genre: Acid House
also: Acid
scene: Acid
emergence: mid 80s
Acid House is House music with acid. What is acid? It's a rubbery, squiggly, bubbly, whirrbly, trippy, bouncey, warpy, funky, filthy, screaming, squelching, barking, blistering, scratching, ripping, dripping, driving, liquid-like hypnotic mutant synthline produced by a little silver box called the Roland TB-303 Bassline.
It's not very big -- only about 30 centimetres long. If you're reading this on a big monitor, this is almost its exact size.
This little unit is probably more important than any other gear in electronic music history, so let me go on a bit of an aside here.
Released in 1981, the original purpose of the 303 was to serve as a bassline sequencer for guitarists (the TB means "Transistor Bass"). And it does produce good basslines (listen to Newcleus - Jam On It or Mantronix - Bassline for examples). It was often paired with its similar-looking sibling the Roland TR-606 Drumatix drum machine, helping lonely guitarists everywhere pretend that they have a band. Or at least some friends.
10,000 units were made. It did not sell well and 18 months later the 303 was taken off the market. And that's the last anyone had ever heard of it... in an alternate universe where things make sense and random accidents don't happen which is definitely not the universe we live in.
Instead, five years later bargain bin House producers in the southside of Chicago picked up some cheap 303s and started fiddling around with them.
According to legend, the original instructions for using the 303 specified it as a "set it and forget it" device. But Japanese tech products in the 80s were notorious for their terrible instruction manuals full of broken english and convoluted techsplaining. Sometimes it was more frustrating just trying to understand the manual than it was actually learning the device so producers often dove into gear headfirst without knowing exactly what they were doing or whether they were doing it properly.
So whereas proper usage of the 303 was to notate the melody, set the knobs at the desired levels and then press play, nobody in Chicago in the mid 80s actually did that. Instead they pushed play and twisted the knobs while it was running (something the original designers did not intend). The sound that came out was the most alien thing to happen to music since Elvis escaped from Area 51.
There are a number of legendary stories about how this weird sound got its name and who gave it that name (possibly Ron Hardy), but it was a perfectly apt description: Acid. No better word could describe it. It was Acid. It could be a reference to drugs, but it was a better reference to the sound it made. It may have also been a reference to the sound it made on drugs.
Now that I'm done gushing over the 303, let's clarify some things about this legendary genre.
First off, this is Acid House, not 303 House. Which means not all music with a 303 in it is Acid.
Secondly, Acid does not have to use a 303. Anyone who tells you that is a purist snob. You can make Acid with any device that has the requisite filter knobs that accomplish Acid's signature wibbly wobbly timey wimey sound, and there are a number of non-303s that can accomplish this like the SH-101, MC-202, Juno 106, Jupiter 8, FR-777, Korg Prophecy or any number of off-303 clones out there including Devilfish, Rebirth, Reason, or you can download the schematics and order the components and make your own X0X box from scratch if you have the electronics know-how. Acid is not limited to just the 303 and its derivatives.
Acid music is not defined by the device, it is defined by the sound. It's not the device that makes Acid, it's what you do with it. So Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat, while fascinating, is not Acid House. Neither is aforementioned Jam On it or On and On.
To talk about Acid House, we must start at the beginning, and the beginning is Phuture - Acid Tracks, a 12 minute stomper that is just a beat and a single looping 303 line, and someone just going to town on those knobs. It's the twisting of the knob part that makes acid Acid.
Acid House was the first genre of electronic music to get a type of party named after it - the Acid House party. It was a hit in Chicago and the Midwest, and it became an even bigger hit in the UK in the summer of 88 (the so-called Second Summer of Love), where vacationing partiers heard it in Ibiza for the first time while also taking ecstasy for the first time (the two compliment each other like a duck's boner and dragging weeds).
They brought the experience back with them to the UK and a year later raves were born. There are tons of books, memoirs and documentaries written about this period because every generation thinks its first exposure to something is the best that something has ever been. And if you get famous later on for doing something, you too will mythologize your origins.
The one, the only, the original Chicago Acid House sound.
Acid House is so important and so instrumental in the making and the modelling of modern rave and club culture that it can't die, won't die, and will never really be forgotten. And to think it owes itself entirely to a bunch of impatient producers on Chicago's southside who neglected to read an instruction manual.
Life is fortuitous like that.
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