Acid Redux

Andy Beta details the origins of the squelching sounds of acid music and how new artists—including former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante—are mining classic sounds while coming up with a new twist on the style.
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Electric Fling is a column that explores the world of dance music.


A1 “Accumulated Acid”

One night in 1987, on the South Side of Chicago, Earl “Spanky” Smith, Herbert Jackson, and Nathaniel “DJ Pierre” Jones drunkenly fucked around with a $40 Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer until they stumbled upon a new frequency. That undulating squelch underpinned the 12 brain-eating minutes of a track that originally bore the title “In Your Mind”. Then, once Chicago DJ Ron Hardy started driving parties insane with it, it acquired the title “Ron Hardy’s Acid Track”. And when Marshall Jefferson produced a finished version of the song, it simply became Phuture’s “Acid Tracks”.

From there, the sound of acid engulfed Chicago and then spread across the Atlantic, helping to fuel the ecstatic Madchester scene and Britain’s Second Summer of Love. But in the UK, the turbid churn of acid turned into the soundtrack for smiley faces. As Michaelangelo Matos writes in The Underground Is Massive, his new history on the evolution of electronic dance music in the U.S. and EU: “People wearing smiley T-shirts and smiley shoelaces and blowing smiley whistles while coming up on smiley pills [would] still be buzzing when the club shut down, partying outside, defying police trying to shoo them home, boogying to squad-car sirens while chanting: Aciiieeed! Aciiieeed! In seven months, acid house had blown wide open.”

But the style’s originators lamented its spread, as well as its newly euphoric connotations. Spanky told The Wire: “It was never our intention for it to be linked to drugs… we thought of acid rock because it had the same sort of changing frequencies.” Meanwhile, Jefferson lamented to David Toop in Ocean of Sound: “You don’t have to use the same machine all the time… I hate that machine with a passion now. Everybody’s using it wrong. The way they’re doing it now, it’s not capturing any moods.”

Dungeon Acid: "Physical" (via SoundCloud)

Now, several artists are tackling that telltale 303 from new angles while staying true to the style’s initial intent. There’s acid to be tasted on the latest Tornado Wallace single, “Kangaroo Ground”, and in the productions of Dungeon Acid. Meanwhile, skulking under the house and techno thumps of Gavin Russom’s recent Mantle of Stars 12” is a permutation of that same gnarly bassline. And one of the toughest albums I’ve heard this year comes from revivalists Paranoid London, who get maximum effect out of that old acid template.

Paranoid London: Album Sampler (via SoundCloud)

For all of its global spread though, acid never really ventured westward. (While California was taken with whinnying high frequencies, they were most often the g-funk variety.) But in the early aughts, California-born Johannes Auvinen began exploring the sound of the 303 under the name Tin Man, offering up a decidedly warmer, if more austere, strain of acid. In 2011, Tin Man released his first single on Oliver Bristow’s Los Angeles label Absurd Recordings under a new sub-imprint called Acid Test. That Tin Man single, “Nonneo”, reimagined acid in a new way.

Since then, the label and its hand-stenciled releases have inspired the likes of Italian techno maestro Donato Dozzy and French deep house producer Pépé Bradock to conjure new moods on the 303. And Acid Test has also released remixes from the likes of John Tejada, the Idjut Boys, and Marcellus Pittman, each artist twisting the instrument into new configurations. Last year, the label ventured beyond 12”s to release two strong full-lengths from Tin Man and Achterbahn D'Amour. And now they’ve released a new album by an artist named Trickfinger.

A2 “Trickfinger”

Trickfinger: "After Below" (via SoundCloud)

Trickfinger is none other than John Frusciante, who has about a dozen solo albums to his credit that range from lo-fi experimental noise to synth-pop, instrumental rock to spastic breakcore. But of course, he’s internationally renowned for his fretwork as the former guitarist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He started with the group as an 18-year-old whiz, and when Blood Sugar Sex Magik broke them on a massive scale, the success, pressure, and scrutiny quickly got to him, and he left the band at the pinnacle of their success. He returned to the fold for 1999’s Californication and took part in two more multi-platinum releases before quitting for good in 2009.

