LFO - 'Frequencies'
No. 29 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
In 1991, a new generation was standing at the end of one wave and the beginning of another. In the ‘80s, the decade of excess, of latch-key kids and cocaine nights, the music of disco and reggae had given way to the ethereal rock of U2, Talking Heads and The Police, and the vagaries of the nuclear age had ended jazz as the voice of America ascendant, bowled over by the tragedies of the Vietnam War and the dark comedown of European colonialism in the form of Cold War hypocrisies.
Cynics and cynicism were the coin of the land and the sea. Unrest in the cities then began with the crackups of punk and hip hop, the angry stepchildren of rock and funk though both glimmered with the buzz of creative destruction — one in the aging shadow of prog rock and the other in the alleyways outside the disco club.
So when the etched fires of the microchip began to transform the very fabric of society, it was the artists, and the rejects, and the freaks, toying with the transistor sounds of synthesizers and drum machines that would begin to re-formulate a new language. It was a language of a future bright yet even brighter in the darkness. New Wave from Joy Division to Depeche Mode, defined the ‘80s along with Run DMC, De La Soul, The Clash, Living Color, The Cure, Def Leopard, Bon Jovi, and so on. It is so easy to forget just how gaudy the gleam of amphetamine MTV had become at the so-called “End of History,” unless we listen to that brief moment, so very brief, yet so very bright: the Berlin Wall falling, the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of the networked computer, the heady innocence of the “free world” before 9/11 — “the ‘90s.”
In that new frontier emerged the global rave scene, a revolution of thought and art spurred on by the zip and zap of electronic and computer technology. Parallel with the wide-eyed optimism of the early Internet — rave — or “acid house” in the more musical British parlance — represented what the younger generation believed was a new kind of freedom. Like a precognitive blast from over the horizon, its rhythms and sounds felt like the multidimensional architecture of a far better, happier world. And at the forefront of that charge are what one might call “pioneers of the hypnotic groove,” artists forging a new music that embodied that change. One band from Leeds, England, who named themselves after a synthesizer setting, the LFO (or “low frequency oscillation” hovering below 20 hertz), scoured its sub-bass zone.
So when one listens to LFO’s opening rumble, the low space-invader voice of a robot asking us what the sound of the future is doing to us — “something you just live in” — it’s transmitting to our ears everything that the world would become, and yet become undone: a melting electric wave pulses through our brains; a higher pitched tweet lilts in answer to the waves; a roll call of the artists in Chicago, London, and Tokyo, along with Düsseldorf (Kraftwerk), Berlin (Tangerine Dream) and Belgium (Technotronic), who helped inspire techno music, ricochets in the DNA of the timeless — house:
“What is house? Technotronic, KLF, or something you just live in? To me, house is Phuture, Pierre, Fingers, Adonis, et cetera. — the pioneers of the hypnotic groove — Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode, and the Yellow Magic Orchestra … In the future we hope our music will bring everyone a little closer together — gay, straight, black or white — one nation under a groove.”
So begins LFO’s classic, Frequencies, the quintessential “bleep-and-bass” album, its ‘Intro’ throbbing between the atomic and the subatomic; clocking at 1:10, its elastic TB-303 synth line slices and whips electrons from machines to madness, from the motherboard to the mantric. “90 percent of the devastation takes place below the threshold of perception,” wrote Simon Reynolds in his exhaustive compendium of electronica’s cultural warp, Energy Flash, pegging Frequencies as one of a small handful of techno rave albums that he considered and anointed truly classic.
Reynolds, a punk believer at heart, diagnoses the disease but never relents in his more personal preference for edge over spirit. In his book, the sub-bass of “bleep-and-bass” trumps the more sensitive reflections of many ‘90s electronic artists, including LFO’s own Advance. Frequencies however is more important for its archetypal breakthroughs than for its pure artistry. And no track exemplifies underground ‘90s phantasms from the deep more than their ‘LFO’ — ‘Leeds Warehouse Mix’ — blowing the doors down to the 21st century and beyond.
The Speak & Spell toy sample of “L!-F!-O!” evokes Kraftwerk, but its pummeling bass evokes DJ Kool Herc. It was an amalgam of the euphoric and the dystopian. Journalist Matt Anniss excavates its spectral bones with the care of an archaeologist, unearthing the gems of its unlikely origins in his book, Join the Future: Bleep Techno and the Birth of British Bass Music; ‘LFO’ for starts was originally created by a trio, which strikes at the heart of the myth that it was simple. Its genesis was serendipitous, pluralistic — a miracle of accidents, sacrifices, cross-ways, friendships and alliances.
