Varley remembers his evergreen 30 year old dub techno classic

Gez Varley, one half of the legendary British techno duo LFO, has told revealed that Warp Records turned down the chance to release his ‘Quo Vadis’ techno classic – and then changed their mind when it got a rave review.

The evergreen dub techno workout, originally released in 1994 under Varley’s solo moniker G-Man, has since been remixed and repressed numerous times. The latest, the 2023 edition, with a Frank Kusserow remix, reached Juno’s shelves last week.

“The Frank Kusserow remix was done in 2011,” Varley told us, “He’s a long time German friend of mine, he’s from Frankfurt.”

He recalls the track being made at his Leeds home not long after he and Mark Bell had decided to call it quits as LFO.

“‘Quo Vadis’ was done on a small set up at my house, but sometimes less is more (well, more or less),” he says, “I was in Leeds at the time, I had just set up my home studio as the rest of my equipment was at Mark’s house. It was more or less my first proper solo stuff – this was born out of the negative response from Warp on my LFO stuff. Warp had become to be anti-techno.

“I even sent the track to them but they refused it – until Mixmag gave it 5/5 record of week , then they wanted it. Luckily Colin Newman loved the track. He picked up on the track as we had done a remix for WIRE and we became friends.”

Newman put the track out on his Swim label, but that was just the start of its release history. “Now it’s been released in 21 versions, not including represses.” Varley said. “Hard to think it’s 29 years old now.”

Varley has been raiding his vaults for other rare and unreleased G-Man tracks issued as From The Vaults I and From The Vaults II for German label Retro and continues to create new material.