A Quick Word If I May, Mr Young

I've just read Warp - Labels Unlimited by Rob Young (and Adrian Shaugnessy, even though he gets no credit on the front and back cover). First up, if y're looking for a serious, definitive work on the considerable impact that Warp have had on the musical world over the past 15 years, look elsewhere. This is a classic example of a coffee table book masquerading as serious history and analysis. Sure it's beautifully designed, and Adrian Shaughnesy's essays on the evolution and impact of Warp's artwork (Designers Republic et al) are thoughtful, illuminating and obviously written from the standpoint of someone who knows and loves their subject, if too damn short. The archive photographs and articles and excerpts from internet discussion boards from the 'Artificial Intelligence' era are excellently chosen and convey a real sense of the possibilities that were opening up around dance/electronic music in the early 90s.

The problem is, the main body of the text totally fails to do justice to it's subject and the material gathered to illustrate it. It reads like a series of expanded-after-the-thought sunday supplement articles written for a reader relatively ignorant of the history of the label and the cultural impact that Warp have had, and in the latter half of the book is far too concerned with continuing the mythologising of Richard James as a reclusive genius, semi-autistic savant saviour of electronica. Not that I'm decrying his music, much of which I love, but Autechre, a group who are as important, if not more so, in exploring and exploding the possibilities of electronica are given no where near as much space or analysis, possibly because their music is considered more 'diificult', or, more likely in my opinion, because they're more difficult to write about as they don't carry around the baggage of being eccentric artists, there's no host of amusing anecdotes about their 'weird' behaviour and therefore Mr Young would have actually had to sit down and seriously think about what he was writing as opposed to regurgitating all the old "Aphex Twin did..." stories that we've all read or heard over the years. It's fucking lazy witing, as is the slapdash way that certain terms are bandied about throughout in a way that leads me to suspect the author doesn't know nearly as much about his subject and it's context, especially in realtion to the evolution of dance music, as he thinks he does. Two examples:

Page 31: "...and when 'Acid House' crept up on him around 1984-85". Now correct me if I'm wrong but I think I know what I'm talking about here, the earliest Acid releases where Sleezy D's "I've Lost Control" from 87 and Phuture's "Acid Tracks" from 88, the former only being referred to as Acid in hindsight, after the proliferation of the term arising from Phuture's groundbreaking 12" and the slew of similarly named tracks that followed in it's wake. So for Acid House to creep up on you 2 or 3 years early, you'd need a fucking time machine.

Page 41: "...the city's young people were gathering under the sign of the new trance Techno played by Juan Atkins, Derrick May's Rhythim Is Rhythim...". I almost puked when I read that sentence. Trance? No. Wrong. So wrong. If you removed that word it would have been fine, but using it in that context shows no understanding of the history, or the very specific terminology of dance music at all. Trance came considerably later, a product of Europeans like Sven Vath and Oliver Lieb, and it's a music that rejects the intricate percussive subtlety, melodic/harmonic complexity and crucially, the emotional resonance of Techno for a far more simplistic, standardised 4/4 rhythmic matrix overlaid with sub-acid burbling and the sort of hackneyed, hippy-stereotype samples (Terrance McKenna talking about hyperspace conciousness, that sort of shit) that make me reach for my revolver, allied with (if y're really unlucky) 'ethnic' instrumentation/music used with absolutely no understanding of context, tunings or, frankly, taste.

Those are just two I could mention, but there are more. Mr Young should know better, given his journalistic background, and the publishers certainly should have picked up on this shit considering that the book has been