2010s: Favorite 30 Labels of the Decade

Astral Spirits

I can’t speak for everyone, but after my daily dispatch of news — divided between celebrating attacks on the defenseless, neglecting the rights of humans and the needs of our planet, and applauding the power, corruption, and lies practiced by our political and business leaders as normal behavior — I’m about ready for a new age, free of overwhelming anger and anxiety and apathy. Some, in fact, have already crossed into new orbits, working away from the sour sounds and ugly sides: specializing in small-run tapes, records, and publication releases (through its sister imprint, Monofonus Press), there was a flush and bloom on everything that Austin’s Astral Spirits did. Each new Astral Spirits release — be it an acrid avant-noise experiment, a set of electronic themes and incidental music, a fresh frisson of free-jazz and relaxed rock, or any combination thereof — brought some sort of positive spiritual therapy and “newness.” With already over 100 releases to its name in a little more than five years, Astral Spirits is a label of love that burns with the raving passion of, and for, the true fanatics of freedom and vision. If our idea of a great music label is one that shoots for the stars and hits them every time, then Astral Spirits is the label that will project us, if not into a new age, then at least into a new state of mind. –David Nadelle

Beer On The Rug

Seems kind of pointless to try to illustrate Beer On The Rug’s cultural impact this decade. I think we all realize the influence the label has had in regards to not only music, but also the entire fucking ＩＮＴＥＲＮＥＴ (*cough* see Macintosh Plus’s seminal Floral Shoppe, as well as many other classic ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣ albums *cough*).

Writing it off as a solely vaporwave label is misguided, though. BOTR was first and foremost a facilitator of zones, no matter the weather. Its greatest appeal was sonic depth and variety. Take, for instance, the phased-out bedroom-pop of earlier releases by Casino Gardens and Free Weed. Or the meditative club drone of Endo Kame. Or the unmistakably unique yet familiar mutant music of YYU. Then there’s the gloss and sheen of acts like Euglossine and Location Services, the video game walk-through of Graham Kartna, the mind-goo chopped funk & soul of Digital Natives, the hybrid psychedelic New Age trips of Dang Olsen Dream Tape, the robotic intestines and metal veins of Hollow Gem and SUSAN BALMAR, and so on.

But nothing lasts forever: the bulk of Beer on the Rug’s discography has disappeared from the internet — at least temporarily. When asked about this, BOTR responded that the label is “more focused on what’s to come as opposed to ground already covered,” while also trying to encourage fans to seek out physical copies. So, do BOTR and yourself a favor and hit up your favorite retailer, ya nerds! <3 <3 <3 –Bort

Constellation Tatsu

While the private press era of ambient and New Age is getting a much-deserved series of vinyl reissues and retrospectives, the current crop of Bandcamp labels churning out traditional and modern spins on ambient tropes have ushered in a new golden age. Throughout the 2010s, Oakland, CA’s Constellation Tatsu gently led the pack, unleashing some of the most soothing, meditative, and adventurous sounds committed to tape. “I like to imagine each cassette as a journey for the listener,” said founder Steven Ramsey in a 2014 interview about the label’s ethos. “One that brings the listener outside their comfort zone, brings them back to familiarity (a space to breathe) and in the end leaves one with a deep sense of exploratory-satisfaction.” Such adventures could be heard on cassettes that spanned Japanese guitar drones, hypnotic Midwest electronic experiments, and melancholy French pan pipes, just a few among the many highlights of Constellation Tatsu’s vast catalog. The label was as reliable as the seasons, putting out 2-4 tapes every quarter, each batch containing a diverse set of mellow drones, exploratory synth work, and lush electronics. Constellation Tatsu was perfect listening when you had a strong cup of tea, a comfortable seat, and the time to let your mind wander. –Jason C

Deathbomb Arc

Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of independent record labels come and go. Most have one thing in common: They’re moderately good for a moderate period of time. It’s unfortunate, but all business is tough business, and the business of music can be tougher than most. So, expecting a label to remain consistently wonderful for eternity is pure folly. An exception is Deathbomb Arc. Release after release, we didn’t know what we’d get from Brian Miller’s L.A.-based label, but it was certain that it’d be an altogether amazing journey, diming and priming our brains until the next excess. Starting with the simple wish of publishing music by Turbine, the Deathbomb catalogue has since showcased artists who are agonizingly true and scabrous and beautiful like JPEGMAFIA, Captain Ahab, clipping., Lana Del Rabies, Ed Balloon, and Miller’s Foot Village. Expect to make repeat visits to your Deathbomb Arc releases; you’ll find a gamut of artistic approaches arrayed and most reach musical (and often theatrical) sublimity. This “Genres Unknown” label has been around for 20 years, and the past 10 were as good as the first. You can bank on the next 10 being a helluva lot of boisterous fun, too. –David Nadelle

Erstwhile

The word “erstwhile,” of course, has within it the connotation of a remove, a reflective posture taken in the present directed toward the past. In trying to write an account of Erstwhile Records’s life over these past 10 years, I find myself in a position of nominative aptness, especially as Erstwhile finds itself celebrating its second full decade of life as the 2010s close.

As I listen back through its catalog — beginning with my own introduction to the label, Graham Lambkin & Jason Lescalleet’s Air Supply — I find myself confronting myself like in a hall of mirrors, with the distance promised by contemplation becoming effaced, my own history of listening reduplicating and reasserting itself. I try to define territory and distill some communicable experience from whatever stuff constitutes this listener, but any sort of critical sangfroid becomes an impossibility, as each second passes and each CD sings its last sound; as each composed silence melts into the improvised silence of the park, airport, funeral parlor, ICU, pool hall, bus, restaurant, post office, anechoic chamber; as my ability to bracket and sort phenomena becomes compromised; as my implication in this endeavor becomes increasingly entrenched in these spinal landscapes; as sound becomes space becomes impression becomes listener becomes sound becomes.

Toshiya Tsunoda, whose absolutely monumental Extract From Field Recording Archive will be the label’s last release of the decade, writes that “recorded material is like a map,” but the power of Erstwhile’s catalog was how it asked us to use this map. Like Borges’s imperial cartograph or Jarry’s sunken Paris, we traversed multiple territories along multiple trajectories simultaneously, and they held conversation, court, in our heads. Nothing corresponded without us listeners. The through line that linked the Erstwhilean vertebrae was a Cagean sensibility that emphasized the dizzying spatiotemporal particularity of any given sound — something that could never be separated from its context or its auditor. Sense, language, metaphor, metonymy, scraps of self all blended together. As soon as I hit play, there was no distinction between the world I lived in and that of an Esrtwhile release.

