The voting site’s implicit promise from day one was that there’d be a release. Richard had said he did not know how many pieces of vinyl he would release, and the FACT writeup had quoted him saying the votes would “give me a good basis for compiling something”. Joyrex’s launch post told people the site would help him put together a tracklist for a potential release.
Fans turned up assuming the voting site and the eventual record would be tightly connected. They weren’t. That’s this chapter.
The thing people thought was coming
In May 2015 the maximalist version of the rumour was a multi-CD or multi-LP favourites compilation, drawn from the SoundCloud dump, with the tracklist heavily informed by the voting site. Richard had lifted the cap from 20 to 30 because he wanted “quite a lengthy release”. He’d asked for the hidden “loved” and “can’t get into” polls because a flat top-30 would not tell him enough.
The forum ran with it. People built ideal tracklists, argued about sleepers, and made Surfing on Sine Waves 2 style playlists.
What actually came out
Cheetah EP, 2016
The first Warp release to reach back into the dump was Cheetah EP on 8 July 2016. By then the SoundCloud account had been quiet for six months and the voting site had been live for thirteen. Two user18081971 sketches map to the EP:
CHEETAHT7 Teac is the clean match. Cheetah3 Teac is less certain, most likely an early take of CHEETAHT2. Neither was at the top of the fan vote: one sat around the middle of the leaderboard, the other lower.
AFX, orphans, 2017
The next clear dump-derived release was AFX, orphans, which appeared on the new Aphex Twin Warp Store on 19 July 2017:
This is where the voting data and release history line up better. Spiral Staircase and Nightmail 1 both had strong fan support, and they remain two of the highest-voted dump tracks Richard has issued commercially.
Orphaned Deejay Selek 2006-08, Manchester 20.09.2019, Music From The Merch Desk
One more mattered even more:
Pretend Analog Extmix 2b was the first top-five fan favourite to ship in any form: first as a 2017 bonus track on the Warp-store version of Orphaned Deejay Selek 2006-08, then on Manchester 20.09.2019, then again on Music From The Merch Desk in 2024. It is a reworked variant, but the underlying composition is the dump’s.
The mismatch
The five highest-voted tracks were 28 organ, 14 Cornish Spreek5b, Pretend Analog Extmix 2b, 14 Make A Baby, and 4 Red Calx[slo]. Only Pretend Analog Extmix 2b has been issued in any form.
28 organ finished first by a comfortable margin: 2,041 top-30 votes, 120 loved, 18 not-loved. It still hasn’t come out.
The pattern is the point. Cheetah pulled middle-of-leaderboard sketches. Orphans did better by the voters. Music From The Merch Desk later pulled several dump-adjacent pieces into the official catalogue, including the same Spiral Staircase, Nightmail, and Pretend Analog material. But the release people imagined in 2015, a fan-informed vinyl compilation of the dump’s strongest tracks, never happened.
What happened to the release
The last DM I have on this thread is a question I sent him in 2019:
That one went unanswered. By then the plan was no longer firmly in his head either.
The platform Warp built instead
The reason sits in a 2016 DM thread between me and Richard, and in what Warp shipped on the back of it. In late 2015 / early 2016, in the same DM thread that had started the voting site, Richard told me Warp had a project in motion. It would do broadly what the user18081971 SoundCloud account had been doing, uploads of unreleased material, but on a Warp-hosted platform with its own engagement layer:
I told him the voting site was already being shifted into something beyond a voting site, and asked to be kept in the loop. His next message effectively paused the plans:
That was the first concrete indication that whatever Warp built might involve me. I’m a software developer, and an Aphex Twin / Warp-hosted streaming platform sounded like something I’d have dropped everything for. I didn’t bet everything on it, “they may well ask you” is a maybe, not an offer, but the prospect of getting to build a successor to user18081971 with Warp and Richard was about as exciting as anything I could have imagined coming out of the voting site, so I paused.
