Label of the 'Week': Warp

This week, coming home from a job I hate, with a government being decided that I was sure to hate, I decided to indulge myself with something I love. And indulgence it was. Using Spotify's label search function I searched for 'Warp' and hit random. Given the much vaunted death of the record label, it's a miracle that I could think of a record label, but Warp sprung to mind

Warp is less a record label and more a style of music in itself - easily identifiable. Drum beats skitter, overlap, cut and stretch - none of the melodic instruments sound organic. Vocals, if present, are heavily distorted. In short, it's warped. Unlike the abacus experimentalism of 12-tone music, or the shapeless mass of free jazz, the vast majority of Warp's music offers just enough structure to box you in, then spends most of it's time bending the walls, wrapping space and time, unsettling. It is a music made almost entirely on computers, and in an era when every job seemingly involves staring at an often malfunctioning computer system for 8 hours, then travelling home past detritis (organic and man-made) it's a music made exactly for our time. Thom Yorke was not wrong in describing Autechre's grotesque and detailed masterwork 'LP5' as "the sound that's in my head". It's in all of our heads, whether we accept it on not.

The gateway to Warp is the music of Aphex Twin, who serves as a kind of Weird Al Jankovic comedy record producer and totem for the Warp ethos, having evolved from making slightly odd music for raves to making ludicrous drum'n'bass and pretty piano music. A lot of the music on Warp follows this pattern - this is a label that used to put out records by the cut-up artist Cassette Boy (who used famous people's words to make them say inappropriate things, a comedy trope surpassed only by old people swearing in its satiric power) and the avant-garde composer Mira Calix, who once performed live 'collaborating' with a tank of insects.

In short, childish and modernist, which is where the idea of the holy label comes in. Warp, for me, fits. This was the idea behind the independent music movement - to have a label that catered for a specific group of people - a social and musical sectarianism. Warp is my sect, and its haunting, fucked music speaks to me as Sub Pop and Rough Trade spoke to its secret following.

Well, I say 'speaks', it's more 'spoke'. In recent years, Warp has succumbed to what China Miéville refers to as the "idiot logic of capitalism", the drive to expand, the drive to accumulate. It has broadened its musical palette, taking in flesh and blood bands with actual instruments, Americans and becoming involved in film production. So once again, I'm left in a corner, demanding ideological consistency, barking at the moon.

The Democracy Ration

It's hard not to get depressed around election time. In 2005, the choice was between an overtly racist party led by a vampire, a flapping husk of a party led by a war criminal, and a party led by and supported by over-earnest students. Little has changed since then, although to believe the papers, everything has changed. The nearly unconstitutional TV debates (well, in so far as Britain has a constitution, they seem to be at least against the spirit of the thing) have flipped many people disillusioned with the Husk Party and the Racist Party to support the Earnest Party, or so hype would have us believe. Behind all this looms a giant recession the size of which the majority of people have never experienced - with the concomitant 'necessity' of mindblowing cuts. It's enough to make you emigrate, either to some politically dubious nation where your accent might render you charming (Australia, the US...) or to another astral plain altogether.

Why is this the case? My argument would not be that politics is inherently worse than it was. Many politically engaged people hark back to the days when the parties were really parties - when the Tories were openly racist, rather than tacitly, when Labour supported strikes and provided free silver spoons to every poor unfortunate in the land, and when the Liberals were so bland that you had to take speed to prevent yourself sleeping whenever they opened their mouths. This is bollocks.

I would wager the reason it's depressing is that the act of voting, in Britain particularly, actualises your powerlessness. This is your democracy ration, handed out every 4 to 5 years. It won't really do anything, but it will do more than the other elections you vote in every year or so - Assembly, Council and European - which are, scientifically, less important than votes cast towards X Factor contestants. You can vote for the people you agree with, but it's wasted. Go home, watch Dimbleby for a few hours, sleep, then go back to having less than no power, just as before, but with a different monkey dancing on the organ.

Or you can agitate, educate and organise. It's the only real political choice you ever have to make, and the only one that matters a jot.