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I'm curious about just how influential LFO's "Frequencies" and their early singles were. I've read a few interviews where the artists talked about how "Frequencies" changed their lives, but I'm wondering whether some of the elements in LFO's music had long been around or not. It's hard to tell since I don't own every early Warp release, for one thing. Is "Frequencies" an actual groundbreaking legendary release that caused a million other bleep-bloop techno acts to form all over the world? Or is it just a great album? Can someone provide some history and context? Cheers, James Jung-Hoon Seo // Oracle Tools Fundamental Technology Group (650) 506-3829 // 2op873 // jseo@us.oracle.com The technology of today is the cheese of tomorrow. // Anti:Rom

quoted 5 lines I'm curious about just how influential LFO's "Frequencies" and their e

> > I'm curious about just how influential LFO's "Frequencies" and their early > singles were. I've read a few interviews where the artists talked about how > "Frequencies" changed their lives, but I'm wondering whether some of the > elements in LFO's music had long been around or not.

For me the heavily bleepy sound of Frequencies, with its pretty literal references to home computer culture, was quite clearly a modern update of Kraftwerk's "Electric Cafe". I remember that at the time it was released a lot of other people felt the same way. Looking back, I don't really know to what extent LFO influenced the development of techno. To my ears it was, like I said, a clever fusion of the Krafterkian sound with Detroit sensibilities and a stripped-down, very mechanistic approach that had not (with maybe the exception of people like Keith Leblanc, but in a very different way) been used before. You have to remember that at the time Frequencies was released, the competition was coming from people like Adamski, 808 State and a Guy called Gerald, all of whose albums were much more approachable than "Frequencies". Its minimalism, as I remember, quite polarized those who had heard it into two distinct camps - you either hated it or you thought it was brilliant. (The same thing happened a couple of years later with another minimo-clonk release, Cabaret Voltaire's "Body and Soul" - no one seemed to know how to deal with it.) Certainly I think Frequencies influenced a lot of purist techno artists - I'm talking people like Richard Kirk himself, Robert Leiner of the Source Experience, and I'm sure people like Neil Landstrumm also - but I don't hear any immediately audible references to anything on "Frequencies" in most of the techno of the 90s. Not that that devalues LFO's contribution in any way - it's just that, IMO, Frequencies was not a "deep" enough album, or didn't deeply affect enough people, to inspire a wave of direct LFO clones. This is absolutely not the case, for example, of first-wave Detroit: you can hear the intricate hihat patterns that the Detroiters pioneered even in a lot of German trance, a school of techno whose sensibilities are very far off from most modern Detroit. I don't think LFO can claim to have spawned concrete innovations that were adopted (and adapted) en masse like those of Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson et al. Then again, I don't know if it's fair to pit the inventions of an army of Detroiters against a couple of British bedroom tweakers who made, in the final analysis, a fine album by any standards, and one that has resisted the passage of time fairly well. I don't think my rambling really answered your question, but those are my thoughts, for what they're worth. Ashok It's hard to tell since

quoted 14 lines I

> I > don't own every early Warp release, for one thing. Is "Frequencies" an > actual > groundbreaking legendary release that caused a million other bleep-bloop > techno acts to form all over the world? Or is it just a great album? Can > someone provide some history and context? > > Cheers, > > > James Jung-Hoon Seo // Oracle Tools Fundamental Technology Group > (650) 506-3829 // 2op873 // jseo@us.oracle.com > > The technology of today is the cheese of tomorrow. // Anti:Rom

quoted 4 lines I'm curious about just how influential LFO's "Frequencies" and their e

>I'm curious about just how influential LFO's "Frequencies" and their early >singles were. I've read a few interviews where the artists talked about how >"Frequencies" changed their lives, but I'm wondering whether some of the >elements in LFO's music had long been around or not.

really should write a book about 'how i fought in the acid house wars', cos the pure energy & the cultural mind bombs of those times will NEVER be seen or experienced on the same scale again i wouldn't say LFO were that influential per se, to put it in context, .. most important thing about lfo was that along with 808 State [yes it's hard to believe but they used to be good once] they were one of the first UK *pure* techno acts to truly cross over into both the charts & get press in the indie inkies [ NME and MM, you have to bear in mind these were the times when the UK techno underground was still in it's formative stages ,finding it's feet and was trying to find a voice, only a handful of people had heard Black Dog,B12, Aphex Twin, most people thought ART was something you drew and Black Dog was something you took for a walk], to me LFO's sound was a synthesis of the cold mechanics of Detroit / Kraftwerk with the simplistic hedonism of Chicago and i'd say the artists they admired had much more influence [kraftwerk, phuture, mr fingers, derrick may, yellow magic orchestra]..they could also cut it live unlike 99% of the mime artists at the time..saw them live a handful of times around 90/91 but it's a bit blurry now..one thing that sticks out from that time is hearing sasha playing octave one and whitney Houston in the same set.. before them the only dance music the indie rags and radio stations would sully themselves with was the guitar - dance hybrid merchants like the mondays, flowered up or the roses who were more readily clasped to the bosom of the indie press around this time NME put LFO on the front cover smashing guitars and proclaiming guitar music as dead...'LFO' [the single] was helped by RadioOne daytime DJ Steve Wright playing it on his afternoon show and proclaiming it as the worst record he'd ever heard fangs for the memories stuart

quoted 4 lines Is "Frequencies" an actual

>Is "Frequencies" an actual >groundbreaking legendary release that caused a million other bleep-bloop >techno acts to form all over the world? Or is it just a great album? Can >someone provide some history and context?

LFO were a big influence on the aphex twin. cheerio! np - sounds fresh - reprazent

Just thought I'd put my view on this one. Looking at LFO's "LFO" single rather than the album as a whole, I'd say this track was HUGELY influential. It's use of Sub-Bass was unprecedented and sparked a wave of imitation tracks. Along with a very small number of other tracks (Unique 3's "The Theme", Sweet Exorcist's "Testone" and a handful of others), a blueprint was formed for a brief phase of "bass, breaks and bleeps" tracks on the british rave scene, which was just about into it's third year at the time (1990, the third summer of love). (Clearly LFO dod not contribute to the "breaks" part of this pattern) This rapidly evolved into the early hardcore stuff of 1991 from which the entire Jungle/Drum-n-bass and happy hardcore schenes can be traced. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that LFO caused drum-n-bass to be the way it is, but the use of sub-bass in this way was not known in house/techno at the time, and became de rigeur in hardcore tracks, and of course part of the genetic make-up of d+b. I wouldn't rate the rest of the album as anywhere near so influential - it just dd not go mainstream like the single. But it's still a classic, imo. laterz, J ^ Steady J aka James Skilton steady-j@geocities.com Autechre & SKAM discogs @ http://subnet.virtual-pc.com/~sk393820 "I don' have any idea 'bout what's going on..."