Some impressions over this past decade:

• Annette Krebs/Taku Unami - motubachii: wandering through construction sites in New Orleans during November
• Greg Kelley/Olivia Block - Resolution: waiting in an airport, January, and wondering if I made the right decision
• Graham Lambkin/Michael Pisaro - Schwarze Riesenfalter: December, falling asleep in my hospital bed and waking up to my neighbor crying
• Takahiro Kawaguchi/Utah Kawasaki - Amorphous Spores: sitting outside, around 2 AM in late May, in the darkness, as raccoons try to knock over my garbage can
• Kevin Drumm/Jason Lescalleet - Busman’s Holiday: vomiting while the harsh noise of “The Hunt” shreds my tiny desktop speakers, a different November
• Lucio Capece/Marc Baron - My Trust in You: riding an empty train, headed for Charleston, South Carolina in July, toward a miserable occasion
• Matthew Revert/Vanessa Rossetto - Everyone Needs a Plan: September
• Jurg Frey - l’âme est sans retenue I: writing this, a third November

Speaking of free improvisation or eai or onkyo or Wandelweiser or even collaboration and community does little, I think, to explain what exactly has been accomplished within the Erstwhile catalog over this decade. I suppose all music writing must fail in this regard, as by representation and conceptual schema we grow more distant from what we intended to engage with an erster Stelle. The more I rely on language, the more I betray my intention — that kernel of significance I desperately hope to make legible for others. All I can really do is recommend that you gather yourself, gather your world, gather your CDs, and listen. –Cynocephalus

Hausu Mountain

There is a small technical distinction between a level and a zone. In video game design, a level is always tied to the completion of a specific set of goals. A zone, however, is just a space that players and in-game characters share. It may have restrictions and change depending on the players, but there’s no need to solve or achieve anything to gain access. No wonder Hausu Mountain framed a lot of what it’s released this decade under those terms. The zones it invited us into — including, of course, the Cool Zones batches it used to put out — felt like places we could spawn in or drift into while retaining the thrilling euphoria of a video game bonus stage.

While any origin story of the Chicago label, founded by Doug Kaplan and Max Allison (ex-TMTer Mukqs), will include references to video game music, other important touchstones were Ralph Records and the jam band scene, an unlikely mixture that had inspired them since the label’s inception in 2012. Of course, even if Kaplan and Allison are old enough to have caught the right fumes seeping from underneath their Phish-loving brother’s doors, Hausu Mountain’s music sounded nothing like Trey Anastasio’s. Instead, Hausu Mountain shared with that scene a genuine spirit of communal celebration, opening portals into some fascinating weirdness without wanting to be hectoring, each release exploring the extent to which strange, eccentric art could also be fun and exciting.

Alongside Natalie Chami, Kaplan and Allison are also Good Willsmith, the mothership, for it was the musical project that started the label. Yet their kosmische explorations were just one side of what Hausu Mountain offered. There was also the warped improvisational vibes of Moth Cock, the MIDI dreamscapes of Nonlocal Forecast, the gonzo footwork by Khaki Blazer, the gleeful reimagination of library music from Euglossine, the mutating collages of Eartheater, the glitchy attack on cyberpunk tropes mounted by Fire-Toolz, the densely human reveries of TALsounds, and so much more. Each of these albums and artists were key to understanding the unique community that coalesced around Hausu Mountain, a group of creators and fans who continue to call us into the next, unexplored zone. On to the following peak. And you can bet a long, strange trip awaits. –jrodriguez6

Hippos In Tanks

It’s rare to witness a label having such a deep, long-lasting impact on the aesthetics of an entire decade, but that is what Hippos in Tanks gave us in just over four years of existence. Barron Machat and Travis Woolsey upholstered the foundation of an entire internet, propelling their lineup with Machat’s familial industry connections and a genuine drive to give experimental art a place in the limelight. Whether it was James Ferraro’s ringtone plasticity, Hype Williams’ camouflaged psychology, Laurel Halo’s technicolor dreamcoat, or Daniel Lopatin’s primordial strangeness with Joel Ford in Games, Hippos in Tanks put them all on glorious display, consecrating wildly innovative works onto one star-studded label, artists who by the way are now among the titans of weirdo music.

2019’s cultural landscape makes Machat’s passing in 2015 that much more bitter. His vision of Daniel Lopatin and Arca going platinum has become closer to reality, given the former’s work with A24 and FKA twigs, and the latter’s with Kanye West and Frank Ocean. But regardless of relative reach and fame, the collective produced radically exciting work, from Autre Ne Veut to ADR to Inga Copeland to Teams to Triad God. That Hippos in Tanks is now four years defunct but still leaves behind such a heavy footprint on avant-culture speaks to the label’s sustained vision and magnetic allure. This decade would’ve sounded very different without it. –Eli Schoop

Hospital Productions

Ever prolificacy’s flexing blister, Hospital Productions popped off scalding on both sides of this 21st-century score. Label head Dominick Fernow’s impressive work as Prurient, Vatican Shadow, and Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement aside, there’s been more than enough varied, singular releases to make one forget all about the noise luminary in charge of curating ‘em. That cold grip so indelibly extended and fused with the label’s refined aesthetic that there could then be a judicious sort of expansion to what could constitute uplift. There has always been an important wallow/confront through line, yet Fernow cumulatively succeeded in showing the emotional/temporal breadth possible within its fathomless nest of screeching abattoirs.

To put it another way, Hospital continued to thrive on being as much a host to the dodgy thematic propositions traditionally inherent to power electronics as a stalwart, scrutiny-bearing, and adaptable institution. Despite its 2011 ascension from NYC brick and mortar to internet streaming limbo, the last 10 years (most recently with a lil push from Mike/Tara Connelly and Greh Holger’s essential NOISEXTRA podcast) have seen its imposing roster’s ills tempered to a fine, clean-slicing glint.

