Nobody really knows. There are a variety of theories and claimants, but whatever the reason, the crowd at the Music Box ended up dubbing Phuture's (then untitled) demo "Ron Hardy's acid track". The term was minted when they named the track itself Acid Tracks.

___________________
Mixes:
> Maximum Elevation [Progressive House]
> DI.FM 26th Anniversary Guest Mix [Progressive House]
> Live @ Dance:Love:Hub London, 11.10.2025
> Higher Peaks [Progressive House]
> Dance:Love:Hub Afterparty (The Return) 23.11.24

Like these sets? Come see me play live at Kibosh in Manchester: https://www.instagram.com/kibosh.mcr/

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J Nobody really knows. There are a variety of theories and claimants, but whatever the reason, the crowd at the Music Box ended up dubbing Phuture's (then untitled) demo "Ron Hardy's acid track". The term was minted when they named the track itself Acid Tracks.

Not necessarily. If you believe a direct quotation from DJ Pierre, it's a related to the drug. The punch at the Music Bowl was spiked with LSD, and pretty much everyone in the club was high on it when they were listening to the track, including the three guys from Phuture. And the song wasn't untitled prior to then - it had a name I can tell you when I get home tonight.

___________________
Mix archive | Melbourne club guide

quote:

Originally posted by Domesticated Not necessarily. If you believe a direct quotation from DJ Pierre, it's a related to the drug. The punch at the Music Bowl was spiked with LSD, and pretty much everyone in the club was high on it when they were listening to the track, including the three guys from Phuture. And the song wasn't untitled prior to then - it had a name I can tell you when I get home tonight.

I'll save you the effort: In Your Mind. And even Pierre doesn't really know for sure where the name came from:

quote:

Spanky and DJ Pierre went to the Music Box for the next fortnight and then took a three-week break. During that time a friend approached them and said that Hardy was spinning an amazing track, which the dance floor was referring to as "Ron Hardy's Acid Tracks". The friend played a tape of the record to Spanky and DJ Pierre. It was "In Your Mind". "There was a rumour that they put acid in the water at the Music Box," says DJ Pierre. "I don't know if it was true or not, but we now had a new name for our record."

___________________
Mixes:
> Maximum Elevation [Progressive House]
> DI.FM 26th Anniversary Guest Mix [Progressive House]
> Live @ Dance:Love:Hub London, 11.10.2025
> Higher Peaks [Progressive House]
> Dance:Love:Hub Afterparty (The Return) 23.11.24

Like these sets? Come see me play live at Kibosh in Manchester: https://www.instagram.com/kibosh.mcr/

Look if acid house is a movement, the TB-303 sound is its logo. (even more than the smiley face)

It's both the movement AND the sound, but it's not JUST the sound.



That Tim Lawrence Article on House music is the liner notes to this record on Soul Jazz:

http://www.discogs.com/Various-Acid-Can-You-Jack-Vol-1/release/466015

And guess what? There are tracks on this album without TB-303 squelch. Yes, many of them include TB-303 squelch, but since that is not acid entirely, there are squelchless tracks.

acid.




acid.



aciiied!

Last edited by nefardec on May-12-2011 at 12:09

off-topic: thread title reminds me of this guy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnmLuOEDbkQ

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J I'll save you the effort: In Your Mind. And even Pierre doesn't really know for sure where the name came from:

In that quote, there are two fragments very close together, "Ron Hardy's Acid Tracks" and "There was a rumour that they put acid in the water at the Music Box."

Why would he even bother to mention the latter if it didn't relate to the song? Also, I have a different quote from Pierre which more clearly supports this notion. Don't get me wrong, I think you're probably correct that the term's origins will never be known. However, Pierre seems pretty clear on it - but I don't really believe that, as musicians often lie about their influences, their intentions et cetera.

___________________
Mix archive | Melbourne club guide

quote:

Originally posted by nefardec Look if acid house is a movement, the TB-303 sound is its logo. (even more than the smiley face) It's both the movement AND the sound, but it's not JUST the sound. That Tim Lawrence Article on House music is the liner notes to this record on Soul Jazz: http://www.discogs.com/Various-Acid.../release/466015 And guess what? There are tracks on this album without TB-303. Yes, many of them include TB-303, but since that is not acid entirely, there are tb-303less tracks

Subtitled "Chicago Acid & Experimental House 1985-95"

AND experimental house.

___________________
Mix archive | Melbourne club guide

quote:

Originally posted by Domesticated Subtitled "Chicago Acid & Experimental House 1985-95" AND experimental house.

it's clearly one phrase.

it's not 'chicago acid' and 'experimental house'

it's 'chicago acid and experimental house'

like chicago deep and jacking house or deep and funky house.

there is no such genre as 'experimental house', or 'chicago acid'. if you nitpick the subtitle like this, you have to define which of the tracks are not 'experimental house'. so tell me, what are they?


if anything the tracks WITH the squelch are the 'experimental' ones. so does that mean they arent acid?

