Acid. What is it? Am I talking about something inside a battery? Am I talking about the infamous psychedelic drug enjoyed so much by Mr. Leary and many others in the sixties and beyond? No. That leaves two options given the nature of this blog, either citric acid (of not that much interest to me) or a term for a sound in music. For me it'll always be a passionate interest and has been a virtual obsession at other times.
Acid is in fact the name given to the noises created through a failed bass guitar synthesizer made by Roland at the beginning of the eighties. This synthesizer was called the TB-303 and is known most often known merely as a 303 or acid. All this sounds pretty inconsequential but it has in fact been massively influential in underground and overground music. This little box helped create whole new styles of music, alongside drum machines made by the same company such as the 606, 808 and 909. At some point in the early eighties various people in Chicago, amongst other places, got hold of this device and noticed that by deliberately not following the 90-page user manual they could tweak this machine to make a bizarre selection of noises with an acidic cutting kind of sound. In fact the there is an incredibly wide range of sounds that can be made with this versatile and unassuming little box. Soon people were making all kinds of crazy noises with it and it helped to give birth to a vibrant underground dance music scene in Chicago and Detroit. The best known early acid label for me is called Trax records and had such names as Frankie Knuckles and Jamie Principle producing music (Principle wrote Your Love, later famously covered by Candy Stanton) using acid noises. I love the use of acid in Fantasy Girl and the aptly named Acid Trax by Phuture, you can really here that iconic squelch and cut. They are far from the earliest acid tracks, but they really give a good taste of that unique acid driven sound.
During the eighties the 303 was used in hip-hop, hip-house, techno and house tracks and of course took the UK by storm in the infamous Summer of Love in 1988, when the UK, depending on your viewpoint, was ravaged or blessed by a proliferation of rave parties seemingly exploding from nowhere. This gave birth to a huge selection of acid house tracks in the UK, with such hilariously cheesy examples as Everything Starts With an E by the E-Zee Possee and much higher quality and inventive tracks like Voodoo Ray by A Guy Called Gerald, a native of Moss Side in Manchester who took the rave scene by storm in 1988. Later on, as dance music took on a harder edge we saw the coming of hard Detroit techno and Underground Resistance, who offered us experimental but highly danceable tracks soaked in acid, such as Seawolf (UR 12-released 1992), a really driving track with several overlaid acid lines. What had become very apparent was the versatility and consequent inventive possibilities attached to this little box. This was also being exploited in the UK a couple of years earlier by LFO with their release of the same name on the eponymous IDM (Intelligent Dance Music) label Warp, later to host such trailblazers as Autechre et al.
So, perhaps the 303 was a fad that would start losing energy in after ten years or so of use? Far from it, in the mid nineties the UK started developing it's own unique acid techno sound. It should be noted that there was a lot of acid techno about before this, from Underground Resistance to Outlander and many others besides. Producers in the UK like Chris Liberator and Guy McAffer (sorry to all those I left out, there are lots!) took up the acid soaked torch and continued to develop this ravey sound in to a rising tranced out sound where the acid sound was used to create a euphoric build up, albeit based on a hard pounding beat usually between 140 and 160 bpm (beats per minute). Some of my early favourites include Glass Ball by Rebel Yelle and London Acid City by Lochi. At the same time and a little earlier the acid sound was utilised by people with a much harder and darker sound from the free party scene, like Spiral Tribe. UK acid techno quickly became darker and harder too. So, the 303 continued to be used to invent and push boundaries, being used in many other genres of dance music in an increasingly subtle and less squelchy way. It has continued to this day, enjoying a considerable rebirth in the genre Acid with such artists as Ceephax Acid Crew on the IDM label Reflex. I watched a documentary recently about the 303 (see below for a link) that pointed out its uses in even pop music, such as Ray of Light by Madonna, so next time you're listening to some pop that seems a little dance music influenced see if you can hear that tell tale squelch...
The 303 has been a massively fortunate accident then. I think what allowed this was experimentation on the part of the early pioneers, in the very way that created techno as a genre; it's versatility in creating a huge selection of noises that are to a greater or lesser extent experimental sounding; and its involvement in the explosion of dance music that took place in the late eighties and in many ways never really ended fully. One thing I've always thought is interesting about the 303 is its ability to concentrate on high piercing frequencies whilst apparently doing something low pitched at the same time. Perhaps this is my imagination or the outcome of multiple acid lines, someone with a better technical knowledge will have to enlighten me. The 303 actually went out of production pretty quickly but was relaunched as basically a 303 sample box (although by all accounts very effective) which had similar tweaking abilities and was called the MC 505 Groovebox and is now emulated by software like ReBirth created by Propellerhead. It seems amazing that an overly complex bass synthesizer has brought me so much joy, but the world is full of many lovely accidents.
I'd just like to take a moment to apologise for the countless artists, labels and such that I've left out. I could probably bang on about this for 10,000 words, but alas life has other ideas.
A documentary about the box in question.
An interview with Chris Liberator on Pheonix FM, a really interesting description of the coming of UK acid techno in its modern form:
A mix of classic acid house tracks that made me want to write this.
A far from exhaustive list of some UK acid techno tracks I like
Fat Arse - D.A.V.E. the Drummer
New Wave of Acid Techno - Lochi
Santa Pod - Crash'n'Burn
Barbed Wire 303 - D.A.V.E. the Drummer
Clawhammer - Temperature Drop
Neurodancer - Wippenberg
Glass Ball - Rebel Yelle
London Acid City - Lochi
Even if Now She's Got a Perm-Lawrie Immersion and Rowland the Bastard
Control - Secret Hero
Right, I wanted to post this, there's still lots I want to add in terms of tracks, I'll return for an edit later.
Thanks for reading!
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