Philip Best is one of the central figures of British power electronics: the founder of Consumer Electronics, a long-running member of Whitehouse, and, through his early Iphar label, one of the people who helped the form spread before it had any real infrastructure. The Bureau files him at Tier II as a founder and cross-pollinator, and states the difficult legacy of the work he belongs to at the front.
The difficult legacy comes first. The projects Best is part of, Consumer Electronics and Whitehouse above all, sit at the most deliberately transgressive end of power electronics, pairing extreme electronic sound with content designed to disturb. The Bureau records this as historical fact, neither endorses nor reproduces it, and files the music for its formal place in the genre. The archive's approach is the same one it sets out on the Whitehouse, Sutcliffe Jügend and Genocide Organ files: document, do not celebrate.
Best began as a schoolboy. He formed Consumer Electronics in 1982 at fourteen, sending tapes of harsh noise into the small network then forming around Whitehouse, and by his own account ran away from home to join that project in 1983. The biographical detail matters only as documented fact about how young the British power-electronics scene's participants were and how informally it cohered; the Bureau records it plainly and files the music, not the biography.
Across two long stretches in Whitehouse (joining in 1983, returning after a mid-1980s hiatus, and remaining until 2008) Best became in effect the project's second figure alongside William Bennett. When he left in 2008 he turned fully back to Consumer Electronics, which he rebuilt as a collaborative group with a more pointed social-political content. The two projects between them span his whole working life, and the archive treats Consumer Electronics as the through-line and Whitehouse as the larger act he served within.
His early Iphar label is the part of his work that reaches widest. A DIY cassette operation of the early 1980s, Iphar issued compilations of the emerging extreme-noise underground, among them a tape made with Gary Mundy of Ramleh, and through that circulation Best helped knit together the founding British power-electronics circle. He is, in the archive's terms, a connector: a figure whose label, collaborations and memberships tie the founding acts to one another.
The Bureau's reading. Philip Best is filed at Tier II as a founder and cross-pollinator of British power electronics, with a difficult-legacy advisory through the projects he belongs to. His centrality runs through Consumer Electronics, Whitehouse and Iphar; his documentary necessity is that the British power-electronics story cannot be told without him. The provocative content of the work is recorded as fact and cross-referenced to the difficult-legacy files where the archive sets out its approach, and the music is filed for its place in the form. The Bureau documents; it does not celebrate.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Iron Age · last revised c. the Anthropocene