Anything goes

This here is the very first trance song I’ve ever heard: Cybordelics - The Adventures of Dama. It’s from 1993, but I only heard it in 1996. I still remember very well listening to it. Back then, the only source of electronic music I had was a weekly radio show made by DJ Horace Dan D. I remember staying late at night to listen to the show, even though I was always supposed to go to school the next day - the show was on Wednesday nights, from 22:30 until after 2:00 sometimes. Because of technical limitations, I had an awful contraption for recording it and the quality of the sound was appalling, but it felt great being able to listen to it later! I would listen to it every moment I could and I remember I would always run out of tapes to record on.

Before discovering electronic music, I had gathered tapes with all kinds of music, but then I erased them all to record the show on them. Horace Dan D had the very healthy habit of making a short introduction and history of an electronic genre during each show and I really owe my passion for various styles to that single fact. I think my interest in the history of all these things also comes from there.

It sends shivers down my spine when I listen to it. I had forgotten the title of the song until I heard it by accident on Digitally Imported’s Old School Electronica a couple of months ago and then I was able to look it up on youtube and I am really glad (and amazed) to find it there.

Boy, it’s great being able to listen to it again!

We can see in the song the very early ideas of trance and how it should be. I just love the way the song just takes its time, leading you into it, without any hurry (the first drum in the song is at 2:30!), and the minimalistic structure of the sounds. It really creates a trance inducing stream of sounds.

Perhaps I’m old fashioned, but having grown up with music like this, I don’t really like most of what is going on in mainstream trance nowadays. Of course, the fact that it is getting more and more commercial doesn’t help either, but the most important thing is that sometimes it really sounds awful.

Also, good as it may sound when listening to it in earphones going down the street or on TV, trance is not meant for meaningful vocals. It is just not compatible with the state it is supposed to induce while dancing. Listening to lyrics, sometimes even singing along, just takes that away because it forces you to focus on the music, whereas dancing to trance should be an unconscious experience, where you let yourself simply be swept away by the stream. From this point of view, I haven’t had the chance to dance to a good set of trance for a long time. The last good one I heard was DJ Sterbinszky some 4 years ago, the first time he was in Obsession in Cluj (I think the club was still called Tutankamon then). I think that may have also been the best , too. But I digress…

Anyways, this here is a great song.

I was writing about Higher States of Consciousness , and it was this very song that made me investigate the history of acid house. I want to post here some of what I have found, although I imagine that anyone who wants to know all this stuff already knows it and the people who don’t know it wouldn’t want to read about it anyway. But hey, I gotta blog about something, right?

Basically, everything revolves around a small piece of electronic equipment called the Roland TB303. This was a synthesizer created by Roland in 1982 with the intention of marketing it as a replacement of the bass guitar to members of the rock and punk scene. Here is a picture of it (source):

But it never caught on. For one thing, it was hard to use, difficult to program and didn’t even sound like a bass guitar. So Roland built about 10.000 units and then stopped. All these pieces that were manufactured ended up forgotten in some basement or attic.

Occasionally, they were used, however, although I was only able to find references to one song that used the TB303 for its intended purpose. It was a band called Heaven 17, with their song Let Me Go (year as yet unknown - early ’80s however). Here it is:


You can distinctively tell the bass line in this song is made by some weird, repetitive machine and it evidently sounds nothing like the bass guitar, but does have a catchy feeling even here.

From early on, there were those who foresaw the potential that the tool had in making dance music. Probably the main feature that made it fit for this task was the fact that the TB303 is programmed like a sequencer. So once you put the pattern in, set the BPM and place the knobs how you want them, it will repeat that pattern over and over, so it was perfect for the 4×4 patterns we hear nowadays all over the dance scene. An early pioneer from this point of view was Alexander Robotnik, with his song Problemes d’Amour. Here it is:


I hear this was quite a hit worldwide in 1983! And I think it’s not hard to understand why: the song is quite catchy even now, don’t you think? Again, we can distinctively tell the bassline is made by the TB303.