Richard asked me to keep this under my hat at the time, which is why this exchange has stayed out of the public version of the story until now. Eleven years on from the original voting site, and nine years after the Warp store shipped, it feels like water has long passed under the bridge, so I hope it’s OK to share. I sent the following back at the time:
The message doesn’t list everything I had been sketching out: community-curated playlists, the ability to share your personal top-30 as a SoundCloud playlist, voting on other people’s playlists, comment threads attached to playlists, and periodic auto-published “top 30 this month” lists.
Warp never did ask. At some point in there I tried to short-circuit the introduction by reaching out to a developer I’d identified via their GitHub as plausibly working on the Warp side; Bleep looked like it was also built with Django so I was all over the technologies their team were using. I don’t have the message any more, and I never got a reply. Whatever was being built on the Warp side, I wasn’t to be part of it.
On 20 July 2017 the countdown timer that had been running on aphextwin.warp.net for six weeks finally hit zero, and the Aphex Twin Warp Store went live. It was structured much like the SoundCloud account had been: a per-track listing of unreleased and B-side material, with previews, individual purchase, and (the part that caught my attention) a comment system gated to people who’d bought at least one track from the release.
WATMM users discovered the gating within about an hour of launch:
Will we be allowed to comment on tracks? Each page has this at the bottom. Comments, To comment on this you have to bag at least 1 track.
Basically, if you buy at least one track from a certain release then you should be able to drop a word in that release’s comment section.
I can comment on the music I just bought, funnily enough I have been given a username, ‘user159811’
The “user159811” detail is hard to read as accidental: every commenter on the new Warp store got a userNNNNNN handle, the same naming convention SoundCloud had imposed on Richard at the start of the dump and which gave the original voting site its name. Whoever specced the Warp store kept that detail.
Within a day, posts were pointing at one specific commenter, handle daddy1, who appeared to be Richard himself replying inside the Rushup Edge release’s comment section. The community noted it almost immediately:
daddy1, Rich or just someone helping running the site?
So: a per-track comment thread, on a Warp-hosted platform, with Richard turning up in it occasionally. The same pattern he’d been using on the original SoundCloud account two years earlier, except now the participation was paywalled. You had to buy a track from a release to comment on that release.
Why this wasn’t what I was building toward
That was the bit that lost me. The thing the original SoundCloud dump had going for it, and the thing the voting site was attempting to extend, was a community response to material that had been put out in the open. The Warp store did something else. It sold the tracks properly, which is fine, but it put the discussion inside the purchase flow. That changes the question from “what does this catalogue look like to its listeners?” to “what does this release look like to the small subset of listeners who bought something here and then chose to comment?”
None of this is a complaint about the Warp store. They’re a successful commercial record label, the price points were fair, the audio was lossless, and I can see why they went that way. The store kept running for nearly a decade and is, today, the canonical home for a sizeable amount of this material:
I actually like this, because it means that spammers will have to at least buy something to be able to spam.
It just wasn’t what I’d been building toward. The voting site had assumed an open layer; the Warp store decided on a closed one.
What got shelved
Life happened. I’d started a new job, Richard hadn’t replied to my recent messages in quite sometime, the WATMM thread had quieted, and the voting-site work I’d paused in 2016 in deference to Warp’s platform got forgotten. The Django box ran on its own. In late 2017 it broke without me noticing, and I didn’t fix it for nearly a year.
What this archive is, then
What the campaign produced: 123,779 vote-events across four years, from 3,200-odd signups, 1,860 of whom actually voted at least once. A clear consensus on the best tracks. A divergence between what the fans wanted in 2015 and what got pressed to vinyl in the years that followed.
A vinyl compilation drawn from the dump may yet happen (the final chapter is about why I hope the door isn’t closed). If it does, the data here is what a curator would want on hand, and hopefully presented in a way much more accessible to Richard than the god-awful Django admin I provided.