The radiant onslaught of both newer (Silent Servant, Ninos Du Brasil, Dedekind Cut) and classic (Linekraft, Skin Crime, Orphx) innovators were taxed and taxing by design, eschewing easy ins and, when performing pop moves, doing so on shrewd, hard-won terms. But at the same time, this label spoiled us rotten. L.I.E.S. founder Ron Morelli gave us half a dozen handsome doom-laden house rippers, and we were showered with exquisite mixes, edifying reissues, and stellar showcases… We shouldn’t be so damn accommodated — it’s unbecoming! But, there we were — Pioughd. Thanks a lot, Hospital! –Willcoma

Hyperdub

Hyperdub entered this decade as one of the most exciting new labels of a generation, but also one of the most scrutinized. After all, how do you even calculate the amount of pressure put on a label who introduced the world to Burial with its first release? Just like the shadowy, mysterious, and sensitive work of its most famous artist, Hyperdub never even blinked at the challenge and became even more profound, with founder Kode9 doubling down again and again on cultivating artists across genres and generations. Brave experiments like Laurel Halo’s Quarantine and Dean Blunt & Inga Copeland’s Black Is Beautiful later gave way to respective breakthroughs like Dust and The Redeemer. Along the way, it provided a platform for genre-defining releases from Cooly G and DJ Rashad, as well as a caring support when the latter’s tragic death threatened the entire footwork scene’s stability. The label even showed veteran video game composers like Yuzo Koshiro the audiences they never realized they had and merged avant-garde and pop with a rare, holistic vision through artists such as Jesse Lanza and Klein.

Hyperdub didn’t walk the line, it drew it, and its legacy will always be in looking to the future by believing in its artists now. –Miles Bowe

Kranky

With records like Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven and Deerhunter’s Cryptograms, Kranky absolutely crushed the 90s and 00s. But it certainly didn’t slow down for this decade. As its 25th anniversary passed last year, the label continued to pump out quality releases from artists constantly pushing the envelope of ambient, drone, and the outer realms of techno.

Two artists in particular stood out: Liz Harris, whose work as Grouper this decade (2011’s A I A: Alien Loss, 2014’s Ruins) rivaled anyone’s; and Tim Hecker, whose compositions continue to explore the reaches of possibility, especially on last year’s Konoyo. But dig deeper and there was plenty more, from the powerfully patient work of A Winged Victory for the Sullen, to the ayahuasca brilliance of Dedekind Cut, to the forays into psych-rock with Lockett Pundt’s Lotus Plaza, to Harris’s spinoffs into full-band territory, Mirrorring and Helen, all of which wonderfully demonstrated just how expansive Kranky’s sound and roster are.

Clearly intent on fostering its artists’ exploration of every kind of marginal space, Kranky’s output therefore had a sort of mutable quality that made it tough to pin down. Perhaps MJ Guider, who debuted her post-punk dream pop on the label in 2016, summed it up best: “It’s mood and temperament. There are so many different styles, but it’s all very introspective and heady, very comforting but very alien at the same time.” So basically, the future. –Reggie MT

La Vida Es Un Mus

La Vida Es Un Mus has been shaping and documenting happenings in global punk and hardcore for the better part of the past decade, with a global yet precisely curated approach that set them apart. By intertwining surefire instant classics from Los Crudos, Limp Wrist, Dawn of Humans, Rakta, and Blazing Eye with the developing mini-discographies and flash-in-the-pan records by new punk auteurs like Woolf, Exotica, Permission, Rixe, Runt, La Misma, Nomad, and Juanita y Los Feos, La Vida Es Un Mus exemplified a label’s truly accelerated cyber-punk potential in the world today.

As the disclaimer on the La Vida Es Un Mus site states, “LVEUM is just one person.” While that might not be entirely unusual these days, it lends some clarity to the label’s unified voice and continuity over the years. It also lends some incredulity to its output, which recently hit 200 releases. A listen through any window of its now-vast discography would give a singular but cohesive story of hardcore as it existed in networks around the globe. Qualitatively, the music tended toward the bare-bones, hard-edged, dissonant, idiosyncratic, and disorienting, all of it like a runaway train (and documented by intermittent email newsletters detailing the latest half-dozen or so of releases, sometimes accompanied by personal notes of exhaustion).

While the label has been a guide through much of the most interesting and fully-realized hardcore today, I’d be remiss to not mention other labels Erste Theke Tontraeger, Static Shock, Iron Lung, Drunken Sailor, and Toxic State, who all seemed to, at one time or another, collaborate for the occasional international co-release. Punk, at its best, is a network and so much more than a few institutions, but LVEUM’s distinctive and attractive voice was so appealing for the way it shaped our taste and provided a nexus from which one could branch out to hardcore from around the world.

I would be kidding myself if I thought I could present you a list of the label’s greatest (and thus imply that I’ve heard anything close to the entire discography), but besides those mentioned above, special nuggets include Woolf’s debut EP, Slender’s Walled Garden, Ohyda’s self-titled LP, Belgrado’s Obraz, and ASID’s Asid Tracks II. More truthfully, I recommend you browse the many offerings on Bandcamp, pick any one of the beautiful covers that might catch your eye, and hit play. Chances are, it rips. –B. Levinson

N.A.A.F.I

Mexico City’s N.A.A.F.I gave us a blueprint for an era. Its tactics, both sonic and social, stretched across territories, histories, and geologies, enfolding like-minded producers, rappers, and singers from the new and old club capitals of the world. With N.A.A.F.I, we became accustomed to the previously unimagined intimacies that connected grime’s oil-slicked futurism to jersey club’s buoyancy, the ways in which shards of glass on the ballroom floor could be thrown into baile club’s exhaust fumes. As the decade unfolded, N.A.A.F.I brought these elements into ever stranger syntheses; to trace the line from Javier Estrada’s Tribal Prehispánico to Lechuga Zafiro’s Testigo is to watch the club be consumed from within, to see its walls brought down by Zutzut’s hyperarticulated drums and Lao’s frigid minimalism. We kept dancing, though; we kept singing, too, to Ciara and Drake, who we welcomed into our underground with open arms. And we had new voices to greet them with, Embaci and Defensa, Linn da Quebrada and MC Bin Laden, voices that were both cute and deadly, voices that fucked and cried and danced with the same intensity and the same determination. We knew things were bad, that the world was ending, and so we needed tactics, ways to survive, sounds to make our own. And then, perhaps, in our own minor ways, we could find ways to continue. For our delirious times: N.A.A.F.I.

