LFO - 'freak' (update 2014 - RIP Mark Bell)

RIP

There is a formal statement from Warp

http://warp.net/records/lfo/mark-bell

Fuck. This is terrible. RIP.

RIP

this is completely unexpected and awful.

RIP

I was two years old when "LFO" came out so I never got to live through its peak and instead hear it as retro, but I get to live in a culture where a piece of music so singular and striking is part of the canon, and that's a testament to the power of his ability to both innovate and excite. Even more amazing is that hearing his work from his later years was just as thrilling and fresh. A truly talented figure, RIP.

Mark Bell's music was futuristic in the best way: not utopian, but urgent, vital and unconcerned with what came before. Shock to have that kind of life force vanish.

This is awful. RIP.

very, very sad; a true innovator. i had a promo of "LFO" by LFO a few weeks before it came out and was in the fortunate position of being able to play it to a room full of people on a huge soundsystem every week. nowadays, a few people might come up to ask what a record is but i swear the first time i played this, over half the people in the club came up to ask what it was. people would spontaneously start applauding when the bass break came in and the bar staff would plead with me not to play it as glasses would start falling off the shelves. it really felt like the future had arrived. it seemed almost revolutionary when it then nearly reached the uk top ten. almost every record he was involved with still sounds phenomenal.

Both Frequencies and Homogenic were completely pivotal moments in the evolution of my taste, although I came to Homogenic first and worked backwards.

At a time when so many British underground musicians release major label debuts with all the life triangulated out of them, and every pop record is accompanied by a tedious discussion as to whether x or y track is too whatever to be picked up by radio, you just want to take everyone concerned aside and remind them that a record as gloriously unhinged and uncompromising and singular as LFO could just come out of nowhere and crash straight into the top 20 and that maybe everyone should just have a little more faith in what they do.

not sure what to say about this so i'll just post my favorite lfo track

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtKcUGRb-hk

:-(

this is from the freak single

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEWrwyKXlps

as the ytimg helpfully explains

that and "butterslut" (they had the best song titles didn't they) are top tier

:(

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/nm7CYPeL1Dw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm7CYPeL1Dw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOG6946sY_0

revisiting LFO as a tangent to the Bjork poll results and remembering this amazing set rip which lived on a long-gone wiped hard drive:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en9hcFiqiko