But the real breakthrough came in 1987, rather by accident. That year, a group from Chicago called Phuture started playing in their studio with the knobs on a TB303 they had and noticed that the squelching sounds it made were very catchy. So, whereas previously these sounds were considered flaws of the TB303, the guys from Phuture had the intuition to notice that they provided the basis for a new sound. From their experiments with the knobs came out what is considered the first acid house track: Acid Trax. Youtube helps here too:


(Psychedelic, isn’t it?)

We can already see in there the basics for acid house, minimal, techno, trance and other subgenres in between. I don’t mean to say here that all these genres originated in this song, because most of them were starting to take shape before acid house. But it is considered to have had the single most important influence on the future development of almost all electronic music. Acid is considered to have changed them forever, both in terms of content and in terms of perception. Another thing was that, because the TB303 was so small and easy to experiment with, pretty much anyone could use it to make music, so it created a boom in the output of electronic music of all kinds. What followed is history.

So how is it used? Here is a guy demoing it all on Youtube (together with the TR606 drum machine, which was especially built to be used with the 303 this way):


So you can see how easy it is.

And the TB303? Well, with only 10.000 pieces around and everyone wanting to use it, its price rose to some 1000 euros in the mid ’90s and is probably even more now. Roland refused to bring it into production again, contributing even more to the high price. They eventually released some replacements, but they just didn’t have the same sound and feel. Of course, emulators and software replacements started showing up from everywhere, with various levels of success. A relatively new project claims to have recreated the original version of the 303 and sells kits which everyone can build at home. The kit costs something like 300 dollars.

So there we have it! History of acid. More details can be found in various sources:

• Acid House on Wikipedia
• Roland TB303 on Wikipedia
• Roland TB303 at vintagesynth
• Booking page of Phuture (now Phuture 303)

but I wanted to try a small multimedia compilation of it all.

Update: Please see this post for even more information on the history of the 303.

I want my first post to be about music. I will be writing quite a bit about it in my posts, because it is important to me.

When it comes to the music I listen to, this is pretty much what got it all started:


It’s Josh Wink’s Higher States of Consciousness.

It’s not necessarily the first piece of electronic music I’ve ever heard, nor is it my all time favorite (not that I have one), but it IS the tune I definitely remember most when I think abut my first days of going out, back in ‘96.

I never really had a sense of how well known this song was around the world (I guess it wasn’t), but in my home town it had become quite a hit around that time. This may seem strange now and we can hardly imagine the original version of Higher States playing in a regular club today, but I guess 7 years late was not TOO late to catch up with a phenomenon which had not been accessible to us when it happened elsewhere. I think people were more open-minded than now and were enjoying this tune and, although they hadn’t even heard of the second summer of love, were feeling some of the sensations that had made the whole rave movement such a hit years ahead. So I guess this is a good demonstration of the intrinsic power that the whole movement had.

For me, it was one of the tunes that forever got me hooked on electronic music. And when I say electronic music, I mean anything from ambient to gabber, from funky house to drum and bass or from minimal to goa. Depending on my mood, I like listening to all of them and try to keep up with what’s going on, although there’s so much happening in all these styles that it is hard to manage. But I never called myself a fanatic of any of the electronic genres and I can’t say I am an expert on any single one. Nor do I make a point of listening to the very latest and trendiest of artists or songs. All I care about is listening to and enjoying the music, be it new or old, famous or not. For the most part, though, I try to explore music and always find something new. I usually make a point of staying away from stuff that is blatantly commercial, even though the line is sometimes blurry. I try to set my own standards here and not to go to the extremes and NOT like a tune just because it has become famous (like Higher States had become in Cluj-Napoca), or like it because it is unknown and/or belongs to some genre or another. I try not to be manichaeist about music.

Nowadays, I have found the best way to satisfy my musical needs is via online radio. Here are some of my best sources:

• Soma FM
• Digitally Imported
• ETN.FM

Mainly, I listen Soma to experiment and try some new styles, not necessarily electronic. I especially have a soft spot for Illinois Street Lounge.

ETN is my main destination for trance and progressive and DI is for pretty much everything else. I especially use DI to listen to house. The funky house channel is really great.

So there you have it! The basics of how I feel about music.