Two DJs on Alternate Weeks: How Cornish Isolation Built Rephlex

Richard David James was born on 18 August 1971 in Limerick and raised in Cornwall. The birthday gets marked every year. The more useful anniversary is the second half of that sentence, because the label he ended up co-founding was not built out of a taste. It was built out of a postcode.

A supply problem, not a manifesto

In 1989 Grant Wilson-Claridge was DJing at the Bowgie, a club on the coast near Newquay. He and James held the booth on alternate weeks, which is how Wilson-Claridge noticed that the other DJ was not playing records at all. He was playing his own tapes. The suggestion that followed was practical rather than visionary: press some of it up.

The reason usually given for Rephlex, founded in 1991 and moved to London the following year, is that Cornwall in the late eighties was a long way from anywhere that stocked the music these two wanted to hear. The label began as a way of manufacturing a local supply of records that did not otherwise reach the far southwest of England. Every other decision the label made for the next twenty three years follows from that one, and most of them look strange until you read them as import substitution.

The genre name was a punchline

By late 1992 the label was posting its intentions to a rave newsgroup, describing its aim as “Innovation in the dynamics of Acid” and stating that it wanted to prove British dance music could be entirely original. Note the target. Not techno in general, not dance music in the abstract. Acid, a form the label explicitly called misunderstood, which in 1992 it very much was, having been written off in Britain as the soundtrack to a moral panic rather than a set of machines with a filter.

Braindance, the word Rephlex coined for its own output, is usually explained as an alternative to intelligent dance music. It was closer to a rebuttal. IDM was a term invented by listeners on a mailing list, and it carried an implied insult to everything it was not. Braindance was deliberately silly, which made it useless as a hierarchy. A label that existed because it could not reach a scene had no reason to help build a status ladder inside one.

The catalogue is the argument

Held up against the braindance caricature of clever, twitchy British electronica, the release list keeps refusing to cooperate. Squarepusher’s debut, Feed Me Weird Things, arrived on Rephlex on 3 June 1996 with liner notes by James, after Jenkinson had been picked up off a pub gig in Finsbury Park. Detroit turns up repeatedly through Drexciya and through Gerald Donald’s Dopplereffekt and Arpanet aliases. Aleksi Perala came from Finland, Bogdan Raczynski from Poland by way of the United States, Bochum Welt from Italy. The label also spent years reissuing other people’s history, including early 808 State, Future Sound of London material and the Criminal Minds hardcore catalogue.

The strangest entry is the most revealing. In June 2004 Rephlex released a compilation called Grime, collecting tracks by Mark One, Plastician and Slaughter Mob. The title was wrong and everybody involved knew it. The music was the darker, sparser instrumental sound coming out of south London that would shortly be called dubstep. A braindance label from Cornwall put out one of the first CD length documents of it, mislabelled, because that was the record nobody else was pressing. Same instinct as 1991, fifteen years later.

Format as the message

The AFX Analord series in 2005 was vinyl only, made on analogue hardware, and issued in a run of individually sleeved twelve inch records before any digital version existed. Rephlex eventually reissued the series digitally in 2009. A label that started because records were hard to get in Cornwall spent its middle age making records that were deliberately hard to get anywhere.

James closed it in 2014 and gave a reason that had nothing to do with music. The business, he said, was the only thing keeping two old friends in regular contact, and he would rather have the friendship. A label that began with two DJs splitting a residency ended by admitting it had turned into an excuse to keep talking.

The Next Radio covers the labels, scenes and machines behind guitar music and the electronic underground.