808 Page #9

know the lyrics,

nobody knows the melody, nobody

knows sh*t.

Only thing that anybody knows

is, "Yo that beat's crazy."

Over in Chicago during the mid 80's,

early house producers such as Chip E

and Jesse Saunders were

working with the 808,

creating influential tracks that would help build the

foundations for house music as we know it today.

These things inside my soul

They make me lose control

It goes on and on

A lot of dance music was quite

familiar stuff based on R&B.

House music and techno

music, I mean

it's all about having this one

bar

looping endlessly and doing

variations on that.

For me that's like the

definition of house.

I think all the early house

producers and stuff

perfected it in a

more functional,

rhythmic, just purely

rhythmic sense,

and it's forever going to be

associated with that sound.

Just dance until

the beat is gone

The early days of house and techno

music were beginning in the mid west

cities of Chicago and Detroit, but what

can be considered one of the first early

experimentations with acid house

sounds actually came from India.

Bollywood session musician Charanjit Singh

created an unusual futuristic blend of 808

beats on his album 'Ten

Ragas To A Disco Beat'.

So far ahead of its time,

when released in 1982,

it pre-dated the first acid house records to

emerge from Chicago by at least two years.

Ahhhhhh I've lost

Marshall was like the... He

lived and died by the 808.

I think every dude

in Chicago did.

I've lost control

I've lost, ahhhhhh, control

I've lost control

You know, I would watch like Marshall

and DJ Pierre, Mike 'Hitman' Wilson,

even Bad Boy Bill, he was

like one of these cats.

I would sit there and watch

them. I was a keyboard player,

I was not trying to even come near a machine that

produced beats, I just wanted to play keyboards.

Chicago '84, '83, '85, maybe to '89 when BMX and GCI

went out over here, that was our sh*t right there.

For us electronic mother

f***ers, the 808 was our savior.

What I loved about all of those

records

at that moment in the

mid 80's was

their simplicity

and their rhythm.

The Chicago and the Detroit

stuff was coming from,

I guess from a European

perspective.

They, they were taking on European influences

and bringing that into their music.

There were a lot of people trying

to bite around that sound.

Particularly in Chicago there were a lot of

producers in Chicago that were just sending me,

at the time, letters because

we didn't have emails,

that they were a very

big fan of that sound.

And they were saying that it

sort of influenced the whole

Chicago whole sound, the whole

Detroit sound and all of that.

In Detroit an 808 driven electro track

was created by Juan Atkins and Richard

Davis as the group Cybotron. Released

in 1983, 'Clear' can be considered

part of the early evolution

of techno music.

Clear today, clear today

Clear, your mind,

Clear, your mind

Clear

It's a bit like one of those things where

one day you realize that almost all the

music you loved did

have an 808 in it.

Something like Derrick May 'Rhythim is

Rhythim', 'Icon' I think is one of the

biggest records for me, most influential

records for me, that's all 808.

Turning the 808 on reminded me of the

Juan Atkins records and also took me

back to the first records that really

I guess got me into electronic music.

Probably my most beautiful

moment with an 808 was

going back at 8am on a Sunday morning after

listening to Derrick May play in Detroit,

and turning on my 808, and

creating a whole song out of it.

Trying to make an intense rhythmic

piece out of one machine,

and in actual fact it became

one of my biggest songs

because that was 'Plastikman -

Spastic' which is pure 808.

In the late 80s an acid house

explosion was taking place in the UK,

influenced by the music

pioneered in Chicago.

I think it's been going back and

forth in a very interesting way.

You know, house music was born

in Chicago and New York,

and London and the UK in general they

really have that thing of turning

a street phenomenon into, adding a cool

factor to it so it becomes more like a trend.

- Me and you were going down the

Hacienda quite a lot -Yea.

And hearing the beginnings

of the acid thing there.

It was natural for us to start

dabbling with a bit of acid house.

It was a really, I don't know, a really

old school sound at the time for me

because I had kind of gone through like the whole electro thing.

But I was used to it and it was a nice sound.

The acid thing was really intense at the time.

There was a sort of focus on it where it

felt like it was in the air and it was exciting.

Therefore when we first made

'Newbuild' that first album, it

was about an intensity.

What you can do with 808's and those

kind of machines is block them off at

sevens and nines and things, put them against

each other and you start getting these

really interesting polyrhythms

that are really exciting.

We weren't particularly focused on making

a dance record or making a club record,

it was just making it as alien as possible

and pushing into that alien territory.

- That's when I got really excited

about that kind of music.

- Same here actually, it was a way of

kind of pushing and experimenting.

- In some ways we were trying to emulate

the American thing but not really

- because we were trying to mess

with that formula, -I was though.

Take those sounds that were

familiar and then push it

out as far as we

could, you know.

By the early 90s a number of

musical genres began to split off.

Producers were experimenting with

break beat sounds and heavy bass.

Jungle and drum and bass were born, and the 808

would play a key role in their development.

808 was the soundtrack

to my generation.

And hearing it and thinking,

"We could really f*** with it.

"Wouldn't it be great to turn a

whole bunch of people onto it."

The tunes for me that took up the mantle of it

within my own music, within drum and bass music

was Foul Play, Satin Storm, Doc

Scott, myself, you know, Waremouse,

2 Bad Mice, Ibiza Records especially. They

hacked into it like you wouldn't believe.

Mickey Finn I think was the

first thing I heard,

which was just... I think it was

about 6 'o clock in the morning

at Castlemorton and it was

frightening.

It was the best day of my life, and the end

of the world had come at the same time.

And I found that... I found Mickey Finn's

production specifically, and then Peshay's

and people like that, Bukem, I

found that mind blowing.

Take me up

Come on take me up

The thing is with the 808 as far as

drum and bass music was concerned, from

the first note, whether it was Bukem on

'Horizons' rolling it, or me dropping it

on one bar on 'Terminator' or 'Satin Storm'

or 'Here Comes The Drums' or any of those,

or 'Your Sound', any of those classic tunes, once

you committed to the 808, you committed to it.

Gladly for us technology came along

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