In the aftermath of Trish Keenan’s death earlier this year, I was wandering around Amoeba Music looking at music, and decided to pick up an out-of-print copy of The Noise Made By People, Broadcast’s LP debut, as a sort of penitence for never listening to them prior to that. It was well worth the 20 dollars, for it was some of the finest music I have listened to in a long time (I could go into detail, but this is a news story). Depressingly, I lost the CD due to the careless efforts of a certain person at my apartment, who didn’t bother to look into his receiver when he took it back without warning a couple months ago.
I’ll admit, talking about this is quite petty, but it makes me even more depressed and livid to think of this act of carelessness in light of a recent press release from Warp — Broadcast’s label. As some of you are aware, one of the largest casualties of the London riots instigated by some middle-class gangsters was the Sony DADC warehouse in North London that also housed PIAS’ main distribution hub. As we noted, Warp was among 150+ labels hurt by the total destruction of the warehouse, but only now has the label proclaimed the extent of the damage. In a press release, the label announced that their entire backstock, spanning the 21+ years of their existence, was destroyed in the fire. In immediate terms, this means that Battles’ next single, “My Machines” featuring Gary Numan, will not be available for physical release on August 15 (today), though it is still available for digital release. (Upcoming albums from Rustie, Plaid, and CANT are still being manufactured, and remain mostly unaffected.)
The bigger problem, as noted by the press release, is the rest of the backstock, including releases by Aphex Twin, Autechre, Plaid, and (of course) Broadcast that may have been out of print for some time. While Warp is currently attempting to recoup some of the losses through creating new stock and recovering stock from its international distributors, the label unfortunately acknowledges that “some releases may never be available physically again.”
Again, you can help out labels affected by the fire in various ways, which we’ve listed here. Until then…
• Warp: http://warp.net
