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