LOWER SYNTH DEPARTMENT

Lower Synth Department’s music is deeply influenced by and related to the experimental electronic music of the late 1970s and early 1980s, that was made in Sheffield by bands like The Future/The Human League, Vice Versa, Cabaret Voltaire, or by the formerly in Preston based musician Colin Potter and a few American avant-garde artists, pioneering in electronic music, like John Bender, etc.. Although the band is very careful in creating a minimal electronics sound, obviously appearing vintage in itself, it is produced in a hybrid way, by using analogous procedures and modern techniques of production as well. So in the end Lower Synth Department is concerned with post-minimal electronics so to speak.

The name of the band is related to at least three different references, which intercommunicate and therefore depict the sound of the band: first to the cold aesthetics of modernist, especially brutalist architecture, which conveyed and expressed a very dehumanized attitude to life from the 1950s till the 1960s, that still affected even the 1980s. Second, technically speaking, to the low frequency oscillator, which creates a rhythmic pulse or sweep and is often used to modulate synthesizers, delay lines and other audio equipment in order to create effects used in the production of electronic music, while the final reference derives from the band’s name abbreviation.