From Ashok Divakaran Sent Thu, Jan 1st 1998, 08:12
From Ashok Divakaran Sent Thu, Jan 1st 1998, 08:12
> > 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 > 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 // xxxx@xx.xxxxxx.xxx > > The technology of today is the cheese of tomorrow. // Anti:Rom