Plaid

All Music Guide:

Although Plaid preexisted the association, the duo's Ed Handley and Andy Turner spent most of their early recording years with Ken Downie as the dancefloor-confounding Black Dog Productions. Meshing well with Downie's vision of heavily hybridized post-techno and obscurantist thematics, the pair brought several nascent Plaid tracks to the Black Dog table on the group's debut, Bytes, a collection of tracks recorded by various iterations of the three members. The group recorded several albums and EPs throughout the early and mid-'90s, helping to forge a style of dance music one step removed from the 12" considerations of the average faceless techno act; Handley and Turner's mutual love for early hip-hop contributed BDP's more bawdy, street-level grit.

The pair split from Downie in 1995, and began rechanneling their efforts full-time with an EP on the neo-electro Clear label before signing to Warp. (The pair also recorded an album with European techno figure Mark Broom under the pseudonym Repeat, two tracks of which also made it onto the South of Market EP, released on Jonah Sharp's similarly located Reflective imprint.) Both of Plaid's first two full-lengths, 1998's Not for Threes and the following year's Rest Proof Clockwork, were issued in the U.S. through Nothing. Once Warp set up a home on American shores, however, Plaid made the natural switch with the long-awaited collection Trainer, a retrospective including much of their early, pre-BDP work. The proper third album, Double Figure, followed in spring 2001, and the handy Plaid remix collection Parts in the Post was issued in 2003 by Peacefrog. The end of the year brought the duo's fourth proper LP, Spokes. Plaid were quiet on the recording front for several years, returning finally in mid-2006 with Greedy Baby, a mini-album that found the pair co-billed with visual artist Bob Jaroc. Two years later, they made the small leap to soundtracking an official film, Heaven's Door, a Japanese film directed by Michael Arias. In 2011, they returned with Scintilli, released on Warp.

Wikipedia:

Plaid is a London-based British electronic music duo comprising Andy Turner and Ed Handley whose sound is characterized by many reviewers as post-techno. They were founding members of The Black Dog and used many other names, such as Atypic (Andy Turner) and Balil (Ed Handley), before settling on Plaid. They have collaborated with female singers Mara Carlyle, Nicolette and Björk, and have released records on the labels Clear, Peacefrog, Black Dog Productions, and Warp Records (along with Trent Reznor's label Nothing Records).

Aside from their own material, Plaid have done extensive remix work for many other artists, including Red Snapper, Björk, Goldfrapp, and The Irresistible Force. Parts in the Post (2003) contains just a handful of Plaid's remix work to date.

Plaid collaborated with video artist Bob Jaroc for their live performances and on the 5.1 audio/visual project entitled Greedy Baby. The project was completed on 20 July 2005, and was first shown at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in the South Bank Centre, and subsequently at the BFI Imax cinema in Waterloo, London. Greedy Baby was released on DVD from Warp Records on 26 June 2006.

In 2006, Plaid composed and performed the original score to Michael Arias' anime film Tekkonkinkreet, and then went on to rejoin Arias for his second feature, Heaven's Door, as well as two of his subsequent short films.

In 2009 they contributed a cover of a Plone song to the Warp20 (Recreated) compilation.

Critical reception [edit]

Plaid has not gained a mainstream following. Their music, however, has not failed to garner positive reviews, on average. While IDM, and techno in general, have experienced a fair amount of popularity at times, Plaid has worked largely within the confines of the low mainstream appeal of their style of music. While Aphex Twin and Plaid have at different times in their careers worked for the same record label, Warp Records, Aphex Twin has by far remained the most popular of the two.