Acid Over
by Simon Reynolds, with Paul Oldfield, 1990

quote:

House music is so impersonal, minimal and repetitive it seems to take effect beneath the level of conscious hearing, sweeping you up by a process of `molecular agitation'. Acid house is the purest, barest distillation of house, the outer limit of its logic of inhuman functionalism. With acid, black music has never been so alien-ated from traditional notions of `blackness' (fluid, grooving, warm), never been so close to to the frigid, mechanical, supremely `white' perversion of funk perpetrated by early eighties pioneers like D.A.F. and Cabaret Voltaire. Acid house is not so much a new thing, as a drastic, terminal culmination of two tendencies in house: the trance-inducing effects of repetion and dub production; a fascination for the pristine hygiene and metronome rhythms of German electronic dance. Pure acid tracks like Tyree's `Acid Over' recall the brute, inelastic minimalism of D.A.F. - it consists of nothing but a bass synth sequencer pulse reiterated with slight warps and eerie inflections. Other tracs parallesl the obscure innovations of bands like Suicide, the Normal (`Warm Leatherette'), Liasons Dangereuses (very big in Chicago), Die Krupps (proto-metalbashers and an early incarnation of Propaganda). Ex-Sample's `And So it Goes' combines cut-ups (`Heroin Kills'), unidentifiable bursts of distorted, sampled sound, and human cries torn from their context (agonies of ecstasy or distress), in a manner not unlike Front 242. Reese's [...]`Just Want Another Chance' sets a guttural, Cabaret Voltaire monologue of desire over the spookiest of Residents synth-drones, an ectoplasmic bassline four times too slow for the drum track. `Strings Of Life' by Rhythim-Is-Rhythim (a.k.a. Derrick May, a prime mover on the acid scene) takes the sultry swing of Latin disco and clips into a spasmodic tic that's deeply unsettling; his `Move It' is a perimeter of trebly rhythm programes that restlessly orbit the black hole where the song should be, and strangely recalls one of those lost, desolate Joy Division B-sides. Weirdest of all is `Acid Trax' by Phuture, the record that started the whole fad off. The `Cocaine Mix' starts with a treated voice midway between a dalek and the Voice of Judgement that announces, `This is Cocaine Speaking'; spectral eddies of a disembodied human wail (reminiscent of nothing so much as PiL's `No Birds Do Sing') simulate the soul languishing in cold turkey; then we're launched on a terror-ride that again reminds me of PIL's `Careering' or `Death Disco'. `I can make you like for me/I can make you die for me/In the end/I'll be your only friend.' If disco was always ment to be about escapism, acid is about no-escapism. In this, acid house takes after the white avant-funk of the late seventies/early eighties, its concept of disco as trance, a form of sinister control or possession. The flash and dazzle of disco classics like Chaka Khan's `I'm Every Woman', Michael Jackson's `Off the Wall' album, or anything by Earth Wind and Fire, is replaced by a clinical, ultra-focused, above all inhibited sound. Expansive and expressive gestures are replaced by a precise and rigorous set of movements, _demands_ on the body; flamboyance and improvisation by a discipline of pleasure. Perhaps there's a kind of `liberation' in submitting to the mechanics of instinct, soldering the circuitry of desire to the circuitry of the sequencer programmes.

That bit you bolded doesn't support the fact that acid house can exist without a gurgling 303.

Also, that same article calls Strings of Life acid house.

I'm actually not quite sure what to believe here. I think your case has merit but you're not supporting it very well.

___________________
Mix archive | Melbourne club guide

quote:

Originally posted by Domesticated In that quote, there are two fragments very close together, "Ron Hardy's Acid Tracks" and "There was a rumour that they put acid in the water at the Music Box." Why would he even bother to mention the latter if it didn't relate to the song?

I think that passage makes it very clear that the "acid tracks" moniker was developed by the kids at the club while Phuture weren't there, and while they heard rumours about it they weren't there themselves, so even they will never know for sure. I can't remember half the shit I talk when I'm in a club, so the odds are nobody will ever say for certain where it came from.

quote:

Originally posted by nefardec That Tim Lawrence Article on House music is the liner notes to this record on Soul Jazz: http://www.discogs.com/Various-Acid.../release/466015 And guess what? There are tracks on this album without TB-303 squelch. Yes, many of them include TB-303 squelch, but since that is not acid entirely, there are squelchless tracks.

I know. I own that compilation. And you're clutching at straws.

All Simon Reynolds is referring to is the way house music sounds when you replace most of the sounds with acid. Everything he's describing is actually the TB-303. The 303 is inherently weird, abstract, inhuman, and alien. It encapsulates the exact essence of sonic hyperreality that defines futurist electronic music - a simulation of a "real" instrument so synthetic and unrecognisable it absconds from any obligations towards reality. That's why it's been such an enduring staple of electronic music.

And I know what you're going to say - these properties aren't exclusive to the 303. However, if we're going to assume "acid" is some synonym for cold, impersonal, futurist hyperreality then you're going to relabel several hundred thousand tracks as acid. They're not. Acid = 303.

___________________
Mixes:
> Maximum Elevation [Progressive House]
> DI.FM 26th Anniversary Guest Mix [Progressive House]
> Live @ Dance:Love:Hub London, 11.10.2025
> Higher Peaks [Progressive House]
> Dance:Love:Hub Afterparty (The Return) 23.11.24

Like these sets? Come see me play live at Kibosh in Manchester: https://www.instagram.com/kibosh.mcr/