LFO - 'Advance'
No. 4 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
A refined sequel to their massively influential first album, LFO‘s Mark Bell and Gez Varley’s last work together is a timeless tour de force. From the first robotic phrases of Advance to its closing pretty sighs, an electronic bravura is on the march, lobbing fireballs across the void. That moody alternating posture encapsulated two tensions: techno oscillating between reflective “intelligent dance music” and the jagged edges of wild nights. Advance was a diamond of contrasts then: its flawless productions lit the mind, hewing closely to the underground attitude of 1990s rave culture, while mapping out a new uncompromising tableau of pure sonic warfare, with deep contrasting expanses of arresting calm fit for headphone stargazing.
Released five years after Frequencies, Advance was designed to push far beyond the world they had helped create. In 1992, the New Musical Express featured LFO on their cover with Bell and Varley smashing guitars. The dichotomy then was clear if not yet fully pronounced: the war between rock and rave. In its same pages was a story on Nirvana’s Nevermind tour in Europe, blood and alcohol spilling in its wake. While Nevermind had already sold 1.5 million copies at the time, Frequencies only sold 100,000 copies or more. In the dance world, that was huge. But rock was king.
Even so, despite misspelling Gez as “Jez,” the NME devoted a full spread to the Leeds heroes, including a combustible photo shoot where dousing a Les Paul electric guitar with lighter fluid almost led to the burning down of an east London studio. It was a provocative image meant to manufacture the faux idea of genre conquest, except there was one problem — Bell knew how to play the guitar, and he and Varley had nothing bad to say about rock per se. They had grown up as fans of Pink Floyd. Depeche Mode was another favorite: even they used an “axe” on Violator.
As LFO explained to NME’s Ian McCann, the kind of fan letters they were getting back in 1992 were not from teen girls or metal heads, but from geeks. “Most of our letters go like this,” Bell told McCann: “‘Dear LFO, my name is Jürgen from Utrecht and like you I have also got a Roland TB-303…’” In other words, LFO were in some ways the first European techno superstars, and their contingent was keyed into computers, Roland synthesizers, and the machines that would soon rule the world. All guitar violence aside, LFO could sense the resistance from both within and without.
Fittingly, that pressure of the underground versus the overground was captured in NME’s review of Advance four years after McCann’s feature. The image chosen is the pub, cornerstone of British society and punditry. Appraised by John Robinson (NME editors still misspelling Gez as “Jez”), we are treated to blurbs from the Warp press sheet about LFO enjoying “bicycle rides” and “cheese on toast” in the long interim. We’re having a pint with Bell and Varley, Robinson describes, in the UK locus of “abstruse philosophical speculation and of getting mighty pissed,” of “self-administered disorientation, and ultimately A Good Time” i.e. back to Earth.
“Is it, they wonder, nobler in the mind to make a far-reaching cerebral massage for the graph-plotters and goateed meta-ravers? Or should they perhaps just ‘Get pissed…’ as someone once instructed, ‘…and destroy’? To decide this, they conclude, could take some time.” Robinson stacks the “contradictory ideas,” the “eerie ambiences” contrasted with “pounding brutality,” of digitized “clanks” giving way to “heavenly voices,” of “classical melodies” uplifted to new “atmospheric heights by intense contrasts.” But ironically, the pub is in fact not at all where Advance fits. Maybe journalists and press officers at Warp got too cute. Because stepping away, metaphorically the “pub” fits as a place of contention, but it’s really about communication, and what Bell and Varley were trying to say: Advance!
Starting with the cosmic ‘Advance’ and ending with the muscular ‘Kombat Drinking,’ and with the submarining ‘Bathtime’ on its Japan release, Advance is a slow builder, taking Bell and Varley many years to conceive and produce. It’s a puzzle and a gem. “We recorded literally millions of bits and pieces and picked the one’s that we thought fitted best together as an album so you could listen to it all the way through,” Bell told Seb Chan in 1996, explaining how he was interested in exploring different emotions. “Forget what instruments you use and work out what feeling you are creating — sad, or happy, or dancing.” Different facets and lines flash and cut angles of intelligence and sentiment, moving electronic music into sentience — sentences without words emerging dreamlike. Mighty electrons whirring and popping with meaning.
