The Null Device

Pioneering glitchtronica label Warp plan to sell their entire catalogue online -- as high-quality MP3s, not some sort of sadomasochistic DRM rubbish either. Certainly a good sign.

(Mind you, given that The Designers Republic are doing the site, chances are it will be inaccessible without Flash, so I probably won't be using it. Not until someone comes up with an "enable Flash for these sites but disable it for everything else" Mozilla patch.)

(Btw, anybody remember 4AD's foray into MP3 sales a few years ago? They had their entire back-catalogue available as 128kbps MP3s (somewhat naff, but better than nothing) for US$1 each from an outfit named Atomic Pop, replete with postage-stamp-sized JPEGs of artwork; unfortunately, they went tits-up some time later. I still have the copy of This Mortal Coil's 16 Days/Gathering Dust I bought from them.)

¶ 4ad mp3s the recording industry warp 0

Tonight I saw Warp: Film For Music, a collection of music videos and short films set to music from infamous glitch label Warp (home of Aphex Twin, Autechre and such). It was a mixed bag; Chris Cunningham's videos were quite good (including the Squarepusher one set in a Japanese children's mental hospital and Aphex Twin's Come To Daddy)' the Autechre Gantz Graf one was oddly compelling, but some of the others were a bit formless. The fact that some of the video seemed a bit blurry and degraded, detracting from the quality of the animations, didn't help; then again, perhaps that was intentional and I'm just not open-minded enough to appreciate it. (Though perhaps the way the sound kept cutting out through one track (by Plaid, I think) was intentional also; if so, it was, in my naïvely conservative opinion, a bad artistic judgment.) The set finished with Aphex Twin's ghetto-fabulous Windowlicker video.

I wonder whether Chris Cunningham is still planning to make a film of Neuromancer. True, the story would seem to the uninitiated like a poor ripoff of The Matrix, but I'm sure it'd work on the arthouse circuit.

¶ aphex twin chris cunningham film neuromancer warp 3