WATMM (We Are The Music Makers) is the forum where most of this happened. It isn’t a Warp Records property; the name comes from the Aphex Twin track on Selected Ambient Works 85-92, and the forum had been broadly Aphex/IDM-adjacent since the early 2000s. By 2014 it was small, opinionated, and very much the centre of the IDM community. When the dump hit, the thread ran to 730 pages.
I’d been a member for years. I posted as xfxf, six hundred-odd posts, no particular standing. Nobody on WATMM really had standing. People argued, swapped low-quality bootlegs of unreleased Polygon Window 12-inches, picked fights about whether the new Squarepusher record was good (the forum’s verdict was usually that it wasn’t, and the forum was usually wrong about this). Berghain meet-ups in Berlin for the European contingent, smaller pub-meets in Cornwall and London. Friendships formed and dissolved. Someone every few months would announce they were leaving forever and post again the next day.
The Gift To The Fans thread
Thread #85636, later renamed to Richard D James SoundCloud - A Gift To The Fans, is the one this whole archive hangs off. It was started on 7 November 2014 (the discovery and the early fake-or-not argument are in the previous chapter) and over the next six months it ballooned to 730 pages of forum nerds doing forensic work on every upload, every rename, every silent re-tagging. The tone was particular to WATMM — half forensic, half shitposting, certainty and disbelief inside the same paragraph:
Kinda cool but not feeling it Not even steinvord level (this is ignoring the real possibility that rdj makes these fake “fake” tracks at a lower quality than his release ones)
(Steinvord was an earlier suspected-RDJ account from around 2013; “Heorge Garrison” was another. The forum had been wrong about these enough times by 2014 to stay cautious.)
That same week the underlying SoundCloud account picked up its second username. For a while the OG thread became two threads in one, half about the “original” mystery account, half about the “new” one, until the rename interpretation surfaced months later. The OG thread kept absorbing every adjacent topic until most of the user18081971 conversation had spilled out into spinoffs. I vaguely recall there being several original topics that were either closed or merged into the main thread.
My role in any of this
Mostly I lurked and posted small things. I’d written a small scraper that pulled the SoundCloud stats into a static page, and I posted the link a few times. When tracks got renamed mid-week I’d usually be the one who’d noticed, because the scraper was firing. That scraper became the seed of the voting site later in the year.
The thread keeps running
The dump mostly stopped at the start of January 2016, but the forum kept turning over the same material — small attempts to put structure on the catalogue, arguments about whether 3 organ was a different track from 28 organ, half listening-suggestion half direct-address posts to Richard in a forum he was probably not reading. By 2019 the dump’s tracks had been off the SoundCloud account three years and the voting had wound down.