An epilogue, from Riobamba, one of many continuing after N.A.A.F.I: “It’s so important to create space for complicating the narrative of the music coming from Latin America, to talk about party vibes just as much as the suffering, violence, the dark shit that happens, and for having club music as a context for this broader range of emotions.” With N.A.A.F.I, beneath the club, the world. –Rafael Lubner

NON

Politics is thought, thought is real, people think: concepts dance, concepts descend, concepts demur, concepts demand. Which is all to say that the conceptual work undertaken by the denizens of NON — from its figureheads to its affiliates — has both a thick history and a kinetic present, confined neither to the dulling mediation and algorithmic monetization of internet flows nor the acquisitive enclosure of institutionalized art spaces.

Illegible to an aspirationally empirical framework partitioning strictly delimited spheres of action — into, for instance, the cultural, the “properly” political, and the economic — the unlicensed citizens of NON refused the metaphor of accessibility that reifies a normative subject of both critique and practice. Nonperformance (or NON’s performance) radicalized the grooves and contours of conceptual possibility, its transnational drift and insolent allegiance to borderless excess a rebuff to any categorization that sought to corral NON’s conceptual legwork within a whitewashed genealogy of avant-gardist esotericism. NON rejected the figure of the dumb proletarian deaf to the soundings of nonperformance, his dumb aperture the narrow constabulary of statist representation. Because sound is politics, politics is thought, thought is real, people think.

Nonperformance, legally speaking, designates the failure to fulfill a contractual obligation. Nonperformance, as Sora Han and Fred Moten and Nkisi and Angel-Ho and Chino Amobi and Embaci and Zarai and Klein and FAKA and MORO and MHYSA and Why Be and Mya Gomez and Alex Zhang Hungtai taught us, provincialized the prescriptions and projections plotted by the teleology of the contract and pries open a radical indeterminacy in whose uncertainty radical practice just might interrupt the reproduction of the lethal extant. When the contract has always ordained a form of death, and when death limns the choreographies of the necropolitical ordinary premised on the ongoing expropriation and extermination of diasporic intimacies and improvisations alike, the stakes of sound and thought and practice for NON-citizens refigured the very terrain that conceptual labor must make its irreducible horizon. –Benjamin Eckman Bieser

Not Not Fun

If you started a record label in 2004, chances are that in 2019 you’re working your way up the management ladder in the private sector, paying down a mortgage, turning down going to shows to hit up hardware stores on Saturday mornings, and occasionally looking in the mirror and thinking to yourself, “Oh yeah, I had a record label one time.” Not so for Los Angeles label Not Not Fun (at least on the latter), which has been plugging away for 15 years. Bedroom psychedelia, experimental dub, late-night shamanic synths, journeyman rock, and trippy ambient tones littered its vast discography, which has been so prolific that for a few years in the early 2010s it was putting out over a dozen releases per year. While the output has recently slowed down (it released three tapes this year), the quality remained spot on. As label co-founder Britt Brown said to our very own C Monster back in 2014, “You need to constantly feel like the shit you’re putting out NOW is as awesome as anything you’ve ever done. The current crop should always be your favorite.” And he meant it. Throughout the years, Not Not Fun magnificently highlighted a varied roster of artists and scenes from all over the globe, running so deep that listeners of all tastes could find at least one release, if not nearly a dozen, that got them nodding their heads and moving their feet. –JasonC

Nyege Nyege Tapes

Nyege Nyege, so the oft-touted tidbit goes, names “the feeling of a sudden uncontrollable urge to move, shake or dance” in the Lugandan tongue. It’s a catchy soundbite, for sure, but it still doesn’t quite capture the full and total en-/un-meshing of ourselves to and from our bodies and our machines, our feet from our brains, all in the spirit of the Dance. That might be getting some of the way there toward describing Nyege Nyege Tapes’s impact on the TMT hive mind in the latter portion of this decade.

While the tape side of operations was inaugurated in 2017, Nyege Nyege had its origins as a party, a studio, and a festival in Uganda, as is befitting a label with such a grounding in the intensely material, ritualistic experience of the Dance. As we veer into the new decade, the label’s reach now stretches beyond Uganda’s borders and into other parts of East Africa; it even has a nifty sub-label in Hakuna Kulala and a few vinyl LPs, to boot. Generic specializations played their role in Nyege Nyege’s outreach — electro acholi was repped by stalwarts Otim Alpha and Leo PaLayeng, and we’d be remiss not to mention singeli and the Sisso crew — but what made it so tantalizing to follow was a no-holds-barred, anything-goes approach to releasing and promoting truly vital music from the continent and beyond. To reductively reel off a few names, we had Riddlore’s psychedelic Afromutations, Jako Maron’s reimagining of the native maloya music of Réunion, and the unmoored live band theatrics of Nihiloxica, as well as my personal favorites from Otim Alpha, Slikback, and Duke (linked above).

Fragmentation and glocalization, fostered by the internet (of course), are by now fairly fundamental girders for understanding the state of play in music and its distribution to the four corners of this trash earth. Nyege Nyege Tapes became a pillar of the 2010s by reckoning with and harnessing the streams of hype that coalesced around the most intriguing global sounds throughout the decade, but its commitment to placing its artists front and center, and, above all else, releasing killer tunes, is far more likely to be what we remember the label by when we gaze back upon this rarefied juncture. Soundbite earned! –Soe Jherwood

Orange Milk

There are many ways to describe Orange Milk’s decade, but one great way would involve Keith Rankin’s art. The man behind Giant Claw (ex-TMTer Keith Kawaii) founded the label with Seth Graham in late 2010, and both have released amazing solo music on it (as well as together as Cream Juice). However, as Orange Milk’s ostensible art director, Rankin also captured the label’s ethos through a collection of covers in the uncanniest ways. It’s an art we couldn’t easily pin a descriptor on. Surreal? Retro-futuristic? Video game-inspired? I mean, in the cover for Foodman’s Ez Minzoku, there is a decapitated head vomiting stairs, surrounded by giant pieces of floating fruit, incongruous shapes, and a severed hand. And that’s just one example of Orange Milk’s many fascinating covers. These pieces of art stood as extraordinary palimpsests of our digital age, just as much as any of the music released by the label.

