Dad Noise: Acid

Posted on April 27, 2012 by Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor

Once upon a time there was Jack. And Jack had a groove, a groove called House.

And House begat an evil child. And Lo! That child was named Acid.

Acid spread throughout the world and became responsible for tabloid hysteria, smiley T shirts, Mike Ink’s hair, and abominations like Goa Trance.

The hype made a lot of people forget it was actually a dirty lo fi music scene spawned in Chicago by producers too skint to afford proper equipment. Like The Hoover, Acid was there waiting to be discovered, in the analogue circuitry of the 303. 

Responsibility for the creation of the wee silver beastie lies with a faceless genius, Tadao Kikumoto, who now happens to be the Roland Corporation’s senior managing director. Kikumoto also invented the 909. Wow.

Acid was an accident waiting to happen. The 303 was not designed for it – it was supposed to do away with bass players. The weird sequencer makes it quite hard to programme actual music, but easy make something odd happen.

We will very soon hit you with a 303-heavy dadcast especially for the acid dads out there. Till then here’s some different flavours of dad acid to keep you smiling. Quack quack!

The Original Chicago Acid House Track
Phuture – Acid Trax (1987)
Phuture’s debut release on Trax was the first acid house record. Everyone who heard it wanted to copy it. Chicago’s local house music scene was flooded with 303 records, some of them crossed the Atlantic, and soon saucer-eyed dads in dungarees were pulling elaborate chicken dance moves at The Hacienda.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKbLI8EufNo

Hip House Acid
The Wee Papa Girl Rappers – Heat It Up (Acid House Mix)
Detroit uber-dad Kevin Saunderson on the mix here. We actually only discovered this tune a few months ago and have been caning it a bit ever since. It’s good.

‘Daddy I’m Scared’ Acid
Bam Bam – Where’s Your Child? (1988)
Probably our favourite scary techno vocal track. Where IS your child? Soundtrack to the London riots right there…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJZCmt38liQ


Cologne Acid
Mike Ink – Playtex (1994)
While Eurotrance was really starting to stink out the dancefloors of the world with its manky stench, some people in the small German city of Cologne got the acid bug bad, but did much better things with it. The result: loads of filthy, distorted, much too fast releases on labels like Force Inc and DJungle Fever by people with funny names like Gizz TV and Jammin Unit. The pinnacle of Cologne Acid came when it calmed down a bit, courtesy of Mike Ink’s minimalist Dadajack EP on weirdo symbolic label Profan. This EP’s ability to cut through in the mix is second to none…a real DJ’s record. All of the tracks are great but this one is on Youtube.


Acid Techno
FUSE – Substance Abuse (1991)
Richie Hawtin made a lot of acid tracks. We chose this one for its lame repetition of the word ‘Overdose’. Picture all the arc-line strobes going off at Pure. Sweaty.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96xVnsmWMPM

‘Dad’s Crying Again’ Acid
Choice – Acid Eiffel (1993)
‘Get a grip dad, you’re pathetic’. French uber-dad Laurent ‘Laboratoire’ Garnier with his Gallic chords reminding us of raves gone by. Like Joey Beltram dropping this over the gargantuan Rezerection PA, aaahhh, that was a moment. And Derrick May playing it at the Volcano on a Sunday night. Derrick May in Partick, on a Sunday? Stuff like that happened in the 90s.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdeVX7UjeIk

Detroit Acid
Underground Resistance – The Final Frontier (1991)
‘Mad’ Mike Banks – another Techno uber-Dad demonstrating his ability to come up with weepy chord sequences. Made you feel nostalgic for the future in 1991. He’s a genius, but thankfully here eschewed his tendency for synthisax noodling in favour of acid. This tune pretty much laid the blueprint for his offshoot label, Red Planet. A Detroit dadcast is a future necessity.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MTM4p0Hx0o

Aphex Acid
Aphex Twin – Windowlicker Acid Edit
There are any number of Richard D James tunes we could choose, but we chose this one, get over it. Takes a while for the acid to get going but it’s worth it.

Bollywood Acid
Charanjit Singh
Powerful evidence that Acid was discovered, not invented. The rerelease in 2011 of an obscure Bollywood album of instrumentals sounds exactly like acid house. We thought it was a hoax when we first heard it. One of those records that is only interesting because of the story – it’s actually a load of old toss.

