A few months back, I made a mix of all soul music on 8tracks. It was pretty well-received, as that is a genre of music I love and know decently. But it got me thinking: I should make more one-genre mixes. But there’s so many genres I do not know anything about. So where to turn? Wikipedia, of course. I found a massive list of musical genres and picked one: right near the top, Acid House. Then I started reading, surfing, and downloading.
Acid House grew out of the club scene in Chicago, in the mid-’80s. It seems to have been fairly self-contained to the midwest (maybe Detroit a bit), and only lasted a couple of years. But then a few years later in the late-’80s, it showed up somehow in London. It became a bit more commercial there. The Acid House sound was simple: a repetitive beat with the “squelchy” sound of the Roland TB-303 synthesizer.
There’s a lot of controversy over who created the first Acid House track, as there were quite a few pioneers back then, all around the same time. I made a mix of some of my favorites by some of them below. A few famous and important tracks couldn’t be used, because they were too long for 8tracks file limits. But I think it is fairly representative of what acid house was in the ’80s. I tried to keep it pure, in later years, producers would mix in different sounds like rap or strings or whatnot. The main consistency in the songs is that squelchy synthesizer and the repetitiveness.
Here is the mix (the smiley face logo was used in the acid house scene):