Free Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture by Simon Reynolds Page B

over-melismatic Robert Owens vocals, most Fingers Inc output reflects Heard’s background as a jazz/R & B drummer and keyboardist reared on fusion and progressive rock (George Duke, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Genesis, Rick Wakeman). Songs like ‘Mysteries Of Love’, ‘Another Side’ and ‘A Path’ are the electro-blues of a seeker. Heard declared: ‘Jack means nothing to me’. But ironically, his most thrilling music took the form of the brutally dehumanized and machinic tracks – ‘Amnesia (Unknown Mix)’ and ‘Washing Machine’ – he released under the alias Mr Fingers. ‘Washing Machine’ – an interminable brain-wash cycle of burbling bass-loops and jarringly off-kilter hi-hats – is a mantra for a state of mindlessness.

Everybody Needs a 303
     
    The machinic, trance-inducing side of house exemplified by ‘Washing Machine’ took another turn in 1987, when jack tracks evolved into ‘acid tracks’: a style defined by a mindwarping bass sound that originated from a specific piece of equipment, the Roland TB 303 Bassline. The Roland 303 was originally put on the market in 1983 as a bass-line synthesizer designed to partner the Roland 606 drum machine, and targeted at guitarists who wanted basslines to jam off. It was singularly unsuited for this purpose, and by 1985 Roland ceased manufacturing the machine. But a few Italian disco producers discovered the 303’s potential for weird Moroder-esque sounds: Alexander Robotnik’s ‘Les Problemes D’Amour’, released in 1983, was a huge ