Warp Records is a British independent record label founded in Sheffield in 1989 by record store employees Steve Beckett and Rob Mitchell and record producer Robert Gordon. It is currently based in London.
Ride are an English rock band formed in Oxford in 1988. The band consists of Andy Bell, Mark Gardener, Laurence "Loz" Colbert, and Steve Queralt. The band were initially part of the "shoegazing" scene that emerged in England during the early 1990s. Following the break-up of the band in 1996, members moved on to various other projects, most notably Bell who became the bassist for Oasis. In 2001, the band briefly reunited for a one-off performance for a television show. Ride announced their second reunion in November 2014. Their debut album Nowhere has been named one of the important albums of the shoegazing genre. They achieved their biggest commercial success with their 1992 single "Leave Them All Behind", which reached No. 9 on the UK Singles Chart.
The Black Dog is a British electronic music group, founded in 1989 by Ken Downie along with Ed Handley and Andy Turner. The group are considered pioneering figures of techno's ruminative "home-listening" aesthetic in the early 1990s.
Plaid are an English electronic music duo composed of Andy Turner and Ed Handley. They were founding members of The Black Dog and used many other names, such as Atypic and Balil, before settling on Plaid. They have collaborated with female singers Mara Carlyle, Nicolette and Björk, and have released records on the labels Clear, Peacefrog, Black Dog Productions, and Warp.
Clock DVA are a musical group from Sheffield, England, whose style has touched on industrial, post-punk, and EBM. They formed in 1978 by Adolphus "Adi" Newton and Steven "Judd" Turner. Along with contemporaries Heaven 17, Clock DVA's name was inspired by the Russian-influenced Nadsat language of Anthony Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange. Dva is Russian for "two".
Snuff are a British punk rock band formed in Hendon in 1986. The original line-up was Duncan Redmonds on drums and vocals, Simon Wells on guitar and vocals and Andy Crighton on bass, with Dave Redmonds being added to the line-up on trombone before the release of Flibbiddydibbiddydob.
White Music is the first studio album by the English band XTC, released on 20 January 1978. It was the follow-up to their debut, 3D EP, released three months earlier. White Music reached No. 38 in the UK Albums Chart and spawned the single "Statue of Liberty", which was banned by the BBC for the lyric "In my fantasy I sail beneath your skirt". In April 1978, the group rerecorded "This Is Pop" as their third single.
Dog Faced Hermans were a post-punk band that formed in Scotland in the mid 1980s and remained active through the mid 1990s. They emerged from the UK anarcho-punk scene with a guitar/bass/drums line-up, but also incorporated trumpet and other instruments not commonly found in punk music at that time. Their composition style incorporated many genres of music outside of rock, including folk, jazz, ambient and noise music with often unorthodox instrumentation.
Bytes is the debut studio album by English electronic music group The Black Dog, credited under the name Black Dog Productions. It was released on Warp on 8 March 1993. The album consists of tracks produced by the members of the group – Ed Handley, Andy Turner, and Ken Downie – under various aliases, including Plaid, Close Up Over, Xeper, Atypic, I.A.O., Discordian Popes and Balil. Black Dog Productions is also the name of their own record label.
Spanners is the third studio album by English electronic music group The Black Dog. It was released via Warp on 16 January 1995. It peaked at number 30 on the UK Albums Chart.
Not for Threes is the second studio album by English electronic music duo Plaid. It was released on 27 October 1997 by Warp. The album was released in the United States on 28 April 1998 by Nothing Records.
The Beyond were a progressive metal band from Derby, England. The band performed under this name between 1988 and 1993, and then under the name Gorilla from 1995 to 1998.
The Best Mixes from the Album Debut for All the People Who Don't Buy White Labels is the first EP and remix compilation by Björk, originally released through Polydor Records in September 1994. The collection contains six remixes of four tracks from Björk's 1993 album Debut. All of the songs were written solely by Björk except "Human Behaviour", which was co-written by Nellee Hooper. Björk and Hooper were also co-producers of the EP. "Human Behavior" was remixed by the English electronic group Underworld; the remaining five tracks are remixes by The Sabres of Paradise and Black Dog. The compilation has been re-issued through the record labels One Little Indian, PolyGram and PO Records.
Dive Dive are a British rock band, composed of Jamie Stuart, Ben Lloyd, Nigel Powell and Tarrant Anderson. Ben Lloyd and Tarrant Anderson also play as full-time members of Frank Turner's band, The Sleeping Souls.
Mark Broom is a British techno DJ and music producer.
Temple of Transparent Balls is the second album by Ed Handley, Andy Turner and Ken Downie, the first under the name The Black Dog, and was released on double vinyl, cassette and CD in 1993. It continued to delight their hardcore followers but confused many with its complexity and inaccessibility. “From the opening digital skank of ‘Cost I’ to the closing circuit board tears on ‘The Crete that Crete Made,’” critic Peter McIntyre wrote, it “took every single strand of modern music, mixed it all up and produced something that sounded like nothing else on the planet.”
The second effort had been recorded at Techno Island Studio, the sonic forge of R&S Records, during an extended stay in Ghent, Belgium. "Temple is filled with tinker toy melodies and drunken electronics, at times astray in a sad metropolis or jumping for joy in a sonic junkyard of the future."
Music for Adverts is the first solo album by Ken Downie under the name The Black Dog which was released in 1996 on double vinyl, cassette, and CD. It was the first without participation by Ed Handley and Andy Turner who left to continue their work as Plaid.
Silenced is the sixth full-length studio album by The Black Dog released in 2005 on CD. It's the first album Ken Downie recorded and produced together with Martin and Richard Dust, owners of the label Dust Science Recordings.
It harks back to Black Dog's debut Bytes, a record that remains a landmark album in electronic music's development. Martin Dust explained: "We never set off to make it like Bytes. My idea was to create something that you could come home to after you'd just been to a club or gig, that would start at the right pace and then just wind down into a great album and just chill out."
Martin Dust had been "friends with Ken for probably nine or ten years. The main connection is that we both had an interest in internet bulletin board systems and punk. I used to run a bulletin board with an old style modem and communication and information file exchange and hacking and stuff, so right from the beginning I've always been talking to Ken, about that, about music, about everything really. We just struck a friendship up like that and swapped music and ideas and continue from there."
Liber Dogma is the tenth full-length studio album by The Black Dog released in 2011 on CD and vinyl. It was written and produced by Ken Downie, Martin and Richard Dust.
The album "represents a radical shift toward dry minimalism, where the beat is pushed to the fore, served by pulsating bass lines and only a sprinkle of additional sounds for each piece. Closer by nature to Berlin’s minimal and hypnotic techno than to Detroit’s more luxurious sound, Liber Dogma has been devised with one aim and one aim only: the dance floor."
The title of the final track is in Japanese, read as "Kā Kurasshu Majutsu" and meaning loosely "car-crash sorcery". On streaming services, the title has been translated to "Car Crash Magick".
Book of Dogma is a compilation by IDM artists Ken Downie, Ed Handley and Andy Turner aka The Black Dog which was released in 2007. The two CDs compile the band's first six EPs, the second CD in fact being a re-release of the 1995 compilation Parallel.
