Quantum bleeps
This month’s enigma exposed: Leeds techno youth create the record Kraftwerk should have made.
LFO Frequencies WARP, 1991
Leeds’ early-’80s breakdancing scene may have been far from the movement’s Bronx birthplace, but it nurtured a surprising amount of musical talent. Future Yorkshire bass fiends including Forgemasters, Unique 3 and Nightmares On Wax all jostled for space on the lino outside the Merrion shopping centre; local lads Gez Varley and Mark Bell were also among the young b-boys who later formed groups. Their name: LFO, for the low-frequency oscillation synthesizer function. By early ’89, house music from Chicago had supplanted electro and hip-hop as the groovers’ choice of transatlantic stimulus, and the pair were working on tracks. Depeche Mode and Mantronix fans both, they marshalled their basic set-up of keyboards and drum machines and recorded on tape. Martin Williams, AKA DJ Martin, who would play the nascent LFO’s material off cassette as part of his sets at Leeds club the Warehouse, was also involved. “Me and Mark were jamming together, doing the music,” says Varley. “Martin was the DJ side, saying, ‘It’s got to start like this, come in like this…’ He played a big part in it.” One early recording, also entitled LFO, was heard by Forgemasters’ Robert Gordon, a producer at Sheffield’s FON Studios and co-founder of the Warp label. This track – a raw house assault with a bass line to dislodge fillings in ravers’ mouths and a title enunciated robot-style by a Speak & Spell toy – would be LFO’s debut single. It sold 130,000 copies and was a Number 12 hit in August 1990. One endorsement came from zany Radio 1 jock Steve Wright. “He slagged it to fuck,” says Varley. “He had to play it, so he speeded it up, slowed it down and put duck noises over it, all this shit, and said, ‘This is the worst record ever!’” Wright may have objected to its mechanoid futurity and lack of guitars, chorus and middle eight, but the still-teenage Bell and Varley – Williams had jumped ship – showed a more traditional mindset with their next move. The house boom mostly favoured tracks over long players, but when they went to ground in Bell’s loft/bedroom in Wakefield for the rest of 1990, their aim was to create an album. Their hardware included a Casio SL-10 sampler, a “really cheap” Fostex multitrack mixer and a Korg Bass Station bought with a publishing advance. “We just wanted to record,” says Varley. “There was no real pressure, which is how you get the best stuff. [Technology-wise] we didn’t have a lot of options, so we had to make do – to just use two effects, but to learn them inside out. It was good working with Mark. He always had ideas – you’d be bouncing them around… I really do miss that.” After what Varley estimates as a nine-month period, the tracks were sequenced: with its shifts in style, pace and atmosphere – as well as its rhythmic invention, giant bass sounds and melodic sophistication – what resulted is that rare thing among ’90s electronica, a satisfying long-playing listening experience that still stands up. Employing a slowed- down voice of doom, the portentous, scything Intro stated LFO’s program, elevating the Chicago innovators over European pop-house contenders (“What is house?/Technotronic, KLF, or something you live in?/To me, house is Phuture, Pierre, Fingers, Adonis…”). A cerebral kind of weight is employed on the mysterious Simon From Sydney (named for an Australian licenser), while We Are Back is steely and combative, claiming the title “true creators”. “Obviously we’re not the real creators,” says Varley. “We just thought it would be cool to make a statement. We’d got slagged off a lot [for LFO] – you’ve sold out, blah blah – so We Are Back was kind of just to say, ‘Fuck off’, really!” Side two of the old vinyl retains a particular charge, with the elastic, chiming Tan Ta Ra leading to a chamber of deep psychedelic delirium, with You Have To Understand and Love Is The Message giving way to the final, exhausted Think A Moment. “We wanted to take the listener on a trip,” says Varley. “What really influenced me as a concept was Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon. I hadn’t listened to [Frequencies] for years but when I did a few years ago, it worked almost perfectly.” Released in August 1991, the album’s chart zenith was 42. February 1992’s storming What Is House EP was also a specialist taste, though to publicise it the group were featured on the NME’s cover smashing and burning guitars. “We got some right feedback about that,” says Varley. “Heavy metal kids giving us abuse in pubs, saying, ‘Who the fuck do you think you are, degrading heavy music?’ I said, I grew up on heavy metal, it’s just to get a bit of shock. Which it did.” In 1992 they began to play live, while an invitation to collaborate came from Richie Hawtin (an earlier session with Kraftwerk’s Karl Bartos remains unreleased). Yet it would be four years until the next LFO album, Advance, and at the beginning of 1997, Varley quit. “It was going a bit funny,” he says. “For about six or seven years he was my best mate, but we fell out… Mark working with Björk was part of the fall-out.” Afterwards, Varley recorded solo and as G-Man; Bell carried on as LFO for 2003’s Sheath, and collaborated with Björk from 1997’s Homogenic until 2011’s Biophilia. Tragically, Bell died on October 8, 2014, after complications from surgery. “We didn’t speak for six, seven years,” says Varley, “but the half year before he passed away we talked on Facebook, loosely, about doing the band again. I was playing in Leeds one night and Mark was meant to come but he had to go back to Iceland where he lived… that was a few months before he passed away.” Today, Varley is making an LP with ex-Krush man Mark Gamble, using vintage gear. “I want to get back to old ways of thinking, and working around limitations,” he says. “I don’t want to copy Frequencies, but it needs to have that innocence. And I’m thinking people need to hear it, because life goes so quick.”
“STEVE WRIGHT SAID, ‘THIS IS THE WORST RECORD EVER!’”
Gez Varley