Only a handful of the album’s 14 tracks even considered dropping the duo’s trademark intensity for a moment and, of these, only ‘Think A Moment’ could be considered anywhere near a moment of relaxation. Bell later claimed that he wrote most of ‘Frequencies’ on his own because Varley wanted to make more direct dance music, although Varley himself has talked of the two working together on the album.Īt that time, the idea of an album of electronic music was still a relative novelty - particularly for a duo that came from the UK’s club scene - and LFO made very few compromises towards the home listener over 14 tracks of hardcore, electronic soul. Full of ideas and teenage mettle, LFO recorded their debut album in a year, with ‘Frequencies’ released in July 1991. ‘LFO’ was a huge dance hit in the UK - DJ Ben Sims told Kirk Degiorgio for Resident Advisor's Rewind feature in 2019 that he must have heard it 20 times across London in the first weekend it was released - and the duo signed to Warp Records on an album deal. Martin used to DJ at a club in Leeds called the Warehouse, Gez used to break at the same silly places I used to when we were about 13." Varley and Bell put together some second-hand synths, recorded the results on a four-track, and Williams would play the results in his DJ sets, also offering the duo advice on how to make their music slightly more dancefloor friendly, winning himself a credit on their debut single on the way. When I left school I did a graphics and photography course, where I met Gez (Varley) and Martin (Williams). "I was really into hip-hop and electro and I wanted to try and make some beats of my own. “When I was 14-and-a-half I bought an 808 from my first girlfriend’s dad for 25 pounds (he used to do ’Lady In Red’-style demos with it)," Bell told The Milk Factory in 2002. That it was makes the album, made by two men still in their teenage years, who didn’t appear too concerned about musical immortality, even more wild. The record is simultaneously minimalist - with only seven parts, according to Varley - and utterly vast sounding, each element as imposing as a giant marble monolith. ‘The Theme’ was brilliant but slightly fuzzy around the edges, as if the group was still working their way towards the trademark bleep sound ‘LFO (Leeds Warehouse Mix)’ was as clean as a cut from a surgical knife, a distillation of pure dance steel. ‘LFO (Leeds Warehouse Mix)’ also pulls off the rare trick of sounding both raw - the bass apparently comes from a Casio sampler - and incredibly clean, as if created under strict laboratory conditions for maximum bite. But these were welded together in a way that still sounds shocking today, as if that sort of bass should never go with those sorts of drums. Sure, it had influences: dub in the epic bass line, house in the drums, electro and acid house in the needle-sharp synth work. Even so, LFO’s eponymous debut single, released in summer 1990 and an unlikely Number 12 UK chart hit, sounded like little else in electronic music. Released in 1989, ‘The Theme’, the debut single from Bradford, England’s Unique 3, was probably the first bleep techno tune. LFO weren’t quite the first act to hit on the classic bleep techno combination of sub-bass, electro and acid. ‘We Are Back', the band’s second single, uses its title more as a threat than a promise, a crunching, distorted computer voice announces that the band have returned, as if intent on slashing your curtains, over a pounding kick drum, synth melody on the verge of a nervous breakdown and corpulent sub bass. Put bluntly, there was something elegantly terrifying in LFO’s music, a mixture of beautifully somber synth melodies, speaker-cracking bass and the acidic bleeps that would lend their name to the brief but much-loved bleep scene of the early 1990s. But the duo’s debut album, ‘Frequencies’, seemed to perfectly encapsulate a certain part of dance music’s shift to the dark side on its release in 1991. Leeds duo LFO - aka the late Mark Bell and Gez Varley - weren’t really a rave band, despite the popularity of their debut single ‘LFO (Leeds Warehouse Mix)’ on 1990’s rave scene. But music that had once strived for a promised land had shifted its gaze. Sometime around the early ’90s, a lot of UK rave music went from sounding ecstatic to something grittier.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |