This is a thirtieth anniversary re-release of the music that (arguably) took Warp from being another electronic music label to being one of the UK’s most important.
At this time in history, albums were still largely a rockist thing — Goldie’s Timeless two years away, Dummy due next year from Portishead and just within a year of Massive Attack‘s Blue Lines and The Prodigy‘s Experience. Those records all, in some way, defining the ’90s and elevating dance music into something that was written about in broadsheets.Black Dog Productions – Bytes
Bytes didn’t quite have that sort of global impact, but what it shares is a coherent image of UK dance music in album format. This isn’t quite acid, but it’s not really the sensible advert background of later Warp stock-and-trade.
Tempos are not quite opiated, but they’re certainly at the lower end; this has the “last spliff then…” vibe of the sunrise after the night before. The loops are familiar — and even if it never actually appears, these rhythms have the track marks from the “Amen” break. It’s breaking out of the functional world of dancefloor diplomacy and heading towards a world of harmony and chord progressions.
Subsequent to this, Black Dog bifurcated into The Black Dog and the much more staid Plaid, but at this point Black Dog still have enough of a foot in the rave to chuck in the odd spanner — the shifting and infrequently jolting “Focus Mel,” the corroding Underground Resistance of “Merck”.Later on, I must confess, Warp starts looking more and more like a professional operation. And good for them, in a sense, but for my tastes the amount of their roster that appeared as the background to car adverts, and the ghastly IDM moniker they never quite shook, pulled them away from the less chilled world of homebrew Detroitisms and rave topographies which are all over this record.
But also the signs were there — this record has plenty of home listening effects on it — the off-phase rhythms of “Clan”, with its modest kick drum, are less likely to set the dancefloor on fire. If I was a drugs-music sommelier (and tbh that sounds great), I’d say this is a record that’s going to complement a k-hole more than it is your bouncing uppers like ecstasy or speed. And either of those are preferable to the cocaine ambient of Warp’s later output. Bytes is just weird enough to draw you in but just bouncy enough to keep your head going.Perhaps oddest of all, after three decades, this doesn’t sound dated. By comparison to, say, Future Sound Of London, so much of Bytes has become pretty standard electronic music tropes such that this sits well enough with music in 2023, while I listened to FSOL’s Lifeforms the other day and I’m pretty sure I heard the synths moaning about their back like a proper thirty+ year old should.
The Black Dog – Spanners
The vibe here is decidedly more experimental than Bytes. Samples all bendy and fucky and the fuller pieces interspersed with “Bolt” pieces — found sound or non-rhythmic interludes that maybe act like a palette cleanser. While Bytes mostly was a case of get in, do your bit and fuck off, much of Spanners is longer, more expansive, more exploratory, “Psil-cosyin” clocking in over ten minutes of ghostly off-beat shuffling before congealing into some 8-bit acid vision of Marrakesh.
It’s worth saying that this sounds like confident music — plenty of stuff which has, by this point, abandoned the idea that anyone’s ever dancing to it and exploring the possibilities of loops, samples and synthesis. Worth saying too for the younger ones reading that making electronic music in 1995 was still quite a pain in the arse — so the kind of labour that goes into the disjunctive MENA rhythms of “Tahr” was surely not negligible. It’s something of a gamble, given that still by this point the idea of the electronic music album wasn’t well-heeled, even if Jean-Michel Jarre‘s Oxygene was approaching its second decade.If Bytes was a ketamine and weed deal, this is perhaps a bit more like ket in a smack den. There’s weirdness all around, but there’s still a warming bubble of recognisable structure and rhythm to keep this away from the fully abstracted world of later ‘electronica’. For all the dusky fractures of the “Bolt” interludes, there’s still recognisable rhythms just about bubbling at the surface of “Frisbee Skip” like a drowning person’s last two-step. Perhaps not surprisingly, the closing track “Chesh” pre-empts the more pacific tones of Plaid, a bubbly staccato drift of harmonic parts that eschews drum-based rhythm and points at where Warp was headed.
Again, Spanners has aged remarkably well — it’s still rhythm-centric enough to nod along to (you’d probably struggle to dance) and it’s missing the asinine blandishments of USA-friendly electronica that characterised late-’90s Warp (for my money at least). This isn’t a rave classic, but it’s electronic music still massively informed by shelving gurners in some field in the arsehole of nowhere. Familiar with, and not yet fearful of, the comedown.
Spanners.
-Kev Nickells-