Such is the strength of Rankin’s art and the symbiosis it had achieved with the music Orange Milk came to (re)present. And we certainly wouldn’t want to sell the label short on its musical merits. A quick look at its catalogue reveals many indispensable names when writing anything approximating a history of underground / experimental / electronic music in the 2010s: DJWWWW, Fire-Toolz, Foodman, Toiret Status, Galen Tipton, death’s dynamic shroud.wmv, EQ Why, etc. But such a wide array of music is far from implying a monolithic ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣ. Though there were common traits among its cohorts, Orange Milk was also home to Machine Girl’s internet punk, luxury elite’s vaporwave orthodoxy, and Nmesh’s cultural hallucinations. Even within the confines of synth-centric experimentation, its releases stretched from Jerry Paper’s quasi-pop leanings to HCJM’s incursions into the noisier quadrants of hypnagogia. The same applied to temporality and geography: Orange Milk showcased the eccentric Midwestern prodigy of Larry Wish, the unearthed works of Russian electronic music pioneer Noah Creshevsky, and the Argentinean avant-garde dispatches in Aylu’s Walden.

But these were not mere quantitative achievements. Orange Milk’s visionary character came from a realization that the museum items of the future were the meaningless trinkets of today. In all likelihood, some centuries from now, even some of the most random aspects of our culture will survive and share space with the older garbage we already impute fictitious meaning upon. Graham and Rankin wanted to start that process right away, putting such polysemic collisions to music. In the process, they have chronicled the maelstrom of a decade, where the past, present, and future stretched, connected, and spliced, even in spite of ourselves. –jrodriguez6

PAN

Origins are no longer very fashionable, riddled as they are with their implicit valuational schemes, silenced occlusions, and constitutive forgettings. But the anachronism of origin can offer small comforts — a stoop to rest your feet on after a long night of dancing, the ease of an old friend’s laugh — that make it just a little easier to recount, to recapitulate, to relate. PAN is not the first Berlin-based experimental electronic music label, but it is an origin for me.

By which I mean: PAN is a place to start and a place to return to. PAN is a point of entry, a crevice that sunders as it swallows, an open invitation you can’t refuse. When Piteous Gate swung wide open and ushered me into the break, into label head Bill Kouligas’s meticulously assembled constellation of experimentalisms past and present, I found no possible orientation to PAN other than headlong.

Yes, I arrived late. And to the cratediggers and the old heads, I will always be late.

All sorts of antecedents elude me, but PAN remains a point of reference so extensive and generous and inexhaustible that it offers inroads backward and forward into the novelty of newfound origins, of traces and milestones. There’s mono no aware’s stratigraphy of transience, Ghédalia Tazartès’s found sound assemblages, Sewer Election’s tape sadism, Lee Gamble’s jungle ruminations and disfigurations, and Pan Daijing’s opera of ache — all inviting rapt attention while beckoning elsewhere, gently.

And then, of course, the beats: at once disarming and rousing, transportative and grounding, familiar and inaugural. When shit bangs like Damaged Merc, Motion, Raven Yr Own Worl, Another Life, or Superlative Fatigue, one is not prone to forgetting. Getting bodied so hard leaves an imprint.

All of which is to say that I am not interested in any history of this decade that neglects the impact of PAN on the ear or the gut. And I think that’s what I mean by an origin: something you wouldn’t be here without. Something that makes you question how to begin. –Benjamin Eckman Bieser

PC Music

Pop culture is an economy of signs; commercial pop artifacts are repositories of signs, which are the economy’s currency. Baudrillard names it sign value: it’s how Starbucks sets obscene prices on cheap commodities, relative to their ordinary exchange value; it’s how Kanye sells plain Ts for the cost of my entire wardrobe. Brands are a type of sign, yet signs aren’t limited to brands, nor are brands limited to material culture. Katy Perry is a brand whose sign value fluctuates with its different expressions across time: from quasi-edgy pop rebel to bubblegum party girl to socially-conscious activist. While the currency of Katy Perry as sign may persist, the signified changes just as Katy Perry, the signifier, alters her form accordingly — just as a paper rectangle might be recycled from a $1 mark into a €50 mark.

Just as language is a hermetic system whose signifiers convey arbitrary meanings & are meaningful only in relation to each other (i.e., they’re tautological), so the economy of pop culture functions via its own arbitrary signifiers & self-referentiality. PC Music was born in this discursive environment as a platform that accelerates tautology via a genuinely irresistible pop aesthetic in order to vacate pop culture signs of their signified & thus expose the shell of the mere signifier itself, which is glorified, interrogated, celebrated, & ridiculed by turns. Where commercial pop artists often give us reactionary gestures of gravity that deemphasize the naiveté of the “idol” persona, for example, PC Music offered us saccharine synths, high-pitched vocals, & exaggerated femininities, harmonized through a clubby veneer that was decidedly non-threatening & for that very reason quite often uncanny.

Perhaps there’s a risk of “over-analyzing” what’s enjoyable about pop music in its own right; for better or for worse, the growing popularity of SOPHIE & Charli XCX isn’t owed to post-structuralism. Nonetheless, that PC Music’s aesthetic sincerity was uncanny should give pause; often the crew offered us forms that felt almost too obvious. But, as Althusser pointed out, that which is “obvious” is precisely so inasmuch as it’s rooted in ideology: Flourishing in the same decade that gave us vaporwave & deconstructed club, PC Music furthered a broader ongoing reflective process by which we came to terms with the evolution of the discourse of pop culture over the past several decades & its state, place, & role within the capitalist ecosystem today. –Baldr Eldursson

Planet Mu

With Machinedrum’s epic Room(s) (2011) and DJ Nate’s mind-bending footwork in Da Trak Genious (2010), Planet Mu started the decade off fuckin’ HOT. And it just kept the hits coming, hits that bridged the divide between UK bass, future garage, and Chicago ghetto tech, fusing so many different influences together to create something truly unique, vital, and global.

For me, the Planet Mu record that stands out most this decade is the underrated 2013 gem John Wizards, where a South African production savant joined a Rwandan refugee to produce a Shangaan electro album with the dreamlike magical quality that extended it way beyond the townships. But there are so many more: Jlin’s revolutionary, kinetic insanity on Black Origami (2017); RP Boo’s hypnotic juke on I’ll Tell You What (2018); Konx-om-Pax’s foray into the club and the bliss of the carefree comedown on Ways of Seeing (2019).

And that’s not it! Planet Mu’s artists (Ital Tek and Kuedo, in particular) kept pushing the wonky subset known as purple sound forward, moving it into a kind of Tangerine Dream-meets-footwork utopia that I never wanted to leave. And then somehow the Holy Mu kept pumping out releases by IDM legends like u-ziq and Venetian Snares while exploring new directions in deconstructed club (Antwood’s three full-lengths) and ambient (Meemo Comma’s brilliant release this year, Sleepmoss).

