FLEX YOUR HEAD

(I covered the Warp20 night for Esquire this month. Also, this version will appear in the February edition of Artrocker Magazine. Thanks to Darran Armstrong for the pictures, you are very good at what you do.)

London’s Warp20 event – an evening, night and morning celebrating twenty years of one of the world’s most revered independent labels - was an amorphous, audio-induced blur of scene clashes, sonic bombast, bad weather and general misrule.

Revellers, fledgling musicians, tech-nodes, pilgrims, collectors, celebrities and journalists pulsed towards The Coronet in Elephant and Castle; an area that has rather unexpectedly become something of a convergence point for the surrounding arts community. The venue, however, was certainly starting to show its age. Standing under stray drips of rain from its fettered ceiling was perhaps not an ideal setting for music of such unabashed perspicacity.

Tangents aside, the night was a musical monument: A befitting end to a decade of immense technological progression in sound art and expansive compositional boundaries. The event offered outsiders a peep hole into the directional variety on offer on the label, but also its enduring ability to unveil artists that seem to act as demagogues of alternative music; the few that forge new creative avenues out of the possibilities that befall them.

Broadcast’s set was moody and otherworldly: Trish Keegan’s throbbing vocal androgyny was cast against cascading psych-art imagery and James Cargill’s instrument-hopping jubilance. Songs from 2005’s Tender Bones were re-imagined as bludgeoning dronescapes, as if every song was a powerful, if very slight, movement in a larger construction altogether.

Battles’ perfectly polished performance offered a timely contrast to the gain-drenched drama. The as-promised new songs were delivered with bombastic geniality, ripe with fresh ideas, textural ambition, tropical melodies and typically wonky rhythm arrangements. 2007’s biggest alt-banger Atlas saw the crowd toing and froing in mass tidal surges, charged with an untenable enthusiasm a song with such bare-bones originality commands.


Upstairs in the west wing, Nightmares on Wax’s George Evelyn shook a darkened dancefloor of rain-drenched party people, converting the booty shakers to his sinister, twisted beats and down tempo acid house in convincing style. The real party, however, was only just afoot.

Flying Lotus’ set was a realised marriage of laptop camaraderie and devil-in-the-details improvised bravura, and as prophetically earth-shattering as you would expect from the omnipotent cut chemist. But it was the moment when a blast of dry ice encircled the silhouetted, crazed figure as he dashed out a frenzied version of Ikonika’s Please that you knew the night had reached its nexus, its defining moment.


Steve ‘Kode9’ Goodman was seen excitedly tip-toeing his way through piles of comatose obsessives, stapled to the d-floor like harebrained apparitions desperately picking their way through Plaid’s gem-encrusted setlist. Never have I left a venue feeling quite so terrorized both visually and aurally and yet wanting, needing more.

To say the night felt elemental in evaluating an era of deep cultural and artistic convergence would be stating the obvious: The Warp back-catalogue stands as a document of this innate parity. As the damaged clubbers stumbled back into the winter reality of South London deep into Sunday morning, the rain borrowed a fresh sense of clarity and retrospection into their furrowed brows. As a comprehensive exhibition of uncontrived talent and dedicated innovation, Warp20 was an effectual reminder of some of the true musical movers and shakers of the decade.