Mark Bell came out of West Yorkshire at exactly the right moment. House and techno were arriving from Chicago and Detroit, hip hop had already changed how young producers thought about machines and samples, and northern clubs were building their own relationship with bass. In Leeds, Bell and Gez Varley formed LFO in 1988. The name came from the low-frequency oscillator sitting inside the equipment, which was fitting: low frequency would become part of their identity.

Across Leeds and Sheffield, a regional sound was taking shape. Producers were stripping dance music down to bleeps, drum machines and huge sub-bass, mixing American electronic ideas with British sound-system thinking and warehouse pressure. When Warp Records began in Sheffield in 1989, that network finally had a label capable of putting its records into the wider rave world.

LFO became one of Warp’s defining early acts. Their self-titled track, usually remembered through the Leeds Warehouse Mix, was released as WAP5 in 1990. The bass was famously deeper than ordinary radios could really reproduce, yet the record still climbed to number 12 in the UK singles chart. A track designed to shake a warehouse had somehow gatecrashed the national chart.

That success did not soften the music. If anything, it proved that the strange, stripped-back northern sound could reach a big audience without pretending to be pop. LFO’s early records helped give Yorkshire bleep a national identity and made Warp one of the labels people watched whenever a new piece of electronic machinery escaped into the world.

In November 1991 came Frequencies, Warp’s third album release. It took the rave-floor impact of the singles and stretched the idea into a full electronic world: LFO, We Are Back, Love Is The Message, Simon From Sydney and the rest showed that this music did not have to be treated as disposable twelve-inch culture. Rave-rooted machine music could work as an album and still sound dangerous through a big system.

LFO continued to change. Varley left the group in the mid-1990s and Bell carried the LFO name forward alone. Advance arrived in 1996; Sheath followed in 2003. The later records were less interested in repeating the first bleep formula and more interested in what machines could still do when pushed into stranger shapes.

At the same time Bell became increasingly important behind other artists’ records. His partnership with Björk became one of the great producer-artist relationships of 1990s electronic pop. He co-produced much of Homogenic in 1997, helping fuse brutal electronic rhythms with the album’s strings and volcanic emotional scale, and continued collaborating with her across later records and live work.

In 2001 he produced Depeche Mode’s Exciter. It was another useful reminder that Bell’s production identity was bigger than one recognisable LFO sound. He understood space, texture, rhythm and how to let electronic details carry weight without turning everything into noise.

Mark died on 8 October 2014, aged 43, following complications after an operation. Warp’s announcement brought together tributes from several worlds because his career had travelled through several of them: rave, techno, experimental electronics and major international records.

His place in the Hall comes back to the beginning. LFO showed that the North was not merely receiving dance music from somewhere else. Leeds and Sheffield were changing it, rebuilding it around their own clubs, machines and bass bins. Mark Bell was one of the people making that future audible.