Writing this decade piece, I kept feeling like all this shit is criminally underrated. And it is! Without Planet Mu, music would be a lot worse off. Its artists simply never stopped moving forward. I’d try to predict where the label is heading in the next 10 years, but sorry, I’m bonged out dreaming my way though John Wizards. –Reggie MT

Príncipe Discos

There’s no way to talk about dance music trends over the past decade without mentioning kuduro & its diasporic turn. From Jennifer Lopez plagiarizing trans icon Titica to the countless producers globally incorporating the Angolan dance rhythm into the architecture of their beats, kuduro shows no signs of dying out. But rearticulation — that’s another thing. Coalescing into a dance scene during the turbulent period of Angola’s struggle for independence, kuduro took on new life in the Portuguese métropole, as second-generation migrants infused the scene with tougher club sounds, oblique cultural references, humorous samples, & a healthy amount of experimentation.

Príncipe Discos deserves major credit for bolstering that once marginal scene to the mainstream, which goes back as early as 2006, when a group of DJs from the Lisbon projects got together to release a massive compilation of tracks spanning the stylistic range of kuduro, batida, tarraxo, & more. While Príncipe’s first proper releases came out a few years after, its core ensemble of DJs hasn’t changed much, save a few surprising & exciting new additions. Most DJs featured on the original mixtape (e.g., DJ Marfox, DJ Nervoso, DJ N.K.) are going strong today, & others from the early days are reaching new audiences with international shows & releases on other imprints, most notably Warp. Tracking the scene’s evolution through its key artists in real time is a true joy: it’s watching the kids on the block grow up & shine beyond everyone’s expectations.

None of this would’ve been possible without Príncipe, which is both a space to rearticulate community identity & make sense of history, & a form of resistance against the otherwise racist discourse of “ghetto” — a term & aesthetic these artists have wholly reclaimed. From Noite Príncipe, the regular dance party hosted by the Príncipe crew going on its eighth year now, to the genuinely iconic artwork of Márcio Matos that adorns & unifies these artists’ releases both on Príncipe & beyond, there’s just no talking about the Lisbon scene without talking about Príncipe Discos. Because it’s not just a record label, but a scene & — no pun intended — a movement. –Baldr Eldursson

Psalmus Diuersae

The label’s name is so on the nose that its Latin-to-English translation feels like a front.

Psalmus Diuersae ⇔ Various Songs. Strip away the ancient mystery associated with classical languages and you’re left with a clinical phrase — a signifier one might find Sharpied on a strip of tape stuck to a filing cabinet. In a decade that gave us a record simply titled Some Rap Songs and normalized distribution via data dump, Psalmus represented the ultimate deconstruction of a record label, doing as much to obfuscate the output and identities of its artists as it did to distribute their work.

Now only accessible through archived copies of its currently-blank website, Lyla Perry’s netlabel (est. 2014?) was an ever-changing library of sound collages, free-jazz exploration, and .pdf files of notebook scribblings, each installment seemingly transmitted from a world just beyond our understanding. From its sparsely-furnished homepage, which housed little more than black hyperlinks on a cream-colored backdrop, visitors were left to their own navigational devices. Clicking on one at random could lead you to a zip file of electroacoustic dreamscapes, a dadaist collage, even an ASMR video. It was a step back into the pastoral internet of the mid-aughts — unpolished and intimate, if not a little scary. Files could disappear or transform overnight. Many of our own posts featuring Psalmus’s work feature now-broken links and can’t be accessed via streaming services. It’s hard to tell whether listeners were meant to be in on a complex inside joke, or were its subject.

Most notably, Psalmus Diuersae introduced us to many of our favorite online personae. Emamouse, a Tokyo-based folktronica producer who performs wearing a felt mask, released a handful of records (and a manga/short film!) through the imprint. Lyla’s pseudonymous project /f earned our EUREKA! distinction in 2014, and has continued to crank out inscrutable noise epics ever since. We still treasure Hari Han’s feathery ambient compositions and crayon drawings.

As long as our hard drives stay intact and the Wayback Machine stays up and running, so too will Lyla Perry’s atavistic vision of a simpler netscape: an age of Mediafire blogs and niche forum communities. The mediums — .wavs, .pdfs, .mp4s — were always the message. The rest is just noise. –Jude Noel

PTP

Earlier this year, sonic vagabond and TMT favorite Lolina begged the question: “Who is experimental music?” Sneakily dissonant in its syntax — staging an ostensible confrontation between the nominative case of the interrogative pronoun and the fiercely contested conjuncture of “music” and “the experimental” — the provocation at once ridicules the hagiographic critical paradigm staking out “the experimental” as the exclusive domain of canonical white men (rest in piss, Harold Bloom!) and underhandedly poses the possibility that experimental art-making can (or is it must?) transgress boundaries demarcating classical distinctions between subject and object, artist and audience, process and product.

At PTP, the unstinting, unsettling, unfinished experimental work of care repaired these alienated categories; bodies and merchandise, rigidly disaggregated and arranged in the seething chain seized and drained by capital, conspired to relate otherwise. Accomplices swerved and ducked out of tallied position to take care, not stock.

“This is a care without responsibility, a care without guarantees, placed in danger.”

PTP’s beautiful experiment eluded capture of any sort, insisting on a notion of “the experimental” that baffled the purse-clutching, land-grabbing, back-stabbing claims of hermeticity and autonomy; that reneged on those reified proprieties; that weaponized relation between sound, saliva, self-preservation, city, personae, paraffin.

On gang/on Geng: “the curator becomes the accomplice when she helps to produce this uncomfortable care, a care that is dangerous, made together but open to anyone and anything, a beautiful care that enlivens attention, heightens sense till sense and meaning coincide.” Drawing from and experimenting with the rich collective productions, social reimaginings, and conspiratorial caretakings tagged and thumping throughout NYC — Wu Tang, Powerule Crew, Mobb Deep — caretaker Geng less curated than colluded, clearing space within the chokeholding architectures of foreclosure and incarceration for séances of breath, ugly cries , lustrous comeups, and, above all, love stories .

