The 6 best Bleep Techno tracks of all time

Bleep Techno

Sheffield and Leeds, 1989: Detroit's sequenced tones stripped to a few sine bleeps and dropped over sub-bass borrowed from Jamaican sound systems. The first British techno that sounded like nowhere in America.

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1. 01

   LFO / LFO

   1990 · Warp

   A test tone, a bassline and their own name spoken over it, and it reached number twelve in the national chart. Nothing else on the radio that year was remotely this austere.

2. 02

   Forgemasters / Track With No Name

   1989 · Warp

   Warp's first release, funded by an enterprise grant, named after a Sheffield steelworks. The label that later signed Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada starts exactly here.

3. 03

   Unique 3 / The Theme

   1989

   Bradford, and usually credited as the first bleep record. The bass is doing something no Detroit producer had asked a bassline to do.

4. 04

   Sweet Exorcist / Testone

   1990 · Warp

   Richard H. Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire with DJ Parrot, making a record out of calibration tones. Sheffield's industrial past and its dance present in one object.

5. 05

   Nightmares on Wax / Dextrous

   1989 · Warp

   Leeds, and considerably warmer than its neighbours here. George Evelyn was already writing tunes while everyone else was still testing speakers.

6. 06

   Tricky Disco / Tricky Disco

   1990 · Warp

   Silly, insistent, and a top twenty hit. Bleep's brief pop moment, before the whole scene sped up into hardcore and left the tempo behind.