Acid House
mid to late 1980s · Chicago, United States
A house subgenre built on the squelching Roland TB-303 bassline, late 1980s Chicago (Wikipedia).
The sound
House's four-on-the-floor under a resonant, squelching, sliding Roland TB-303 bassline that twists and bends as it plays.
Listen for: The squelchy, rubbery 303 bassline sliding and resonating on top of a straight house kick.
Things to know
Acid house was invented around 1985 in Chicago by a trio called Phuture (DJ Pierre, Spanky, and Herb J) by misusing a Roland TB-303 bass synth.
The acid sound is a Roland TB-303 bassline running on a loop while someone twists its filter and resonance knobs in real time, producing a squelching, sliding, almost talking texture.
The TB-303 was a commercial flop. Roland designed it in 1981 as a guitarist's bass-accompaniment box and almost nobody wanted it, so the units sat in pawn shops cheap and ended up reinvented.
The Second Summer of Love was the 1988 UK acid house explosion, centred on Danny Rampling's Shoom in London and the Haçienda in Manchester.
The 1994 UK Criminal Justice and Public Order Act gave police the power to shut down outdoor gatherings playing music "characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats."
Key tracks
Acid Tracks by Phuture · 1987
Voodoo Ray by A Guy Called Gerald · 1988
Pacific State by 808 State · 1989
Higher State of Consciousness by Josh Wink · 1995
Family tree
- House: Acid house is Chicago house plus one machine: the Roland TB-303. Producers fed the 303's bassline into house tracks and twisted its knobs as it played, and the squelching, resonant sound it made became the signature of a whole subgenre.
- Jungle / Drum & Bass: Jungle came out of the rave explosion that acid house set off in Britain. As the parties turned into hardcore rave, London DJs sped the breakbeats up, layered Jamaican sub-bass underneath, and by 1993 the sound had grown into its own genre.
- Trance: The rave culture acid house set off across Europe built the rooms trance was made for, and the 303's hypnotic looping arpeggio is a direct ancestor of the trance arpeggio. The euphoria stayed; the squelch became a melody.
- UK Rave / Breakbeat Hardcore: Breakbeat hardcore didn't replace acid house, it sped it up and roughed it up. Producers kept the TB-303 basslines and the four-to-the-floor pulse but layered chopped hip-hop breakbeats on top and pushed the tempos past 130 BPM. Simon Reynolds compares the relationship to heavy metal's debt to the blues: the same essence of repetition and bass pressure, coarsened and intensified.
- Big Beat: Acid house handed big beat two things: the squelch of the Roland TB-303 and an energy template. Fatboy Slim's own formula for the genre was the breakbeats of hip-hop, the energy of acid house, and the pop sensibilities of the Beatles. You can hear the acid inheritance all over the era's synth lines, pushed louder and dirtier than the Chicago records ever went.
- IDM: Aphex Twin's earliest productions grew directly out of DJing acid house raves around Cornwall in the late 1980s, where he absorbed the squelching TB-303 sound before co-founding Rephlex Records in 1991. Acid house is the raw material IDM's founding generation broke apart and rebuilt for the living room instead of the dancefloor.