Because it was all love. –Benjamin Eckman Bieser

Recital

Despite our best efforts, the past won’t let us go. Throughout the last decade, Sean McCann’s Recital label allayed that encumbrance, carried on its own shoulders the weight of abandoned aesthetic traditions, and became itself a catalog of musical histories in reformation. Sean McCann’s Music for Private Ensemble was a rapturous bounty; Ian William Craig’s A Turn of Breath was untouchably smoldering; Sarah Davachi’s Let Night Come On Bells End the Day eked out pleasure in mellifluous drones; Karla Borecky was genteel, Matthew Sullivan celestial, Roger Eno like white smoke. Recital carved lines in the stone of history between what came before and what happens now, and, in essential projects like the singularly ambitious and collaborative “dream LP” Simple Affections, made music of coinciding voices.

But that’s only half the legend told. Recital was not just a counselor of progress, but an antiquary of a musical underground, a collator of collapsed time and lost sagas that were invariably a blessing to receive: unearthed sound experiments and poetry from legends like Dick Higgins, François Dufrêne, and Geoffrey Hendricks; unreleased folk curios by The Ivytree; reverent reissues from Loren Connors; and unexpected one-offs like the live radioplays of Towards a Total Poetry. Every Recital release, regardless of source or inspiration, was an exquisite surprise to be discovered, a celebration of some obscure class of workmanship, and a niche of warm appreciation for anomalous art and its authors.

Reading McCann’s publicity notes for each release, one gets the impression that Recital as a marvel of curation could only exist in a digital environment that allowed for immediate contact between globally divergent artists and collaborators, yet the label’s entire project was to honor the record of a past dotted with insular, regional scenes distinguished by a particular grade of experimentation. Heading into the uncharted horizon of a new decade, Recital remains an unparalleled museum for tomorrow. Its artifacts are sanctuary. –Colin Fitzgerald

Room40

This decade began auspiciously for the Australian field recordist Lawrence English, and it has only improved since. On January 1, 2010, English’s label Room40 released its 10th-anniversary compilation, titled simply 10. If we’re lucky enough to see 20 drop this coming January, it will highlight an impressive roster recruited in the label’s second decade. Room40 has seen luminaries including Portuguese improviser Rafael Toral, English sound theorist David Toop, and Japanese insane person Merzbow join its ranks in the past 10 years.

Room40’s remit is to blur the boundaries between noise, ambience, and field recordings. English himself led the way in the 2010s with two major statements on the relationship between noise and political expression: an exploration of informational repetition by way of feedback loops on Wilderness of Mirrors (2014) and a meditation on affective responses to global catastrophe on Cruel Optimism (2017). On the ambient side, Richard Chartier’s pinkcourtesyphone project arranged sizable blocks of reverb and distortion into beguiling shapes on Elegant and Detached (2012) and Indelicate Slices (2017); on the field recording side, this year’s haunting Waking, She Heard the Fluttering by Alexandra Spence wrests beauty and horror out of found sound.

Actually, looking back, it seems that Room40 has fulfilled its remit. The boundaries are blurred. Attempts at categorization have been defied. Spence’s field recordings are noisy as hell. English’s noise comes in waves of ambience. Pinkcourtesyphone’s ambience roars into noise and subsides into clips of found sound. Room40’s new goal for the 2020s? Continue honing what can only be called “the Room40 sound.” –Nom de Plume

RVNG Intl.

I’m notorious for effing up quotes, but I will never stop collecting them. One I wrote down ages ago is by artist Rita Ackermann about Michael Jackson, how “He was able to compress a bulldozer and Bambi into one song. That’s also the main focus of my own work. I want to show such a duality in its most raw form — with a fragility that triggers aggression.” This seems to sum up the work philosophy of Brooklyn’s RVNG Intl. Co-founded and run by Matt Werth, the label has since 2003 gathered seemingly incongruent threads and woven them into complex pieces. Each release was like a trip through the looking glass, to test the limits of music and language. And with its FRKWYS series, it unleashed some of the most memorable and meaningful mishmashes of the last decade in experimental and new music. Painstaking rumination might be behind its releases — from its regular issues and the aforementioned collaborations to its Beats in Space, Freedom to Spend, and ReRVNG archival choices — but I like to think the label came to these musical inventions freely, with a willingness to try almost anything to bring something “new” into the often-tired landscape. Going against the grain of the current climate, RVNG Intl. has issued works that capture a fresh strangeness and an artistic freedom that few labels would tolerate. Music should make us feel, and if you can’t feel the music released by RVNG Intl., what can you feel? –David Nadelle

Sacred Bones

They’re Pokémon cards; they’re comic books tucked in plastic sleeves; they’re cereal boxes lined up on a supermarket shelf. Sacred Bones’s record sleeves are as integral to the Brooklyn label’s success as its penchant for post-punk and crepuscular aesthetic. Almost all of them are stamped with an ouroboros and imprinted with a tracklist that resembles a list of active ingredients — a letterhead logo that feels almost clinical, imposing order on the discography’s array of ghoulish and psychedelic artwork. There’s an obsessive need to collect them all that stems from the intersection between uniformity and variety. The catalog numbers are even printed prominently on the front covers! Label founders Caleb Braaten and David Correll have made an effort to maintain this consistency from its founding in 2007, citing the futurist and spartan artwork of Factory Records as a key influence.

Factory’s legacy even seeps into Sacred Bones’s sound, especially in the former half of its history. Alongside gloomy garage-rockers like Gary War and Blank Dogs, synth-centric acts like TR/ST and Led Er Est carved out a nostalgic niche for the label, capturing the attention of an 80s-obsessed indie zeitgeist at the turn of the decade. The most memorable releases of the period, though, came from Sacred Bones’s more eclectic contributors. Amen Dunes’s Through Donkey Jaw appeared on many of our staff’s decade lists, transmitting spectral folk-rock through a watery atmosphere. Zola Jesus’s early work with the label was a fascinating precursor to her recent cinematic output — beautifully brittle and caked in distortion.

The decade’s latter half has seen Sacred Bones wear many hats. Though unexpected, its forays into the film world have fit neatly into the label catalog, sandwiching John Carpenter’s Halloween score and a handful of Julee Cruise demos between works by Black Marble and Jenny Hval. And let’s not forget the 1976 Plantasia record it reissued this March: a synthetic, New Age ficus blooming from its surrounding selection of vintage punk and industrial electronica. The vibes might be funereal, but, yes, there are even slivers of optimism interred with the ‘Bones. –Jude Noel

Shelter Press

Less a record label than an immaculate virtual boutique of musicianship (plus lovingly crafted visual/textual artifacts known as books) at its most supra-threshold tactile, Felicia Atkinson and Bartolomé Sanson’s “publishing platform” has been remarkably consistent since its 2012 inception.

