If you want to survive and thrive creatively in the music industry long-term, you could do worse than study Warp. The UK indie label got its start in the late 1980s with a bass-heavy regional dance sound known as bleep. By 2000, Warp had relocated from Sheffield to London, and led the rise of what it dubbed “electronic listening music” and others called, for better or worse, intelligent dance music. Over the past two decades, the label has expanded its horizons, dabbling everywhere from Los Angeles beat music to Brooklyn art-rock to chameleonic Detroit rapper Danny Brown. Last year’s Warp debut by Yves Tumor, Safe in the Hands of Love, felt like another future milestone.

So Warp has certainly earned a 30th-anniversary celebration. Less clear is what released form that should take in 2019, when the label’s groundbreaking studio work is only a couple of taps away, and previous anniversary compilations already exist. Large anthologies are crucial in Warp’s history, going back to 1992’s genre-defining IDM compilation Artificial Intelligence, which helped expose Aphex Twin and Autechre. WXAXRXP Sessions, available piecemeal or as a 10-disc vinyl box set, distinguishes itself by bringing together only radio sessions, including previously obscure or unreleased tracks.

There are 41 tracks here, from 10 of Warp’s defining artists, with recording dates spanning from 1990 to this summer. That’s more than three hours of music, and plenty of it is great: an alternate-history crash course in a boundary-pushing label’s impressive breadth of vision. But a collection of 10 radio sessions is still a collection of radio sessions. This buffet of material feels like it would once have been relegated to B-sides on import-only CD singles, to be cherished by the most diehard fans.

In a press release, guitarist Mark Clifford of Seefeel tells a story that seems emblematic of WXAXRXP Sessions. The electronic-leaning UK shoegaze innovators are represented here with a dubby 1994 radio session for beloved BBC radio host John Peel that includes two previously unreleased tracks. One of them, an aqueous, lurching beast that would make an incredible sample for a present-day rap song, the band apparently came up with on the spot. Clifford recalls that Peel announced the song by saying, “Rough for Radio, that’s exactly how we like it,” and the title stuck.

WXAXRXP Sessions offers the chance to hear some of the label’s more heavily mythologized artists in just this state, rough for radio. Aphex Twin is documented here in another Peel session, one of only two that Cornish synth wizard Richard D. James (among many other aliases) has ever done. This warm, playful set—highlighted by rarity “Slo Bird Whistle,” which sounds true to its name—is an inviting glimpse of James on the eve of his 1995 album ...I Care Because You Do. The 1998 Peel session by Boards of Canada, the Scottish electronic duo’s sole radio performance, loosens up a few tracks from their sublime album of the same year, Music Has the Right to Children, alongside a Peel-only curio: the glitchy, percussive “XYZ.” A previously unreleased 1990 Peel session by Leeds’ LFO accounts for Warp’s rave-era origins, though the haunting “Rob’s Nightmare” shows the duo was already thinking beyond the dancefloor.

More recent Warp radio sessions illuminate how the label has evolved while maintaining its forward-looking spirit. A four-song set by Flying Lotus, most of which originally aired on BBC Radio 1 in 2010, finds a top-notch band breathing new life into heady jazz-funk from that year’s Cosmogramma and 2007’s Reset EP, plus a sultry one-off called “Golden Axe.” Four songs recorded by Mount Kimbie during Warp’s takeover of London online radio station NTS this past June underline what a forceful live act the once primarily electronic duo has become, bolstered by scene-stealer Mica Levi’s beautifully slurred “Marilyn” guest vocal. New York composer Kelly Moran, whose session is the only one here that has never been broadcast, extends the Warp tradition of contemplative, deep-listening experiences into the less familiar realm of prepared piano.

As an excuse to expose new audiences to Warp’s formidable roster, WXAXRXP Sessions is fine, and piling all these sessions into a playlist and hitting shuffle is fascinating; they flow, despite their differences. But, unusually for the label, this seems less like the sound of tomorrow than a (lavishly assembled) completist novelty. There, too, Warp may be a harbinger of how to get by in the record business. Considering the richness of the scraps stitched together here, it’s hard to get too upset about whatever keeps the music playing.

Buy: Rough Trade (Mount Kimbie) (Bibio) (Kelly Moran)

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