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| quote: | Originally posted by Domesticated
So what are the defining characteristics of the genre, if not the 303
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it's a huge part of it, but it's also the 808 and he rhythm of course, the minimalism, the militant cadence, the use of vocals, the alien sense of authority, the subjugation to the rhythm and the sound. i was just trying to make a point that the presence of 303 squelch in another track doesn't automatically make it acid house or acid anything.
if acid house is like an alien invasion, the squelch is like the voice of the leader, the mind control aspect. but the 808 is there to keep you in line and stuff your body parts into little metal cages.
(sorry if parts of this are gibberish, its scanned from kodwo eshun's book 'more brilliant than the sun')
| quote: | Phuture's enthralling Your Only Friend is Acid's sequel to james Brown's '72 King HerOin, the electronic update of Roland Kirk's '69 Volunteer Slavery. After the pusher sells you to the Drug, the Drug sets you to work as a mule, sends you out into the world programmed like a medium at a seance. The drug becomes the clock which keeps time in its universe of unending servitude. In a Voice pitched down into the Vaderized groan of a Designated Despot: 'This is Cocaine speaking, I can make you do anything for me.'
Acid's 303 delivers you up to the Kingdom of Cockayne, accelerated into a powder paradise of endless cocaine. To dance is to be drawn helplessly into what the track warns against. Acid's sternest injunctions - 'You have been warned, I'll take your life' - incites more dancing, not as release but as voluntary slavery, dancing your way into a new constriction. You're willingly abducted by Acid into the Despotic regime that never sounded so good before.
Enthralled by frequencies, you're modulated by sensations of aggressive evasiveness and attacking elusiveness. You shed your life as easily as a snake shucks its skin. Slip from the morals inculcated into your muscles. The Voice of Doom decrees its death command: 'Take a shot from mell'lI make you fly/Take too much from mell'lI make you die.'
Instead of emulating rock's bass, forever stratified at the low end,
Acid exaggerates the Roland T303'S dry slipperiness, its glissements, by transforming the sound of the note, the colour of its tone as it plays. Filtering bends < >selects < >suppresses timbres, producing the aural equivalent of a tracer effect, a wavering sense of panic as the ear fails to resolve this slippage of overtones.
Acid is an accident in which the TB303 bass synthesizer uses Phuture to reproduce itself, to mUltiply the dimensions of electronic sound, to open up a nomadology of texturhythms, rhythmelodies. Phuture, Bam Bam et allove this synthetic, unnatural noise. Acid trax amplifies this sense of terrifying newness.
Nothing you know about the history of music is any help whatsoever. What is this noise and where's it coming from? Who are these people and why are they smiling at me? Brutally inexpressive woodblocks hammer out an inhuman irregularity, relieved by the stabs of bassic synth. The heart's beat is captured and cloned by the time synthesized into impacts. You become an extension of the machine which generates time. Slip through the spaces between the sequences.
No government can scare you into stopping because E, trips, hydroponically grown skunk, all these have already scared you more than they ever could. This sense of being snatched by drugs, of being kidnapped into your head, of drawing out the madness already in you: this is what the Darkside is. Everything the media warns you against has already been made into tracks that drive the dancefloor.
All black electronic musics have their Darkside, and Acid 's begins with Bam Bam's '88 Where 's Your Child, the Acid track as audio abduction, the sound that snatches you from school, self and society, that kidnaps your mind and never gives it back. Like 4 Hero's Mr Kirk 's Nightmare, it amplifies parent's drug-panic into a hilariously horrifying feedforward loop: 'Parents, Don't let your kids out at night/Don't you know they don't know wrong from right?'
Acid here is a psychotic sampladelia of whining motorcars, of vicious glass smash played as a 3-note refrain, of cars slowed down into decaying gong and intermittent baby screams. Bam Bam pitchshifts his voice until it slurs down into a sinister gloat punctuated by vampiric laughs. It's the sound of seduction every parent dreads: 'Where's your
child?/Do you know?/Look aroundlNowhere to be found.' Acid is repetitive attack patterns that perpetually climb, build and
fall, restlessly lurching from panic inducing trebles to queasy lows. And even worse - even more satisfying - are the voluptuous groans and sated sighs emitted by the voice as if it's stroking itself while recalling intense gratification: 'Nobody likes to be left alone/especially when they don't know right from wrong.' Where's Your Child hits a peak of sweet unease when Bam Bam murmurs 'Curfew Curfew' like an incitement to unnamed perversions, the enticing threshold into its ahuman world: 'You're all my children now.'
If Rock's archetypal demand is for satisfaction, tthen the RhythrTlachine's is for feeling. Fingers Inc - synthesist-producer tarry Heard and vocalist Robert Owens - ask the question for the 20th C djancefloor: Can You Feel It. 'It' here is emotion without an object, pOintle\s, careless, directionless feeling for its own sake. Fingers Inc demand thatt you feel feeling. Can You Feel It is a synthetic sanctuary whose edgele~ss tones insulate and enwomb. Its syntharmonic horizon reaches inSid€e you, wrapping itself around your skin, confusing the borders between, tissue and touch, igniting sensations of unspecified expectation, i"nminent immanence.
Heard induces a sense of sanctuary, rapt ton\es cradling yoU in warm bass, hovering at the edge of the horizon. Can You Feel It is the empathogen in a state of unconditional elation, lips pursed, eyes flickering at the speed of the sun.
When you're entactogenic, the skin gets tactile hallucinations, hears things, transmitting and receiving sensation-concepts. Eallows you to anticipate the beat, to slip inside the machine mnemonic.
The skin is the borderguard of yourself. As an empathogen, E affects the physical interface of perception. Pat Cadigan clicks the cursor on zoom: 'The way to change people's ideas about reality is to change the way they feel reality - literally.'
The skin seizes control of all the sensory channels, triggering memory skin, skin telepathy, finger-recognition, shiversighs, rapt gasps. The skin becomes an aerial receiving and transmitting everything.
Feeling it is the sensation of amplification, of all channels open, supercharged. Your body seethes; a planet of wetware as you dive, dive into the seadepths of your blood. Feeling is the result of all the senses converging at once.
The Rhythmachine values these peaks above all else. These nonverbal Nirvanas of total tactile telepathy are what A Guy Called Gerald terms 'emotions electric', the moments when each dancer in the crowd becomes a medium transmitting sensory current. |
Last edited by nefardec on May-11-2011 at 19:25
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