Frusciante’s submersion into a heroin habit in the mid-‘90s is legendary, and when we meet out on Venice Beach one night, I can just make out the scar tissue along his forearms. “Originally, I wanted to just bring these big pillows, and we could just sit on the beach and look out at the waves,” he tells me as introduction, sporting chunky black glasses and a lopsided bowl cut. “But then I thought that might be kinda weird.” Instead, he suggests fish tacos.

In person, Frusciante is intense, detailed, and scattered all at once. He never once utters the name of his world-famous band by name, calls his heroin habit a “sabbatical,” and is as quick to cite Beethoven as he is to cite Squarepusher. As our talk goes on, his nervous energy ratchets up in intensity. It’s only when we go outside nearly two hours later—where he quickly fires up a cigarette—that he says it was the longest he has gone without a smoke.

B1 “My Dinner with Frusciante”

It’s not wholly uncommon for rock icons to dabble in electronics, but seeing Frusciante resolutely abandoning the guitar and diving full on into sequencers and synths is a peculiar thing: Who willingly moves from master to apprentice? And while his solo work has shown flashes of Depeche Mode pop sensibilities and Aphex Twin-type mischievousness, Trickfinger is a stripped-down set of eight classic-sounding acid tracks; those expecting the haywire sounds of Frusciante’s previous albums might be startled to hear something so streamlined. While he looks up to the likes of Aphex Twin, Autechre, and his friend and collaborator Aaron Funk of Venetian Snares, Frusciante’s tracks aren’t nearly as freewheeling and unwieldy as those of his influences.

“When I stopped doing drugs at the end of the ‘90s, all of a sudden I became obsessed with synth pop,” he says. “And by the time I rejoined the band in ‘98, I just wanted to hear drum machines and synthesizers.”

As life in the band continued, Frusciante delved deeper into electronics on the side, tinkering on keyboards, 303s, 606s, and 202s. He began adding keyboards to his live guitar setup, and you can hear some of these news sounds slowly infiltrate his own sound. When the 2006 Chili Peppers track “Dani California” came on the radio while driving down the highway en route to Venice Beach that night, Frusciante’s solo flaring to life at song’s end, I could hear the influence of Jimi Hendrix—but as chopped up and reconfigured by J Dilla. During dinner, Frusciante tells me he’s abandoned the guitar. “Sampling is my favorite way to make music now,” he says.

But as he dove deeper in the world of electronic music, the big revelation was Richard D. James’ Analord series. “When that came out I realized this is better than rock music, that it was the Sgt. Pepper’s for today,” he says. “The whole time I'd been in the band, I would've rather been spending all my time making electronic music.” He enthuses about the return of Aphex Twin and the producer’s recent Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 EP. “I hope that one day it's inexpensive enough to where we have robot electronic orchestras that are controlled by the mind of a composer,” he says.

As part of his new musical education, Frusciante eventually started taking inspiration from early Chicago acid. “I heard that Chicago stuff and it's like when you see an early John Waters or a Robert Downey Sr. movie and you go, ‘Oh, OK!,’” he says, adding that when he first heard DJ Pierre, he finally connected acid house back to the punk of his teenage years: “Both punk and acid take the pressure off you as a musician and make you realize you can just express yourself.”

In some way, Frusciante’s Trickfinger album is where rock initially inspiring acid comes full circle. Discussing the roots of acid and those earliest manipulations of the 303—of Phuture and closet metalhead Marshall Jefferson emulating the likes of Hendrix and Black Sabbath’s acid rock—Frusciante perceives the parallel. “Acid is what Jimi Hendrix brought to guitar, where the sound is changing the whole time, using his wah-wah pedal and fucking with the mixing board,” he says. “It’s just like a guy on the 303 when he's turning the knobs. I want the sound to be constantly changing. That’s when it makes sense to me.”