Over three decades Warp has expanded across genres from jazz to folk and hip-hop, challenging the weight of their heritage without losing sight of it. It has grown and innovated, contributing greatly to the complexity and self-renewal of electronic music as a whole. The label is not stuck in an idealised past.

One thing that distinguishes Warp from its competitors is its refusal to succumb to nostalgia.

At the very beginning of rave’s slow-motion collapse, they helped redeem the scene’s more intimate face, salvaging art from amid the ruins. Warp dissected that essence from the inside, long before it was being repackaged as history. Jeremy Deller’s documentary Everybody In The Place (2019), Philly Adams and Kobi Prempeh’s co-curated exhibition ‘Sweet Harmony’ (2019) at the Saatchi Gallery, and Niall Griffiths’s novel Broken Ghost (2019) are just three recent celebrations of the divine, quasi-spiritual energy of those gatherings. Today rave culture is being canonized by artists and journalists alike in nostalgic terms as a kind of lost paradisal community. When the UK’s underground party scene reached its zenith, the label didn’t just survive, it adapted to meet changing circumstances. Courtesy: Warp Recordsįounded 30 years ago in Sheffield, Warp has grown into one of the world’s most respected independent record labels. The result is less about hedonistic excess than concentration – less about rave than its deconstruction.Īrtificial Intelligence, 1992.

The cover, an image of an android reclining on a living room chair, was accompanied by the sleeve note ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ The album proceeds from video game bleeps to wide-panned Balearic pads on a journey from chaos to equilibrium, like a heart rate pulsing with amphetamines returning to normal after a big night out. Its fast tempo captured the ecstatic energy of dance tents but the beats were cut-up and disorienting, the samples obscured and mutated. Artificial Intelligence, though, was a sedentary affair. These were the twilight years of acid house, of ‘autonomous party zones’, warehouse raves and jam-packed solstice festivals.

When Warp Records’ first Artificial Intelligence compilation was released in 1992, the label was little more than a bedroom outfit, its roster made up of virtually unknown artists.

Niall griffiths broken ghost