this saturday! (nov 4) LFO (live) (1 Viewer)

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u:m

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Apr 2, 2002
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u:mack
present static
featuring
LFO (Live)
DJ Rob Hall (skam)
Temple bar music centre
saturday 4 november
doors 11pm till late
Tickets €23 from road, city discs and online at
www.tickets.ie and on the door
Listen to LFO at
http://www.myspace.com/lowfrequencyoscillator


We are very proud to announce the first ever Irish
apearance by techno legend LFO. u:mack have been
trying to book LFO, whose live performances are ultra
rare, for more then ten years. This will be the party
of the decade.

LFO Biography 2003
By Bill Brewster.

SCENE ONE: A couple of young boys have sneaked into a
club in Leeds, The Warehouse, with the help of their
friend, Martin Williams, who also happens to be the DJ
there. Martin has a cassette of new music given to him
by these cheeky teen chisellers. One track in
particular is causing much dancefloor consternation.
It’s called “LFO” and it’s also by LFO. As luck would
have it on this evening, Steve Beckett and Rob
Mitchell from the fledgling Warp Records notice the
dance-based kerfuffle and run up to the booth
demanding to know what the heck the tune is. Martin
dutifully points in the direction of 20 year olds Mark
Bell and Gez Varley, for it is they.

SCENE TWO: I’m stood in a gay club in London, Troll,
in the early summer of 1990. It’s sticky and humid
outside, while inside the sweat is dripping off the
speakers suspended above the dancefloor. A record
comes on with bass so BIG, so tangible, it feels like
you could put your arms round it and give it a cuddle.
It sounds disembodied and otherwordly, and yet,
paradoxically, it’s also soulful, like Kraftwerk is
soulful. It’s also called “LFO” by LFO. It fits in
perfectly with the mixture of house, techno and the
R&S-style new beat the DJs play.

Mark Bell’s story could provide a template for every
kid of a certain age growing up in Thatcher’s Britain.
You could almost write the script yourself. It’s an
amalgam of video games, football and music with a spot
of hi-jinks thrown in for good measure. In a way, acid
house became the physical expression of the disparate
feelings of thousands of kids in Britain: casual
culture, electro, breakdancing, hip hop, football,
clothes, computer games, daft haircuts and that
strange British obsession with black American culture.
Mark Bell and his mate Gez Varley were no exception,
really. They had the lino, like everyone who’d ever
bought a Streetsounds compilation, and an unquenchable
passion for electronically-driven culture.

Yet there is one difference. There are very few kids
from the back streets of Leeds who get to work with
Björk in Spain, produce bands like Depeche Mode and,
moreover, get to make their own records for a living.
Oh, and just for good measure working with a bunch of
Germans who just so happened to be ex-members of
Kraftwerk.

Mark Bell’s most significant early memories of music
were threefold. There was the teacher at school who
taught art and played Jean-Michel Jarre and Kraftwerk;
there was the older sister who played disco, funk and
early electro in her bedroom. There was also, recalls
Mark, “a record shop in Leeds that had arcade games
like Tempest and Defender and they’d play loads of
early hip hop like Schoolly D. I remember feeling this
is mine and my friend’s place”.

Mark’s first foray into the world of electronic
instrumentation began when he managed to do a deal
with his first girlfriend’s father. “He used to make
reeaaaaallly bad ‘Lady In Red’ style ballads that I
had to sit through for ages so I could convince him he
needed a band, not soulless electronic crap, and I
could buy his drum machine!”

When Mark left school to go do a photography and
graphic design course at college. It’s here that he
met both Gez Varley, his early LFO collaborator, and
Martin Williams, a West Yorkshire DJ. Thanks to a
legacy of money left by Gez’s grandmother, they found
themselves with a bedroom full of equipment and a
world of ideas. Those ideas mutated into cassettes
full of possibilities, and pal Martin started playing
them at his gigs. LFO (Low Frequency Oscilllation),
the knob on many a vintage synth, now became a group.

“One Saturday Rob and Steve from Warp came to the
Warehouse,” recalls Mark, “and Martin played some of
our tracks and the crowd would go mental. Rob knew his
music so he asked Martin what was playing and he
pointed at me and Gez. So we sat in someone’s car and
played them a tape, it was 90 minutes of fun! They
couldn’t believe how much there was, Warp the label
hadn’t quite started yet but they offered to put out a
12 for us. We’d never even thought about releasing
stuff; it was more than enough hearing the music on a
big system.”

