Acid House

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Acid house is a style of house music. The style was developed in Chicago around 1985, relatively parallel to the emergence of Detroit Techno and also came to Europe from 1987 .

features

The characteristic of Acid House is a strongly modulated chirping and bubbling of the Roland TB-303 synthesizer . The device is actually a bass synthesizer, but with certain settings it can produce completely different sounds that have become the characteristic "acid sound". Otherwise, acid house is minimalistic and mostly instrumental house music with a pumping four-to-the-floor beat at a speed of 118–135 BPM . Often short pentatonic tone sequences are repeated monotonously, or very high frequencies are played continuously, which can lead to trance-like effects in the listener. In contrast to the Chicago House , the Acid House hardly has any disco influences .

A particularly intensive use can be found in the piece Higher State Of Consciousness (Tweekin Acid Funk) by Josh Wink .

history

The first publication that the Roland TB-303 uses to generate acid-like sounds is “Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat” by the Indian musician Charanjit Singh from 1982. It underlays traditional ragas with a modern sound and takes on some characteristics of the later Acid House - including the typical combination with the Roland TR-808 drum computer - even if it is in a completely different musical and cultural context. The record was not a commercial success and remained largely unknown for a long time.

America

DJ Pierre and Earl “Spanky” Smith from Chicago are considered to be the real inventors of acid house in the context of US club culture . Under the band name, the two had programmed an approx. 15-minute drum track to which DJ Pierre playfully (he himself had little experience with the device) modulated a bass line with the TB-303. They gave the track (which they first called In Your Mind ) to DJ Ron Hardy , who was playing Music Box at the Chicago club at the time and built it into his set. The open-minded audience received the piece euphorically.

According to the story, the audience soon only spoke of Ron Hardy's "Acid Tracks", the song became known as "Acid Trax". The name was supposedly based on acid rock , which was already experimenting with similar sounds. The public associated “acid” with the drug acid (slang term for LSD ). The music, which reminded many of their LSD trips , did the rest.

"Acid Tracks" soon followed in 1986 with the first regular releases of the new style such as B. Sleezy Ds I've Lost Control (produced by Adonis and Marshall Jefferson ). Acid House soon overtook Chicago House in popularity and quickly became the cornerstone of the American underground scene. “Acid Tracks” itself was released on LP in 1987 by Trax Records , newly produced by Marshall Jefferson, under the project name Phuture (DJ Pierre, Earl Smith had teamed up with Herbert Herb J Jackson in 1986 ). Phuture tried to actively speak out against the drug image of acid. For example, the B-side of Acid Tracks contained the track Your Only Friend , which is about a cocaine victim .

Europe and Great Britain

In 1987 House began to establish itself in Europe. At the same time, British DJs brought house sound to England for the first time from their Ibiza vacation . Paul Oakenfold initiated the first after- hour parties at the Project Club , but only Chicago and New York House were shown . The music spread like wildfire across the island, there were more and more parties and house clubs like the Haçienda in Manchester opened everywhere . First house hits in the UK were Release Your Body from Bang the Party and Oochy Koochy from Baby Ford . Jack Your Body by Steve "Silk" Hurley and Pump Up the Volume by M | A | R | R | S were the first house tracks to reach number 1 in the British charts .

The "acid smiley"

The Shoom opened in November 1987 in a former London fitness club . It was here that an entirely unique English acid club culture began to develop. The Shoom was to become a place of pilgrimage for acid disciples. The party mascot, the smiley “J”, was to become the symbol of the entire acid movement.

At the beginning of 1988, more and more alternative and later also mass media began to report about the acid house parties. In the course of the year this media hype led to the greatest British youth culture since punk and went down in history as the " Second Summer of Love " (after the hippie wave in the United States in 1967). On the European mainland, people danced to the acid rhythms. Soon commercial tracks like “Theme From S-Express” by S'Express , “The Only Way Is Up” by Yazz , “Beat Dis” by Bomb the Bass should flood the music market and storm the European charts. Germany also experienced a wave of acid house, which even took place in the youth magazine Bravo . One of the first clubs was the UFO, initially located in Berlin-Kreuzberg , from the later operators of the safe .

However, the acid wave in Great Britain should soon come to an end with its commercial sell-out. With the advent of house music for the first time came amphetamine - derivative Ecstasy to England and gave the dancers a unique experience. When the press repeatedly reported on the drug excesses at the warehouse parties, with some reason, the hype turned into hysteria. The police repeatedly raided and broke up parties. The smiley items (posters, stickers, T-shirts, mugs, etc.), which were sold en masse everywhere, disappeared from the range of department stores for image reasons .

In October 1988, the BBC also refused to play the current top runner in the UK charts, D Mob with We Call It Acieed . A ban on repetitive music in public was discussed, as many of the illegal parties were self-organized, for example in old factories or in the middle of the country. In retrospect, the boycott of the state-owned BBC, especially in London and the major metropolitan areas, led to a number of pirate channels that was unique in the world and filled the void left by the BBC. By mid-1989 at the latest, Rave Acid finally replaced the new youth culture in Great Britain.

But the brief acid house wave had a long-lasting impact: the foundation stone for a functioning British underground was laid. Many dance labels were founded and pirate stations are still broadcasting today, ensuring that new musical trends prevailed much faster in Great Britain than in continental Europe . The great acceptance of drum and bass and 2 step on the island is their great merit. The acid sound continued to be popular in European clubs . Many musicians continued to experiment with the acid sound and built it into techno and trance pieces . Acid revivals take place in the underground at regular intervals, and they keep experimenting with new style influences.

Acid house classic

  • Phuture - Acid Tracks (or Acid Trax) (1985; published 1987)
  • Mr. Fingers (Larry Heard) - Can You Feel It (1986)
  • Sleezy D - I've Lost Control (1986)
  • Adonis - No Way Back (1986)
  • Pierre's Pfantasy Club - Dream Girl (1987)
  • Armando - Land of Confusion (1987)
  • Tyree Cooper - Acid Over (1987)
  • Gherkin Jerks (Larry Heard) - Acid Indigestion (1988)
  • Phuture - We Are Phuture (1988)
  • Fast Eddie - Acid Thunder (1988)
  • A Guy Called Gerald - Voodoo Ray (1988)
  • Jolly Roger - Acid Man (1988)
  • Humanoid - Stakker Humanoid (1988)
  • D Mob - We Call It Acieed (1988)
  • Josh Wink - Higher State of Consciousness (Version 3 - Tweekin Acid Funk) (1995)

Major acid house labels

  • Trax Records (Chicago)
  • DJ International Records (Chicago)
  • International House Records (Chicago)
  • Westbrook Records (Chicago)
  • Westside Records (London)

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Charanjit Singh on how he invented acid house ... by mistake in The Guardian of May 10, 2011.
  2. ↑ Jay Strongman: Rave: the culture that isn't . ( dischord.co.uk [accessed October 27, 1999]).