I can assure you there is no greater telling of a chapter of electronic history, set in a modern context, than this collection. A brand-new decade in retro colours, still vibrating with the naïve possibility that perhaps this time the future really would be different. Whether it was the intention to set out to communicate these themes, Acid Punx 3 did that to me. For me. Great job.
The Sound fo the Past, Present & Future
During the period of lived experience that was the 80s transitioning into identifying as the 90s, I found myself in my mid-twenties, still conceited enough to think I knew stuff, but not naive enough to think others knew way more than I did—a notion lost on the younger me, and perhaps the birth of a much later wisdom. The musical soundtrack to my days was shifting out of the post-mid-period 80s that had seen me ensconced entirely in the worlds of On-U Sound and Adrian Sherwood, Tackhead, Dub Syndicate, Barmy Army, Gary Clail, Mark Stewart and the Mafia, and ex-Slit Ari Up‘s sublime New Age Steppers.
It was a time of taut, hard-programmed drums. The Sugarhill Gang‘s studio musicians had regrouped in the UK, with Keith LeBlanc and Doug Wimbish regulars at gigs I attended that remain almost indescribable. Seeing Keith LeBlanc perform his debut album Major Malfunction on just a drum kit that triggered every part of the album—bass, guitar and vocal chops—whilst he alone sat playing his kit to a room packed with bobbing heads, locked into grooves you didn’t even know existed, remains one of those experiences that permanently alters your understanding of what electronic music can be.
But as this season made way for the 90s, the genesis of this and so much more collapsed into the new decade via a post-acid-house fervour that saw alcohol sales drop and clubs turning their taps off, leaving us to buy bottled water instead. European electronics and Chicago and Detroit sounds melded from London to Berlin and back to Manchester and beyond. Industrial leanings and acid house shared a space, along with numerous compilations that were essentially delivered under the increasingly broad banner of “dance music”.
One such album, Give Peace a Dance, is a hotpot of rap, electro, electronica, acid, progressive and ambient, symbolising both the new decade and, more essentially, the emergence of dance music as a unified consciousness. A second Summer of Love that would eventually, like the first Summer of Love, and every other creative movement before and since, become necessarily homogenised and fed back through the culture industry as unit-shifting chart fodder and house music for TV adverts selling alcopops, sanitary products and everything else imaginable.
Here, for the purposes of communicating the splendour of Next Wave Acid Punx TROIS!, that period of countercultural history provides the context. A time of confusing, multifaceted electronic Euro-EBM-industrial euphoria: 303s, piano hands in the air, we are one and all, the politicians need to do ecstasy, childlike innocent abandon. All of that can be found herein.
From the Hoovers and spray-can white-noise sweeps of rave music to the gruff industrial chants of Nitzer Ebb and Die Krupps; where Front 242 meets S’Express, where the Love Parade meets The KLF, where Age of Love meets the love of the ages in the form of white labels and white doves. Over 50 tracks see practically every piece of instrumentation laid squarely on the 2 and 4 of every bar, over and over, with nothing whatsoever played on an offbeat—not for fear of the funk, but because, at this point, we simply didn’t know we could do that. A notion wich Detroit Techno would soon usher in for everybody.
Just as these tracks push they neatly pound. They build expectations, and they do so from a lineage in which those expectations were met, precisely, on time. Before tracks would soon build with incredibly long 909 drum fills that would go and go and go and go until you jump for joy at the drop, only for it to keep you waiting just a little longer. Delightful, of course. But here, your expectations will not find themselves unmet. Drops drop. Peaks peak. Loops, well… …loop.
And by this new decade, the artists both old and new, collected here over 50 tunes, come together to brilliantly—whether they know it or not—paint a new picture of a period of transition. This is not simply nostalgia dressed in the clothes of rave culture. It is a reconstruction of the moment when a multitude of previously disparate electronic languages suddenly discovered they could occupy the same room, the same dancefloor, sometimes even the same record.
I can assure you there is no greater telling of a chapter of electronic history, set in a modern context, than this collection. A brand-new decade in retro colours, still vibrating with the naïve possibility that perhaps this time the future really would be different. Whether it was the intention to set out to communicate these themes, Acid Punx 3 did that to me. For me. Great job.
Next Wave Acid Punx TROIS! is available on Eskimo. [Bandcamp]
