- Are you sitting comfortably? A cornerstone of "home listening music" turns 30.
- "We were at the end of a musical revolution (in the early '90s), and the real interesting part of music at that point… were the sessions when you came back from clubs—at 4 or 5 in the morning—and people would play tracks that… weren't intended for the dance floor." That was Steve Beckett, cofounder of Warp Records, speaking to a devilishly young Benji B for Red Bull Music Academy in 2007. Beckett was talking about the "post-rave" movement, which closed the door on acid house and the bleep and bass eras, and had been highly lucrative for the UK label. A new trend of electronic "listening music" was emerging, which Warp first identified and documented on 1992's Artificial Intelligence compilation.
One of the most important dance music records "not intended for dance floors" ever released, Artificial Intelligence celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, and as the first entry in the highly revered series of the same name, which ran from 1992 to 1994 and played a tremendous role in Warp's formative years. Records like Artificial Intelligence and B12's Electro-Soma created the blueprint for ambient techno and "intelligent dance music" to blow up in the mid-'90s. Rather shrewdly, the compilation placed Warp and its maverick team of electronic-nouveau producers—Autechre, B12, The Black Dog, Richie Hawtin, Speedy J and a young Aphex Twin—impressively ahead of the curve.
Enter Autechre. Two of the iconoclastic Warp duo's most melodic tracks feature on Artificial Intelligence. "The Egg" boasts slow, melodic piano keys drenched in fuzz, which skirt around choppy distorted vocals and oscillating bass wave sounds. Shapeshifting seamlessly through different melodic and percussive iterations, it's like an intergalactic chameleon, a masterpiece of the IDM sound that this compilation helped create. The tempo breakdown in the later stages of the track feels like a stroke of pure genius. ("The Egg" is actually a slowed-down version of "Eggshell," which would later appear on Autechre's album Incunabula.) "Crystel," on the other hand, is more representative of the duo's optimistic beginnings, before things became darker and experimental.
The Dice Man is an early alias for Warp's most celebrated artist, Aphex Twin. Although you can tell "Polygon Window" is from his early days, it doesn't feel dated. Ambient techno moodscapes blend with tubular kick drums and rich sonic oscillations form an intense sandstorm of melody. Here RDJ is young and playful in a fertile patch, just before he went on to release Surfing On Sine Waves and Selected Ambient Works 85-92, permanently etching his place into electronic music history as a master of eerie electronica. "Polygon Window" is a significant counterpoint in the catalogue of an elliptical artist who would define so many things not just for Warp, but British counterculture over the next thirty-odd years.
Another important, but often overlooked, act on the compilation was B12—Steve Rutter and Michael Golding—who left a huge footprint for the leftfield UK techno scene as B12. Here, under the guise of Musicology, they offer "Telefone 529," one of the most striking ambient techno tracks in their entire catalogue. It playfully samples vocals, bass and melodies from Kraftwerk's "The Telephone Call," and features a dive-bombing drum pattern arranged with a je-ne-sais-quoi deftness that encapsulates the atmosphere of the whole record—ethereal, but still grounded in rhythm.
If you look closely at the record's cover, you will notice that the sleeping android has Kraftwerk and Pink Floyd records on the floor. Illustrated by Ian Anderson of The Designers Republic—one of the pre-eminent firms of the time—the idea was to convey the message that the record was to be listened to: in its entirety from end to end, like Pink Floyd's The Dark Side Of The Moon, sat comfortably and focused—something that may have felt foreign to ravers at the time.
With that in mind, many of the tracks on Artificial Intelligence fit together because they are sonic artefacts taken from the same time, place and school of thought. Take "The Clan" by I.A.O.—AKA Ken Downie of The Black Dog—and "Telefone 529" by B12 for instance: the twinkly synths, artificial-sounding drums and slow meandering rhythms make everything feel in sync and computer-controlled, as if it's been generated by an alien AI. Juxtapose that neat idea with the reality of today's in-home technology, platform capitalism and behemoth streaming services and you have a hellscape on the boil.
Artificial Intelligence also cannily connected the dots between Warp's home in Sheffield and similar movements in Europe and North America. "Spiritual High" is a slab of melodic acid techno from UP!—an early alias for second-wave Detroit techno luminary Richie Hawtin—and "De-Orbit" is a strikingly warm early track from a young Speedy J of the Netherlands, who was deep in an ambient techno phase that would culminate in his masterpiece LP Ginger. "De-Orbit" meanders between styles: slow breakbeat, dark ambient techno, even early Detroit electro. What's most compelling is how the slow drum sample that appears about a minute in can completely transform into a melodic breakbeat monster when played at 45 RPM. It became a useful DJ tool which proved popular in LTJ Bukem sets from around that era (a story well-documented in the rich realm of YouTube comments).
Finally, there's "Loving You Live," credited to Dr. Alex Paterson but actually recorded by both members of The Orb. This one features lush water splashes, dolphin squeals, escalating keys and choral vocal rushes, a great set opener, closer or, as intended, something to put on when you get home from the rave, while the sun is rising but you're not quite ready to go to sleep. In purist fashion, The Orb are the only act on here to have embraced the ambient-music mantra for life, while others moved deeper into abstraction or onto the dance floor.
The compilation helped highlight a movement of talented people who identified something happening individually, then decided to do it differently, together. That's something often overlooked about Artificial Intelligence—this was a bunch of young guys who were being explorative and trying to do something fun—and different from what they were seeing at the time. The compilation was both timely and ahead-of-it's-time. The late Warp artist Chantal Passamonte (AKA Mira Calix) summed up the compilation quite perfectly in the following quote: "It was cementing something that was happening in one document. It was one album, it flowed well and it offered listeners a chance to discover new artists. It felt like the start of something, which is what it turned out to be."
TracklistA1 The Dice Man - Polygon Window
A2 Musicology - Telefone 529
A3 Autechre - Crystal
A4 I.A.O - The Clan
A5 Speedy J - De-Orbit
B1 Musicology - Premonition
B2 UP! - Spiritual High
B3 Autechre - The Egg
B4 Dr Alex Paterson - Loving You Live