Like so much in the big bang of rave, the making of LFO happened on the ground. An older DJ, Martin Williams, held the keys to the Leeds underground, while the younger Gerard “Gez” Varley and Mark Bell — former breakdancing rivals — brought out a combination of wide-eyed spacial-ism and keen melodic instincts. Together, a revolution in bass — a “bass-ism” — sparked within their unique configuration. Sonically speaking, their studio set-up was basic. They only had a Casio FZ-10 sampler that could only hold eight notes at a time, the Atari-ST and Juno 106 synthesizers, Roland 808 and 909 drum machines, and a Kawai K1.
But the combination was titanic. They first met in a computer skills course that Williams was teaching. He was a known name in the local music scene as well, so Varley and Bell immediately clicked with him. He invited the two students to work on music at his home studio, which they called ‘the Attic’ — where over about 18 months they completed around 20 to 30 demos. Living off Kentucky Fried Chicken and Coca-Cola, they would immerse themselves inside a sonic cave for days on end, the glow of Williams’ computer screen layering blocks of sound into an unstoppable sequence, depth-charging away at the real world and summoning the future right now.
One day in 1990 within a few hours they crafted the first demo of ‘LFO,’ a Kawai K1 synthesizer preset providing “a dreamy, futuristic focus throughout,” washing right through the middle of a call-and-response bass line that went high and low, low, low. “It boasts ear-catching bleeps, glassy-eyed chords and low-end that kicks you in the guts,” writes Anniss. “Listen to it over a Reggae sound system or a sizable club rig and its sub-bass frequencies will rattle your ribcage and send your mind spinning.”
It’s the bouncing yet subterranean bass that blew ravers’ minds around the world. Robert Gordon, the record producer who crafted Warp Records’ first release ‘Track With No Name,’ remembers working with the sound engineer Kevin Metcalfe on the ‘LFO’ vinyl mastering. “The cutting engineer had never come across anything like it,” says Gordon. “I remember that we blew the fuses on his cutting system. It’s the only time anything I’ve been involved in has ever done that. We had to stop, put a new fuse in and start again.” It was if they had broken the floor to open up the Earth’s core.
As Anniss encapsulates, it’s not just the bass however. It is how the bass separates, opens up, and swings under the lashes and sparkles of melodic intensity that move over the happy collisions of late-night personality. It’s the sound of the circadian roll heaving from an emerging electronic world that would subsume modern society, yet guided by the hands and minds of innocent and optimistic artists. How Frequencies’ ‘Intro’ flows into ‘LFO (Leeds Warehouse Mix)’ is key to the album’s magic, like seeing the sharp glint of the tip of a cresting wave that then curls and runs right through the whole of history. Ecstatic. Revelatory. Fervent. Bleep — there are no words for it.
Soon, ‘LFO’ would send Varley and Bell’s careers into outer orbit. It reached No. 12 in the UK’s top singles chart. The legendary John Peel played it enthusiastically on BBC Radio 1. Varley has a stark memory of that life-changing moment: “I remember one night my dad shouting up to me: ‘Gerard, get down here - John Peel is playing your song on Radio 1!’ It was ace, man.” From there, things accelerated at warp speed. Synonymous with Warp Records, the indie label’s first hit would define the era of British techno, breaking bleep-and-bass to the masses with an uncompromising sound that was pure underground and sheer Leeds, Midlands brilliance.
The album Frequencies followed the next year. Along with The Future Sound of London’s Accelerator in 1992, it established the progressive blueprint of what would define 1990s electronica: the obsession with space, the wild sampling, the cutting of breakbeats with drum machines to create graphic rhythms, the stark driving power of the metronome, the tinge of melancholy on the heels of ecstasy. Not a terribly varied album, Frequencies instead explores the archetypal core and limits of the bleep-and-bass aesthetic. It’s minimal yet energetic. Robotic yet humanistic.