And while Bell told journalists that the intent was to give listeners a truly diverse listening journey, in truth, the tempest of techno was at the album’s core. Its mid section was dynamic and rocking and rolling. “Different styles and moods,” he told Urb’s Chris Campion. “Inspiration can come from anywhere,” Campion wrote. Bell: “It could be if we have been to a club or seen a film, like a late-night film.” They had sequenced the songs so as if they were collected into four “sides” of vinyl, each representing something of a cycle, building and falling, collapsing, expanding…
The dreamy ‘Loch Ness’ is a nova, one of the most evocative space symphonies techno has ever wrought. A clash of sparkling sine waves and thundering drums, it sends the listener floating off through a magnetic storm in some distant galaxy. The tossing and turning of ambient beauty ‘Goodnight Vienna’ calls to mind the stark dots, lines and geometry of Wendy Carlos, who composed the movie score to Tron, without aping her style. Pugnacious ‘Tied Up’ shocks the nerves with aqueous electricity, rolling over molten pits and boxing your lights out with low frequency jabs.
When did this stubborn battle between the hard and soft begin? Bell and Varley were once rival breakdancers in the mid-1980s, before teaming up on England’s immortal bleep techno anthem, ‘LFO’ (“bleep” referred to the use of synthesizer sine waves, from high frequency notes to low frequency oscillations, the inspiration for the LFO name). Launching Warp Records into the charts and rattling warehouses across the globe, ‘LFO’ and their subsequent debut album, 1991’s Frequencies, reshaped the electronic landscape, helping pave the way for similar-minded cohorts like Orbital, Aphex Twin and Richie Hawtin. Many critics still peg this groundbreaking period in LFO’s career as their finest hour, and so historians must not ignore it.
Certainly it was their most impactful. But a closer listen to Advance, which took Bell and Varley five years to craft, and almost never came out, reveals that the old rivals scaled even greater heights. Take four invincible tracks from Advance: ‘Them,’ ‘Ultra Schall,’ ‘Shove Piggy Shove’ and ‘Psychodelik.’ The first prowls to tapping drum sticks flanged out into oblivion while a sweep of chimes and slow-mo splashes tug the mind into a grooving undertow. ‘Ultra Schall’ is much less linear. Its various elements slowly coalesce around a mournful melody, a call and response between panting percussion and terse bass murmurs anchoring its bright scrawls of light. It’s electronic music supreme and one of the most overlooked techno wonders of the ‘90s.
The joyous ‘Shove Piggy Shove’ with its skyward counterpoint and little guitar flicks is an easier pleaser that belies a restrained almost jazz-like approach to its chimes, bass and percussion. Bjork in fact picked a version of it as the compositional framework for ‘I Go Humble’ on her second album, Post, the beginning of a long collaboration with Bell, who would play a crucial role on her most electronic outing, Homogenic. But ‘Psychodelik’ — perhaps the greatest masterstroke on Advance — needs no Bjork counter-valence. One of the most infectious techno rides of all time — a dazzling synth-line weaving up and over and around — the slow howls and scintillating melodies of ‘Psychedelik’ soar and crash in a cosmic delirium of the senses: somewhere over the rainbow, glowing in memory — the mighty meteors fall.
Bell and Varley bid adieu with two competing sides of the LFO psyche. Varley only got two credits on the album which could be why they parted ways after its release. They wanted to go different directions, and the centrifugal force pulling them apart courses throughout Advance’s 12 tracks. It’s as if their competition of breakdancing moves finally sent them spinning apart. Bell was a perfectionist, and Varley wanted to get his rave on. The ambient calm of Bell’s quietly opening ‘Advance’ stumbles into the bruising, slashing drums of Varley’s ‘Shut Down,’ the beguiling admixture of their mystical friendship scrambling the mind as the feet wig out to its viking kind.
This is the message, not the “cerebral massage,” that one hears amid the din of the bar or pub or club. When two people lean in. This is the connection two ravers make amid the music and the splendor of humankind’s strange yet magical ardor. Thunder in the distance. Lightning bolts overhead. “Headbang and chinstroke work together,” Robinson noted. In the swirl of 1996 — as mega-clubs and booze took the reins of British rave culture and the UK government effectively shut down its revolutionary tenets — LFO’s Advance moved the resistance deeper into the spirit. That’s why perhaps it took so much time, even if NME and the public missed it. In that same McCann feature in 1992, it’s clear that LFO could see it. They predicted it.
