After over a decade of propelling techno in ever freakier and more cerebral directions, Warp Records can look forward to an unusually high profile in 2001. Radiohead's acknowledged homages to Warp artists like Autechre and The Aphex Twin on 'Kid A' have attracted plenty of inquisitive attention, for a start. Then there's a new album from the high priests of eerie ambience, Boards Of Canada, an intriguing debut from cult actor/director Vincent Gallo and - who knows?- maybe a rare sighting of the elusive Aphex himself.
To start the year, though, there's the kind of complex, pulverising future music that's been the label's genetically modified bread and butter for quite some time now. Richard Devine comes from Atlanta and normally records for the Schematics label, a Miami correlative to Warp, whose artists - notably the excellent Prefuse 73 - are starting to make headway over here. He first came to prominence remixing Aphex's landmark 'Come To Daddy' in 1999.
Devine's two basic modes are a kind of looming ambience underpinned by malfunctioning machinery; and hyperactive digital funk. The prototype for this, and much other avant-electronica, is Autechre's 'Anti', a track that made an explicit protest against the Criminal Justice Bill in 1994, when the playing of repetitive beats in public was made illegal. On 'Anti', no beats were repeated, as the rhythms constantly changed through the course of the track.
You can hear the same principle on Devine's 'Patelle', mindbending in its detailing and restlessness. Contrary to the chinstroking stereotype, this is not passive listening music; it's far too ferocious and exciting for that. Take 'Swap, Trigger', a kind of brutally mutated hip-hop that recalls German fellow travellers Funkstorung, or the artful devastation of 'Block, Variation', where crashing soundfiles are organised with strangely symphonic precision.
There's a slight disappointment that this adventurous-sounding music follows the label's template a little too faithfully at times. Devine has plainly mastered the induction stage of being a Warp artist; it remains to be seen whether he can evolve into as wilful and eccentric an artist as so many of his new labelmates. Still, for newcomers to the aesthetic, perhaps drawn in by Thom Yorke's adulation, 'Lip Switch' is a suitably difficult, high-quality place to begin.