Whimsical is another frequency it casts: ‘Simon from Sydney’ is a timeless drift through a late night or early morning, post dancing one’s brains out (it seems that’s when one meets ravers from the other side of the world, sitting down to talk, trading ideas about the future and a music culture that a global generation have wrought). ‘Nurture’ brings in a more frenzied state of mind, a kind of Art of Noise in space; almost speaking, wordless melodies say something on the edge of thought, a profound communion of sound for sound’s sake from mind to heart.
It’s ‘Freeze’ however that reminds us that ‘LFO’ was the flashpoint of the Leeds and Sheffield bleep explosion. Still moodier and mellower than the monster ‘LFO,’ it evokes the kinetic power, and purpose conveyed in the sensual lines of a wicked groove. Its spirit is as much sex as intellect, delirium as much as machine logic; the influence of Depeche Mode is strong on ‘Tan Ta Ra,’ yet entirely unique and alien — the cold and alienation of Detroit sweeping through with gusts of ghosts that suspend temporal reliance on the flow, bringing the circle into the clock of what we know.
And what too many of us didn’t know, as Anniss points to poignantly, is that Williams, DJ Martin that is, was edged out of the LFO story early. A Black man who was critical in the development of LFO and their journey, Williams says he holds no hard feelings, and remains friends with Varley. But one can indeed hear the loss of his warmer, more eclectic approach to sound, informed by his love of soul and jazz, as much as electro or house or techno. And this is perhaps why the second half of Frequencies becomes a little too even, too mechanical, too abstract. ‘Think a Moment’ and ‘You Have to Understand’ are fine songs, but until Advance, they lack Bell’s later fuller gusto.
Which brings us to ‘We Are Back,’ the first track Varley and Bell did without Williams. What is incredibly clear from Anniss’ reporting is that the Warehouse and Chapeltown hero — Williams — was instrumental in Varley and Bell’s musical formation, and hence Warp Records. ‘We Are Back’ repeats a Texas Instruments call-and-response with clonking beats and piston rhythms that helped define LFO’s spiritual superego: Williams’ six-month-old daughter lent the Speak & Spell toy, and Varley riffed, downloading his inspiration from the ether, and pushed into the Kawai K1, Bell sculpting lines on his SX1000 synthesizer, and Williams gracing the controls. Contrasting, ‘We Are Back’ lacks a true groove — the dislocation of ‘LFO.’
“When ‘LFO’ came out I told them that what they’d done would last for years,” Gordon recalled to Anniss in Join the Future. He had discovered LFO for Warp when he heard DJ Martin at a Leeds club and then listened to their demos afterwards in Williams’ car. Crucially, Williams shaped the bass and oomph of ‘LFO’ by testing it out at the various venues he played, tuning it relentlessly on reggae sound systems. Gordon would later recommend Warp Record’s Steve Beckett and Rob Mitchell to the Attic. “I knew that everyone was going to try and beat it,” Gordon continues, “particularly the heaviness of the bass, but that they wouldn't be able to. I never tried to beat it — I knew it was the ultimate.” It was Williams’ work ethic and smarts then, that opened the bass.
Would it be too much to ask how much the genesis of LFO illustrates the future we got instead of the future we dreamed of? The genius of Varley and Bell was established, as Frequencies and Advance show. The latter is especially potent — the tour de force of Bell’s more singular artistic vision and prowess. But Anniss probes and reveals that at the heart of rave’s pure genius was something more communal and more fragile; the hypnotic groove of ‘LFO’ and Warp’s legions foreshadowed the hypnotic power of today’s social media algorithms, the artificial intelligence of the Internet, pulling in global brainwaves and new economic pathways. And yet the fate of our future depends on frequencies that go deeper than electronics to the human spirit.
After laying out their manifesto on Frequencies about the global and multicultural origins of house and electronic music, the duo of Varley and Bell by way of Williams kicked right into an acid burning groove that perfectly captured the ecstatic, elastic days of early rave. Decades before the technological revolution would fix more and more of humanity into the relentless gears of the digital Machine, the K1 warmth, subsonic bass and liquid melodies of ‘LFO’ pointed to a much better route: its together empathic human route — the pioneers’ path to the hypnotic truth.
Track Listing:
1. Intro
2. LFO (Leeds Warehouse Mix)
3. Simon from Sydney
4. Nurture
5. Freeze
6. We Are Back
7. Tan Ta Ra
8. You Have to Understand
9. El Ef Oh!
10. Love is the Message
11. Mentok 1
12. Think a Moment
13. Groovy Distortion
14. Track 14