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Acid

Belgium, Indisc, 1988

Amnesia

Amnesia was a Belgian studio act from the new beat years. Olivier Caplin and Stephan Novak started it, and Novak wrote most of the music on the first album. The producers were Bruno Vangarsse and Michel Nachtergaele, who took writing credits as M. De San Antonio, with Benoît Marissal on arrangements. That album came out on the Belgian label Indisc in 1988, went to Debut in the UK the same year and reached Germany and Spain in 1989. Discogs files the records under new beat and acid. As the scene moved toward techno, more composers came in under the Amnesia name. In the early 1990s Vangarsse and Nachtergaele left and started Pleasure Game, and later moved on to lighter, jokey dance records.

Manchester, Spirit Studios, 1988

808 State

Before the hits, 808 State were regulars at Martin Price's Eastern Bloc shop. Graham Massey and Gerald Simpson first teamed up with Price in a hip-hop crew called Hit Squad Manchester, then switched to acid house. Newbuild was recorded over a weekend in January 1988 at Spirit Studios, on worn tape the BBC in Manchester had thrown out. The gear was Roland, a TB-303 with TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines, a Juno-106 and four SH-101s. About a thousand copies were pressed, and John Peel played it a lot. Aphex Twin reissued it on Rephlex in 1999, and in 2004 Rephlex put out Prebuild, more 1988 acid tracks, some from tapes made in Simpson's bedroom. In 2012 Massey and Simpson played an improvised one-off set in London.

Windsor, Ontario, NovaMute

Plastikman

Plastikman is Richie Hawtin, born in Banbury, Oxfordshire, in 1970 and raised from the age of nine near Windsor, Ontario. With John Acquaviva he started the Plus 8 label around 1990. Sheet One, the first Plastikman album, came out on NovaMute in 1993 and is built around the Roland TB-303. He made it at Studio UTK in Windsor, mostly by jamming live on the 303 and editing afterwards, cutting some pieces down from about forty minutes to ten. Early CDs had a perforated inlay that looked like a sheet of LSD blotters. In 1994 a Texas man was arrested after a policeman saw one on his car seat. He toured the live show for about ten years, and in November 2013 played as Plastikman at the Guggenheim in New York.

Chicago, 1985

Phuture

Phuture started in Chicago in 1985 with Earl Smith Jr., known as Spanky, along with DJ Pierre and Herbert Jackson, called Herb J. Spanky had got into making music from dancing to Ron Hardy, and Pierre grew up on Hardy at the Music Box and Frankie Knuckles at the Warehouse. Pierre first came across the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer through a friend. Spanky then bought one secondhand, cheaply by Pierre's account. Pierre's habit of twisting its frequency and resonance knobs while a beat ran gave the group a squelching, wobbling bass sound, and that sound became the basis of acid house. Herb J left in 1988 and the group split around 1990. Spanky later led Phuture 303, and he died in September 2016, months after a stroke.

Dunton Green, head torches

Orbital

The Hartnolls grew up in Dunton Green, Kent, and they started out recording in a converted stair cupboard at their parents' house, on their father's four-track tape deck. After a start on the small Oh Zone label, FFRR handled most of what followed. Live, they mixed and sequenced on the fly behind banks of equipment, wearing head-mounted torches. A lot of film work came in from the late 1990s, including Event Horizon, Octane and the 2012 remake of Pusher. They played the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Paralympics, with a speech by Stephen Hawking. Paul has made solo albums and worked on music for Peaky Blinders, while Phil DJs. A tenth album came out in 2023.

Tourcoing, Attack Records

Emmanuel Top

Emmanuel Top was born in Tourcoing, France, on 30 October 1971. He started out at the end of the 1980s in Belgian new beat, recording as Bazz for DIKI Records and working with Bruno Sanchioni. In the early nineties he put out a run of acid techno 12-inches on Attack Records, and they sold better in Germany and England than in France. A triple-disc set collected many of them in 1995. The following year he signed to NovaMute, the Mute offshoot that also released Plastikman, and made an album for them. With Sanchioni and Bruno Quartier he was also in the trance trio B.B.E., who had UK chart hits on Positiva in the late 1990s. In 2013 he released a twelve-volume series of soundtrack albums.

The Collection