’ll spare some people a lookup; 12 PM BST is 7 AM, US EDT)
posted by ardgedee at 2:45 AM on June 21, 2019


A couple acts appear multiple times on the schedule (Autechre, Aphex Twin, Broadcast...). I wonder whether they're going to be different sets or the same set repeated. Aphex Twin's won't be because one time slot is 30 minutes and the other is 2 hours.
posted by ardgedee at 4:46 AM on June 21, 2019


ardgedee: Broadcast's is not the same set repeated, but I think it won't be a new live recording (the schedule shows it as a couple of mixtapes in memory of Trish Keenan).
posted by fmoralesc at 5:16 AM on June 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


Well, there's the soundtrack for my afternoon. Thanks!
posted by my-username at 5:18 AM on June 21, 2019


So far Mark Pritchard and Mt Kimbie have been great. Nightmares on Wax isn't the usual endless flow of downbeat funk because he's breaking in every once in a while with reminiscences. If I was doing work that needed more concentration right now it would annoy me, but I'm not so I'm finding the mix of music and talking kind of moving. It's giving me a better appreciation for the work he's put into his sound.
posted by ardgedee at 6:00 AM on June 21, 2019


This is cool.

I love Carboot Soul era NoW but his more recent stuff has left me cold.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:58 AM on June 21, 2019


Judging by past performances, will it be easy to download these once it's over?

Every time Warp comes up I want to give a shoutout to their online record store Bleep. They launched in January 2004 with something radical at the time; DRM-free music for sale. You just paid your money and got a music file, no need for iTunes or other bullshit. Amazon followed soon after, and eventually Apple, but it was Bleep that got there first.
posted by Nelson at 7:45 AM on June 21, 2019


Thanks for awesome post FLT!
posted by erebora at 7:58 AM on June 21, 2019


:)

I'm loving this so much.

And one thing I didn't mention in the OP -- in addition to the 60 hours of Warp and adjacent artists, there will be a lot of rare and unreleased tracks being played.

Nelson, I'll admit I'm not familiar with NTS (I've heard of them before, but I hadn't checked them out before today). I think they post their prior streams a short while after they're broadcast (er, streamed -- they're internet-only), so if there's not a single landing page for the whole WXAXRXP weekend+, I'll pull together a new list of links for folks coming back to hear them again.

Also, before Bleep was eMusic.com, which is celebrating 21 years of being a DRM-free MP3 sales site. It's a weird subscription-based site, in that you pay a fixed amount every month, and if you don't spend most of it* by the end of the month, you lose it.

* The cheapest purchase, usually for a track or a two-song single, is $0.49, so if you have less than $0.49, it rolls over to the next month. Before this set-up, it used to be that you subscribed for a fixed number of credits, which also didn't roll over, but you didn't have to deal with spare change. I'll stop now, but I can ramble on via MeMail if anyone wants to know more about eMusic.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:07 AM on June 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


Great post, love Warp!
posted by rossmeissl at 8:10 AM on June 21, 2019


This will make many of my old arty/skateboard friends happy if any of them are still alive.

I had no idea eMusic was still around.
posted by zerolives at 8:43 AM on June 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


I've got the stream running live on my Sonos (thanks to TuneIn Radio) and it's really wonderful. Right now they've got an interstitial playing John Cage's Suites for Prepared Piano and it's a particularly good choice.
posted by Nelson at 8:59 AM on June 21, 2019


I met two of the Warp guys way back when, though only realized it later as it was at a friend's and, though music (and the biz) was very much on topic, nobody was making official introductions.

It would've been the mid-1990s sometime, Vancouver, so I knew who Warp were, their Artificial Intelligence stuff being required listening in my personal universe. I don't remember much other than being surprised at how enjoyable their company was, so unlike many of the music biz types I'd encountered from London, who all seemed to be deep in some attitudinal war zone. But I suppose that was Britain then (and probably still now) -- a definite North-South divide, Warp being from Sheffield originally.

Anyway, one thing I do remember is talking about sampling and digital copying of recordings. This was before filesharing etc had become a thing, but not before the spectre of it was being noticed and felt. Their attitude was along the lines of, "well, what can we do? We're not going to sic lawyers on our customers, so I guess we'll just hope this is a wave we can somehow ride."

It seems their surfing skills have served them (and us) very well.
posted by philip-random at 9:03 AM on June 21, 2019


The current Aphex Twin set is also video streaming live. The first number involved a machine playing a grand piano on a giant swing. The second one has green lasers and at least a dozen mirror balls sparking up the place.
posted by ardgedee at 11:09 AM on June 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


Nelson: That was the Aphex Twin thing. You should check the vid if you can.
posted by ardgedee at 11:10 AM on June 21, 2019


Sheffield represent!

Lots of good Warp tunes on let’s say 90% of the domestic climbing videos ever made.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 4:34 PM on June 21, 2019


It's day 2 and I can't believe how much time I'm spending on this stream. I couldn't catch the Autechre segment (it was on during dinner) but I figure if anything here gets reposted to Youtube/Soundcloud by fans it's going to be the big acts, so I'm not that worried about missing out on anything.

Kelly Moran and Bibio are new names to me but I liked their segments a whole lot. There's just so much great stuff, and I notice NTS 2 has also been devoting hours there to Warp acts, interleaved with recordings of seminal past masters (a rare and very, very good 1975 concert by Terry Riley and Don Cherry, an early work by La Monte Young, lectures by Sun Ra, Aldous Huxley and Buckminster Fuller, conversation between John Cage and Nam June Paik...).

