Acid house
- Alternate meaning: The Acid House a 1994 novel by Irvine Welsh, later made into a film.
Acid house is a variant of house music characterized by the use of simple tone generators with tempo-controlled resonant filters. It began when musicians discovered that they could create interesting sounds with the Roland TB-303 analogue bass synthesizer by tweaking the resonance and frequency cut-off dials as they played. The term "acid" was used in Chicago at the time as a term for the squelchy "acid" sounds of such bass synthesizers such as the TB-303. When Genesis P-Orridge visited Chicago in the late 1980s, he checked out acid house music, thinking at first that "acid" referred to LSD. He brought the sounds back to England and began developing with his band Psychic TV a more psychedelic sounding acid house music, including samples from 1960s exploitation films, from Timothy Leary, etc. Acid house music became a central part of the early rave scene in the U.K., and the yellow smiley became its emblem.
Notable acid house artists
- Phuture - Chicago-based group of acid house pioneers, formed in 1985, and best known for their classic 1987 single "Acid Tracks", which defined the genre and was its first "track".
- 808 State - British outfit from Manchester, formed in 1989. Their first album, Newbuild, was acid house, and occasional acid house influences appeared in later tracks.
See also: Madchester, acid house party
Sources
- Shapiro, Peter (2000) Modulations: A History of Electronic Music: Throbbing Words on Sound, ISBN 189102406X.