There was the elaborate controlled melting and stricken atrophy of Ben Vida’s final Damaged Particulates installment in 2016, as well as Gabriel Saloman’s alternately stark and murkily idyllic Monument Building triptych, which was truly transportive, despite many of us not getting to see the choreographed dance it was made for. There was D/P/I’s spark shower playgroup of triggered automation and ostensible 2016 bow-out, Composer. Also the kit-muted Music is Rotted One-Note-esque velvet gloved throttling of percussionist Eli Keszler’s Stadium. Flautist John Also Bennett gave us two peace-imbuing yet tense minimalist sonic habitats (one in collaboration with Christina Vantzou). And Atkinson herself has presented some of her best work here (2017’s low, squirmy, and fatalistically reflective Hand in Hand), in addition to cementing a powerful collaborative magic with the great Jefre Cantu-Ledesma.

For a small concern, 48 albums in less than 10 years is impressive enough. But for each to retain such essentially distinct textural character for all that time casts a special glow on the endeavor. Rather than missteps, Shelter Press offered curious genre detours, slowly ironing out the more fickle wrinkles of preference. It almost felt like a staggeringly intricate exhibit or compilation given an indefinite extension. It was not scene-specific or specific at all, beyond a desire for greater media intersectionality in experimental music. As a result, Shelter Press has been a fine example of how experimental approaches to music can dissolve their imposed margins of obscurity and properly reward the curious past their bewildered enticement. –Willcoma

Stunned

Phil and Myste French didn’t invent the cassette tape, but by 2010, their label Stunned was the undisputed champion of the medium. At a time when physical media was under attack from digital files and the emergence of streaming services, Stunned seemed to prize musical objects as important as the melodic messaging therein. The label provided an outlet for artists to express themselves inexpensively. Let’s take a chance on an artist, a scene, and an idea — and the whole idea of Stunned followed. The artwork was especially vivid, a pastiche of graphic and color as unpredictable and experimental as the music it was encasing. The artists, young and wild, expressing themselves in a manner befitting the singular aesthetic of the label’s design choices: art pieces in 4.25 x 2.75-inch packages.

Stunned brought us early releases from M. Geddes Gengras, High Aura’d, and Sparkling Wide Pressure. It took on a variety of noise, drone, and experimental pop that had no discernible place in a world increasingly attached to indie music rather than independent artists. And all of it arrived on cassette, a medium so outdated in the mainstream at the time that its affordability in both creation (dubbing parties at home on a stereo setup) and shipping (media mail) made it accessible to not only labels pumping them out, but also DIY artists on a shoestring budget. Even as social networks were becoming the norm, Stunned seemed to bring these disparate sounds, personalities, and artistic values together to create a community that built upon the label’s ethos. So when Phil and Myste shuttered Stunned in 2011, it was a relationship ending. Although all parties involved moved on and like-minded independent music began to thrive, along with the cassette tape, a lot of it felt hollow without Stunned along for the ride, especially given the label’s lasting impact throughout the decade.

Thankfully, Stunned found “it was impossible for us to stay away for long.” Eight years is an eternity in music these days, but Stunned’s clandestine return this year through Phil and Myste’s own musical outlet, Nite Lite, still felt relevant and of this time. Whether this was a reawakening or one final kiss goodbye, its timeliness was matched only by its necessity. –Jspicer

Sublime Frequencies

When your ears have been desperate to lock in with the nexus of human eloquence and brevity (though the bounty is staggering), for (roughly) another 10 years now, Sublime Frequencies was your Huckleberry. This desperation reaches across cultures and the fool’s errands that we run through our inherited tools of expression (namely music and diplomacy), even if time has often shown we can’t have nice things in this regard. As fine as it’d be for that fine point of grace to be a home, it evaporates with our hunger for it. In this light, Sublime Frequencies continues to stay the course, capturing insistent yet unassuming moments in time and space that elevate its raw quality to something more emotionally vital than its potential curio status for Western audiences.

Be it the deep, windblown blues of Group Inerane and the Guitars from Agadez series or travelogues like Mark Gergis’s I Remember Syria (reissued in 2014), ritual music like Olivia Wyatt’s hypnotic document Staring at The Sun: Ethiopian Tribal Music, or the enchanting folk-pop universe of Omar Khorshid’s Guitar el Chark, Sublime Frequencies have faithfully presented its Middle Eastern, North/West African, and Southeast Asian sounds with an emphasis on authentic and ethical representation of the artists.

The label has unerringly balanced its potentially luddite-ish aversion to polish with a showcase of the vast sonic potentiality contained within spare, ancient, and modern instrumental elements in a natural environment. Both the intimacy and ear-expanding quality of these artifacts have not been dulled by the 2014 decision to put many of its titles (sold out and otherwise) on Bandcamp. If anything, it likely helped to nudge the label beyond its money-to-burn completist collector market. The vast trove of incredible music and footage (its mesmerizingly immersive DVDs are well worth seeking out) might get slightly lost in translation, but the sheer force of the passion behind these rituals/performances has been unmistakable and appropriately humbling to behold. –Willcoma

Warp

The 2000s was a period in which Warp, the de facto electronic label, was largely bemoaned for capitulating to the indie trends of the time. Bands like Maxïmo Park and Grizzly Bear didn’t fit the classicist’s view of what Warp was “supposed” to be. Turns out, the label was only just getting started. This decade, Warp had the boldness to release music from artists as disparate as Danny Brown and Drexciya, just because both of them fucking rip. This stretching of genre in its ranks found the label combining the experimental electronic fortitude it was known for — whether it was Richard D. James imbuing importance amongst the cavalry or Autechre feeding the purists that mutated techno we all so enjoy — with young guns like Kelela, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Yves Tumor, who helped define not only the label this decade, but contemporary music in general, each subverting electronic music standards in some fashion. Warp’s visionary approach was also complemented by its ears on the past, whether it was reissues of landmarks by LFO, Boards of Canada, and Stereolab, or something as simple as Broadcast’s presence on their website, a reminder of what should and could have been.

Perhaps most significantly, there’s an undeniable influence from Warp’s leadership that flows through all these musicians. Artists were offered not only enough resources to build upon their previous works, but also the freedom to pursue whatever wild ambitions came to mind, resulting in a vast range of treasures dedicated to pushing the envelope, releases that felt all-around bigger and bolder. It’s why Warp is the label supremé of our time, the standard to which all music labels should be held. –Eli Schoop