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Warp 9
Warp Record: Check out It's A Beat Wave Photograph: album artwork Photograph: Google
Warp Record: Check out It's A Beat Wave Photograph: album artwork Photograph: Google

The 101 strangest records on Spotify: Warp 9 - It's A Beat Wave

This article is more than 9 years old

Released in 1983, this album from New York crew Warp 9 worked real emotion and intelligence into the world of experimental hip-hop and electro

In January 1983 the idea of a 'club DJ' joining the elite ranks of professional dance music producers was still considered odd enough to warrant a quarter-page story in Billboard magazine. Thus 23-year-old John 'Jellybean' Benitez was inducted into the world of fader-pushing, adding, with impressive prescience, "Many of the top producers of tomorrow will be people with club DJing experience." Benitez had already had huge success with his 7" edit of Planet Rock, the top 20 hit Pac-Jam by the Jonzun Crew and the brilliant Keep It In The Family by the legendary Brazilian composer (Eumir) Deodato, but this hot new producer had his eyes on a Frankie Avalon track, a remix for The Beat and a track called Light Years Away by a New York crew called Warp 9.

Lotti Golden and Richard Scher's electro-futurists had already enjoyed Benitez' touch on their deliciously pulsing 1982 single Nunk - New Wave Funk ("Nunk, Nunk, ain't no punk, everybody rock to the New Wave Funk…") but this new track was something else, a brilliantly spare and sparse piece of electro hip-hop, LYA traversed inner and outer space, matching rolling congas with vocoder voices and the hiss and sizzle of cutting edge synth and drum machine technology. Inspired by Grandmaster Flash's The Message, LYA is a cornerstone of early 80's beatbox afrofuturism that has, for some reason or other, largely slipped off the map.

Producer and musician Golden had a career reaching back (beyond) a psychedelic soul album for Atlantic in 1969, but her work alongside Scher points toward a world that was swept away by the unstoppable rise of Russell Simmons' rock-fan aesthetic for Def Jam. The genius of Warp 9 is how they took what was considered a throwaway music and invested it with real emotion and intelligence and three decades later It's A Beat Wave - from its appallingly cheesy cover down - is a crisp and melodic reminder of the gleeful sense of adventure that lit up the soon-to-be-abandoned world of experimental hip-hop and electro.

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