Acid house is a sub-genre of
house music that emphasizes a repetitive, hypnotic and
trance-like style, often with samples or spoken lines rather than sung lyrics. Acid house's core electronic squelch sounds were developed by mid-1980s
DJs from
Chicago who experimented with the
Roland TB-303 electronic synthesizer-sequencer. Acid house spread to the
United Kingdom,
Australia, and continental
Europe, where it was played by DJs in the early
rave scene. By the late 1980s, copycat tracks and acid house
remixes brought the style into the mainstream, where it had some influence on pop and dance styles.
Nicknamed "the sound of acid",[1] acid house was different than the emerging styles of deep house or vocal house in that it was starkly minimal, being very light or absent of instrumentation and generally harder or trancier sounding than these.[citation needed] This bifurcation marked an early separation in house music that directly correlated to the origin of hard dance and trance and which developed in conjunction with the more underground and specialized rave scene.[citation needed] The starkness of the style was a result of the discovery of the strange sounds that the Roland 303 bass line synthesizer produced when tweaked and the straight 4|4 rhythm which though shared by much of house and techno music was programmed into much harder and more pounding rhythms than pop or electro.[citation needed] Both of these elements are present in most of the tracks considered core to the sound of acid house.[citation needed] Roland's other famous sound, the Roland TR-909 drum machine is nearly as common. Acid house's influence on dance music is tangible considering the sheer number of electronic music tracks referencing acid house through the use of its sounds, including trance, Goa Trance, psytrance, breakbeat, big beat, techno, trip-hop and house music.[2]
The first acid house records were produced in Chicago, Illinois. Phuture, a group founded by Nathan "DJ Pierre" Jones, Earl "Spanky" Smith Jr., and Herbert "Herb J" Jackson, is credited with having been the first to use the TB-303 in the house music context (the instrument appeared as early as 1983 in disco via Alexander Robotnick).[3] The group's 12-minute "Acid Tracks" was recorded to tape and was played by DJ Ron Hardy at the Music Box, where Hardy was resident DJ. Hardy once played it four times over the course of an evening until the crowd responded favorably.
Chicago's house music scene was suffering from a massive crack down of parties and events by the police. Sales of house records were dwindling and by 1988, the genre was selling less than a tenth as many records as at the height of the style's popularity.[4] However, house and especially acid house was beginning to experience a massive surge in popularity in Britain.