The resultant tale has become the stuff of acid house
legend. The expected 2,000 sales mutating into 130,000
and a number 12 placing in the UK Top 40. Not only
that, but Radio 1’s Steve Wright offered his own
(w)ringing endorsement, pronouncing ‘LFO’ terrible at
every available opportunity. Being harangued by Steve
Wright is, of course, the sort of thing that in saner
times would merit knighthoods and the donation of
small Caribbean islands for use thereof.

The debut album Frequencies – the first great European
techno LP – captured the Detroit aesthetic perfectly,
though this was hardly a surprise. The Detroit
pioneers themselves had been influenced by electronic
music from Yorkshire – early Human League and Cabaret
Voltaire – as well as P-Funk and electro. Most of the
kids in Yorkshire making early house and techno
records had started out in breakdance crews. Electro
was in their blood (or, at the very least, record
collections).

There was some gap between the first album and
Advance, their second effort. The press described them
as “the Stone Roses of techno”, somehow missing the
point that they were still actively making dance
records for indie labels like Carl Craig’s Planet E.
No matter. Advance managed to combine visceral
drill-sergeant beats (“Tied Up”) with an almost jazz
aesthetic on “Shove Piggy Shove” (which became Björk’s
“I Go Humble”): Beauty and the Bea(s)t.

After the release of Advance, Mark and Gez parted ways
with Mark retaining rights over the name. Not that he
did anything with it. A mere seven years later we have
the third album, Sheath. So why the gap? “Fuck knows,”
laughs Mark. “It’s not intentional…It’s easy doing
your first album as you have all the first part of
your life to express. The second one is harder unless
you’re going to repeat yourself… and repetition bores
me a bit, it’s a complete wasted opportunity to be
creative.”

Not that the lad’s been idle or anything. There’s the
small matter of co-producing Björk’s Homogenic (the
aforementioned trip to Spain), which included working
with legendary Brazilian producer/keyboardist Eumir
Deodato. “I really enjoy producing, as in thinking how
someone’s song would make me like it, then actually
putting that into practice,” says Mark, simply, of his
production work. “You also meet some brilliant people
like Deodato. He’d just wear his pyjamas all day
playing the stock market on his computer, but when he
was young he’d be a ‘true playa’ with loads of bikini
girls on his sleeves.”

Mark also produced Björk’s Selma Songs (the soundtrack
to her Palme d’Or winning Dancer in the Dark film) and
Depeche Mode’s Exciter. A chance to work with true
heroes. “I felt a bit odd when Depeche Mode were
asking me for days off or what they should eat,” he
confesses. “I used to be into them when I was 12 and
now I am deciding what food they’re going to eat? They
were really fun though.” He adds, pointedly: “But
doing my own thing is more rewarding as there is no
compromise, it’s just me.”

No compromise indeed. And so to Sheath by LFO. There’s
a lack of a vocal presence on Sheath. Might this be a
reaction to working with so many vocalists? “It’s
definitely a reaction,” confirms Mark. “Björk is an
amazing vocalist and I always compare other people to
her range and feeling which is a bit stupid of me, but
I’ve been spoilt really. Most demos that I get sent
with vocals I find pretty hard work. I prefer the
synths to sing on this one.” Describe your record in
three words: “L...F.....O...”

Mark Bell still lives for that great moment, the one
that makes the hairs stand to attention on your nape.
“I remember hearing Schoolly D’s ‘Saturday Night’ and
Grandmaster Flash’s ‘Adventures On The Wheels Of
Steel’ and just getting all moist!,” says Mark. “I
still get those feelings when I hear a ‘special’
track. That’s what I live for really, hearing or
making a ‘special’ track.”

So has anything changed from starting out to getting
here today? “Phew… I’ve got some pubes. I can cook a
bit and I read the Sunday papers.” Growing up? Who
knows? Just don’t ask him what went wrong at Leeds United…
 
This is going to rule. I know it says it up there, but tickets will definetly be on the door?
 
yeah, deffo some on the door
Champion.

colorful-idiot.jpg
 
I chose Sufjan Stevens in Belgium over this. He better be fuckin good and the Belgian beer better be fuckin deadly.

Rob Hall was amazing after Jamie Liddell in the TBMC a while back.

FUCK
 
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