(Dis)placing musical memory: Trailing the acid in electronic dance music

Abstract

The acid, a museme, is the unstable element in acid house. It is arguably both the spiritual and hedonistic apex of psychedelic music, enabling a shift in perception. In electronic dance music, the journey of the acid museme seems to have developed from Phuture's "Acid tracks" during the mid-1980s in Chicago club the Muzic Box. The new sound of acid house, as well as acid's implicit reference to the psychedelic drug LSD, inspired a moral panic in the UK during the late 1980s. By the early 1990s, acid house further influenced the development of trance music in Germany and elsewhere. Yet, a similar musical figure can be recognised in earlier electronic acid rock experiments of Tangerine Dream. The discussion first maps out the development of this museme by placing key-moments geographically. However, this paper concludes that musical memory seems to operate rhizomically, in a deterritorialised 2 (displaced) manner.

Sounds and the City

“…His accessible work on a rapidly changing world not only inspired producers in Detroit, but also electronic musicians such as New Order in the UK. In turn, British post-punk electro pop artists (including Gary Numan, Section 25, Depeche Mode), as well as German electronic pioneers like Kraftwerk were a source of inspiration to the early Detroit techno producers, together with the sound of New York's disco and electro, Chicago's house music, and Detroit's Afrofuturist P-funk of George Clinton (Rietveld, 2018). Afrofuturism takes its cue from a sense of alienation experienced by African-Americans, for whom there is no return to a nostalgic and innocent past.…”

“…Although the alien sound of "Acid Tracks" by Phuture (Trax Records, 1987) was rejected on first listening, it was embraced by the dancers by the end of the night, its machinic gurgling perhaps speaking for an alienated state of being. This new unhinged sound was so powerful that it inspired a genre in its own right (Rietveld, 2013) and a moral panic in the UK where acid house warehouse parties morphed into rave culture (Rietveld, 1991;Collins, 1998), as well as the sound of trance and techno during the 1990s. It is this wobbling sound that can also be heard in much of the output of Detroit's Underground Resistance, in which, Williams 2001, 167) states, "Atkin's robot has been replaced by the cyborg".…”