Hollywood Acid
Blade Opening Scene – Pump Panel remix of New Order Confusion
What a pleasant cinematic surprise we got as the opening distorted kick and 303 line of Tim Taylor’s acid techno remix blasted out of the Odeon PA. Quite a good club scene up until the blood. Seen plenty zombies over the years, but no actual vampires.

Posted in Dad Heroes | Tagged | 5 Comments

Dad Trax: S Express – Hey Music Lover – Vimto Edit

Posted on April 13, 2012 by Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor

Errzi big slab of acid cheese. Get it right up ye.

Occasional dad-house disc jockey MC Vimto takes a dirty great pair of scissors to William Orbit’s daft but fairly rare Spatial Expansion acid remix of the already quite daft pop house tune, Hey Music Lover by S’Express.

Posted in Dad Trax, Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Dad Dancing: Spiral Tribe in Lewisham library, 1991

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor

In 1991 Castlemorton was a mere twinkle in the Spiral crew’s googly eyes. What you have here is the remnants of a party, still going at it the next day. Dancing in a library.

Looks exactly like every party ever that has gone on way past the time when people should really be in their beds. Watch at 2 minutes when the bloke in the red hat pulls some nice arm moves, and the impressively bendy guy next to him thinks ‘I can top that’, combines the arm move with a knee dip. Class.

Where are they now, the crusty ravers? They have cut off their dreadlocks and become web designers. A few have gone to France and are still at it, because people in France like 180 bpm acid techno even today. And the weather’s a bit less depressing if you’ve made a lifestyle decision to live in a bus.

Posted in Dad Dancing | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Dad Dance: N-Joi Adrenalin on TOTP

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor

Bounce bob, bounce

This clip is properly embarrassing. Great early 90s hair: the bouncing bob. They used to be everywhere.

How can you take yourself seriously, pretending to play a synth and wearing cast-offs from a Janet Jackson video?

As we’ve seen before in the Hitman And Her clips, blokes in ties all over the place. Why dress like you’re going for a job interview to be in the crowd on Top Of The Pops? Answer: cos it’s 1990. Some clubs wouldn’t even let you in unless you dressed like that.

Classic bassline though. Really used to hit you in the chest coming out of a 100K rig.

Posted in Dad Dancing | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

Dad Dance: Total Confusion on Dance Energy, 1991

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor

Web things like the Boiler Room are what have replaced Dance Energy now. That’s all a bit serious though. The clothes, the hair and above all the dancing were much more fun back in 1991. The key word is ‘energy’, there was a lot of it about.

We are a bit obsessed by the music of 1991. As with a lot of stuff from that golden year, this tune totally stands up, still sounds fat. It stuck in my head the first time I went to Pure in, you guessed it, 1991. And I’m still not done with it, 21 years later.

Properly mental underground music, on network TV, at tea time.

RIP Caspar Pound, the eponymous ‘Hippie’ who was the man behind early trance label Rising High.

Posted in Dad Dancing | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Dadcast 11 – Indie Dads

Posted on March 4, 2012 by Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor

Image

For our latest cast of the pod, we celebrate the collision of dance music and those stupid curtain hairstyles. And a couple of songs by The Fall.

You may be interested to know that Sheer Taft was from Greenock. Nobody makes tunes like that now, and why would they?

Kinda an odd interpretation of the idea of indie this…based on being drunk one night after watching a Screamadelica doc and remembering something called ‘indie dance’ that was around in the early 90s.


DOWNLOAD: Dadcast 11 – Indie Dads

Tracks:

Big Hard Excellent Fish ft Margie Clarke – The Imperfect List
The Fall/Coldcut – Telephone Thing
Happy Mondays – Wrote For Luck (We Love Mondays edit)
Sheer Taft – Cascades
Bocca Juniors – Substance (Remix)
Speedy J – DeOrbit
My Bloody Valentine – Soon (Weatherall Remix)
The Fall – Big New Prinz

Posted in Dad Casts | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Dad Noise: The Schaffel

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor

What do you get when you cross this:

With this:

Schaffelbeat was a funny little phenomenon that popped up somewhere in the mid 90s in Cologne, Germany (hence the flag), reaching a height of popularity in the early noughties with Schaffelbeat chart hits from the likes of Goldfrapp and Rachel Stevens. Then it kind of tailed off, though it still resurfaces now and again.