Why does American radio have to be like it is when UK radio can be this good?
posted by ardgedee at 5:28 AM on June 22, 2019 [1 favorite]


This is exactly what I needed this weekend!
posted by loriginedumonde at 1:59 PM on June 22, 2019


I gotta say playing some very slow and process oriented Sakamoto on Saturday at 10pm is pretty troll. I guess we've been partying with Warp for over 30 hours now, a little downtime before the second set of drugs kicks in is needed.
posted by Nelson at 4:18 PM on June 22, 2019


It was midnight in London, not 10 PM. But yeah, on the one hand maybe it was a little too chill for a Saturday night but on the other hand maybe they're working on the premise of streaming around the globe so trying to target a party hour is inherently self-defeating.
posted by ardgedee at 4:31 PM on June 22, 2019 [1 favorite]


ardgedee: Why does American radio have to be like it is when UK radio can be this good?

Point 1: NTS is not a terrestrial station, it's web-only.

Point 2: I'd credit pirate radio (previously) with the diversity of radio (and music in general) in the UK. I hadn't realized how bleak the "official" UK radio landscape was until reading kerplunk's comment.

I remember, quite sadly, reading in the College Music Journal (CMJ) in the early 2000s that "the U.S. had said 'heck no' to techno" (or it might have been my imagination -- Google's book search points me back to ... my prior comment on MetaFilter), with the idea that U.S. audiences liked rock and rap, country and western as "modern" sounds. If this was CMJ's summary of the U.S. audience, and they represented the edgier side of the dial, techno, or "electronica" as it was so often called in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the U.S., was going to be more underground stateside than in the UK.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:15 PM on June 22, 2019


The final third of Plaid’s set this evening was transcendent. I think I got a contact high even though I was alone in my room and the strongest substance at hand was filtered water with a lime wedge.
posted by ardgedee at 7:54 PM on June 22, 2019 [1 favorite]


BOC are on! (I got there a little late)

So far it's a DJ set which is probably not what some people were hoping for but it's cool to hear what they're into. There are some scraps and transitional bits that sound like they could be original material, too? I'm not really an expert on the truly early BOC, to be honest, so if they pulled up some stuff from way back when I might not even know.
posted by atoxyl at 1:33 PM on June 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


Okay, yeah, there are definitely bits of BOC mixed in here.
posted by atoxyl at 1:45 PM on June 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


Yeah so far it seems like a sources-and-inspirations set. A few artists have been doing that this weekend.

They seem to really be into Italian and eastern European psychedelia.
posted by ardgedee at 2:09 PM on June 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


We made it! It's over!

I really liked the Boards of Canada set. Very bizarre collection of music pretty much none of which I heard before.

Now then.. where are the downloads? What's worth listening to again?
posted by Nelson at 4:02 PM on June 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


The Oneotrix Point Never and Plaid sets that I got to listen to were all memorable. Most of Friday, actually, was fantastic. I didn't even get to listen to channel 2 which went pretty deep (see my comments above), and I hope somebody made an archive of that stream, because there is a lot there I wish I could've dived into.
posted by ardgedee at 6:54 PM on June 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


It looks like (some of) the sets are going up now on NTS:

Friday sampler:
* Mark Pritchard - MP Productions (all unreleased mix)
* Plaid - Inner Sound Set
* Oneohtrix Point Never - Presents Myriad Live at the Roundhouse, London, 08/03/19

And here's the pics/ text from Warp emails, used to promote this weekend.

In the next couple of days, I'll work to pull together an archived link of official NTS streams that have been re-posted, both for the Primary and Secondary streams (I totally missed the fact that Stream 2 was also a Warp take-over).
posted by filthy light thief at 10:19 AM on June 24, 2019 [3 favorites]


The sets are being compiled on a dedicated WxAxRxP page. Currently mostly stuff from channel 1 but some sets from channel 2 as well. I hope more are eventually added, but there's already quite a lot here.

The NTS Series page also has links to other archives of interesting programs, such as a 6 hour Hunter S Thompson themed set, a 7 hour Haruki Murakami themed set, a Sigur Ros takeover, a Haroumi Hosono/YMO Day... there's a dizzying amount of good stuff here.
posted by ardgedee at 7:07 PM on June 24, 2019 [3 favorites]


Oh, and for those interested in this sort of thing: Three mixes of Studio Ghibli soundtracks, sorted by year.
posted by ardgedee at 7:15 PM on June 24, 2019 [1 favorite]


ardgedee, thanks for those links!

I see that NTS is a bounty that I have foolishly ignored previously. I found some rips of the streams, and I'm curently listening to the Adrian Sherwood Warp vs On-U Sound Mix, which doesn't look to be back on NTS yet.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:35 AM on June 25, 2019


New Plaid album that I wasn’t previously aware of is *very* good.
posted by Artw at 9:10 AM on June 25, 2019


FWIW the mixes on NTS' web page seem to be hosted in their Mixcloud account. Most (but not all) are tagged with a warp-30 tag. I was able to use youtube-dl to download those and ended up with 35 files totaling 42 hours. Quality is very low though; 68kbps stereo AAC or thereabouts. And not all the uploads are tagged, so it's not complete.
posted by Nelson at 9:55 AM on June 25, 2019 [2 favorites]


Catching up on the Plaid mix and it’s exquisite.

/this is now a Plaid stan account.
posted by Artw at 10:57 AM on June 25, 2019 [1 favorite]


If you want Autechre's sets, high-quality, legally and for free, get them while you can.
posted by ardgedee at 6:19 AM on June 27, 2019 [2 favorites]


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