“Think of the way the big record companies are trying to do away with vinyl,” Bell opined; perhaps paranoid but also true. “They know full well that dance music is just 12“ singles. It’s an attack on dance music because they know it’s not a CD market. And an attack on dance music is anti-independent labels, because all those dance hits are on little labels. The big labels want everything their own way and dance music is a threat. They’d rather it wasn't around.” Perhaps feeling the pressure, as LFO were themselves trying to infiltrate the album format, Bell understood the critical importance of making such longer plays, “Jürgen from Utrecht” awaiting.
From Varley’s perspective, the music industry, even in the form of Warp Records, could be an impediment to innovation. By 1994, he felt Warp was pushing more radio friendly fare over dance floor belters, which was where his loyalties lay — as early as 1991, he was piecing the dynamics together as the question about how to advance techno, through the shut downs of raves and the scheming of mainstream punters, confronted everyone from Leftfield and The Future Sound of London to Andrew Weatherall and Massive Attack. As he told Music Technology magazine, Varley believed that mountains of past success stood in the way of future paths.
“The big record companies own all the rights to those old tracks, and they can re-release them without having to spend any money on advances,” he averred to Music Technology’s Simon Trask. “They're just doing it, ‘cos it’s cheaper, and ‘cos everyone knows the music already. It's just another con. They're telling us what we should buy, like they're saying the '60s were better music, like ‘there's no good music around now, what about the Hollies?' When the '90s have finished, there'll have been just as many good hits as there were in the '60s.” Meaning as long as the hits deserve it.
So much so, LFO shelved many album’s worth of material in favor of pushing out their best work possible. Never wanting to repeat themselves or fall too much into formulas, Bell and Varley first assembled an album in 1993 but discarded it. They worked with Kraftwerk’s Karl Bartos, and that too was scrapped. Perfectionism is evident in every second of Advance, as is the inherent tension between art and commerce, between the underground id and the overground ego. In fact, there possibly may be no other ‘90s electronica album obsessed over more, even anticipated more, than save maybe Leftfield’s Rhythm and Stealth.
Like Leftfield, that long gap was in many ways a ‘90s career hazard. Innovation in electronic music was moving so fast that by pursuing perfection and pushing the boundaries at the same time, by 1996 when Advance was released, the whole electronic landscape had changed, including the language and genres that all producers faced. Was it “techno”? “Acid house”? “IDM”? All the above? None. Definitions are only so useful: empowerments as well as cages. The quality of journalism around electronica had also grown more sophisticated. So that by Advance’s release, the NME was more aloof, running only a review — the commercialists demanded hits, while LFO demanded contradictions.
Which is why it’s always worth revisiting. Like a prismatic gem put on the table between the pints, it calls to the fighters and the lovers. It’s the storm and the calm. That glorious juxtaposition of core and edge plays out again with the album’s closers. ‘Forever’ by Bell drifts to a fever of shimmering keys and angelic clangs while ‘Kombat Drinking’ — credited to the two breaking mates — struts to a martial beat, its warping drums and assured cadences saluting the masses as it gently waves goodbye to another innocent era of utopian dreaming, not one raver left behind.
Nearly a decade later, Bell would return alone as LFO with the respectable Sheath. A few killer tracks recalled the earlier glory, while Varley scoured the techno hinterlands with quality albums like Bayou Paradis. But nothing matched Bell and Varley’s last stand together. Advance is, well, advanced, even more than two decades after its release. In fact, it’s still not clear anyone has caught up. Or ever will.
Track Listing:
1. Advance
2. Shut Down
3. Loch Ness
4. Goodnight Vienna
5. Tied Up
6. Them
7. Ultra Schall
8. Shove Piggy Shove
9. Psychodelik
10. Jason Vorhees
11. Forever
12. Kombat Drinking
13. Bathtime*
*’Bathtime’ is a mostly ambient exploration of the submerged muffles of water on human ears contrasted with rhythmic pings reminiscent of sonar and submarines. A bonus track on the Japanese edition, it’s worth seeking out for fans for its understated quirkiness and general pleasantness.