It’s what happens when you set your sequencer to do triplets instead of 16th notes. So instead of the usual doof-doof-doof you get doof-de-doof-de-doof. Something about that little extra semi beat makes people smile and do a goofy dance.

But who did it first? The prime guilty party is surely Wolfgang Voigt, AKA certified Dad Hero Mike Ink – check out his amazing hair.

Around 1995 most techno was baws to the wall taps aff stuff with mad 303s, or minimal looping a la Jeff Mills. Not really scoring high on humour. Serious blokes with shaved heads, a lot of frowning and sweating and people going on about ‘purism’. Then on his 1995 Force Inc LP, as Love Inc, Voigt lifted a big sample out of T Rex’s Hot Love, and made this:

Now some other Colognials must have instantly spotted the potential for dancefloor tomfoolery in this triplet shenanigans, with Wolfgang himself using it to good effect in some of the arty musique concrete type stuff he put out on his mysterious Profan label. Back before the internet, people could put out records with just symbols on them, and nobody would have a clue who they were by. Profan was one of these. It was followed up in 1999 by the Kreisel 99 series of 7″s. There was one a week for the whole of 1999 and they all had a spinning top on the cover. They were lovely little objects, we have a few of them. At the time we thought there was a Schaffel scene happening in Cologne, with lots of faceless artistes with names like ‘Grungerman’ and ‘Mint’,  but actually almost all of them turned out to be Wolfgang Voigt.

It sounds very German, which is odd considering the original inspiration was a rock scene from England involving Slade and a future paedophile. It’s probably something to do with the old Bavarian oompa loompa music – check out this from Jurgen Paape. Or should we say, Jurgen PAARPE!

Mr Voigt and Michael Mayer (another fine purveyor of the Schaffel) then started the great Kompakt label/shop/distributor which quickly went on to world domination and indeed still rules much of the world today. Kompakt dancefloor offshoot Speicher launched initially with loads of Schaffel. And more Dad Heroes, The Orb, also got in on the act with a series of Schaffel-laced Kompakt releases. (Half of the Orb is of course Thomas Fehlmann, who is German).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlcuBfGcfkA

But as with so much in techno, the KLF actually got there first. They spotted the potential in the Glitter beat long before Wolfgang and his chums, and even got a number 1 hit single out of it.

Look out for a Schaffelbeat Dadcast, just as soon as we pull our fingers out. Hopefully by next week.

Posted in Dad Heroes | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Dad Trax: Blawan – What You Do With What You Have

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor

Blawan - What You Do With What You Have

If you thought Dads only have ears for the music of the past, think again. We do like some new tunes. They are getting quite hard to find though, partly cos we now almost never go to a record shop (in fact we almost never go into a shop that isn’t on the internet), but also because the ease of releasing and producing music has created a giant torrent of guff with the odd little floater of goodness zooming past.

This tune rocks though. It’s got a pitched down vocal sample from Moodymann, a bit of acid, some nice filtered stabs and a hefty simple beat. It’s one of those tunes that’s great fun to mix other tunes into. And it’s on Dads’ favourite old Belgian label R & S Records. Probably one of our top ten techno tunes of 2011. He does wear a really fucking stupid hat as well which always helps.

Posted in Dad Trax | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Dad Dancing: Ultimate Taps Aff

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor

An outstanding demonstration of the Taps Aff school of Dad Dancing – especially notable for being in someone’s house. Begins with an excellent Head First Crab down the stairs move. Finishes with a Front Door Slam. Nine out of ten.

Posted in Dad Dancing | Tagged | 1 Comment

The Quietus – Mark E Smith Interview

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor

Mark E Smith

This big interview piece with certified Dad Hero Mark E Smith is well worth 10 minutes of reading time.

An excellent piece of work from the writer Kevin Perry who spoke to Mr Smith over many pints in Manchester on the eve of the 29th Fall album, Ersatz GB.

For a bit of contrast, check out this vid courtesy of TV’s Lauren Laverne. Painful. Demonstrating that for a good interview, it’s best if you know something about the person, rather than just be an ironic media twunt.

Posted in Dad Heroes | Tagged , , | 1 Comment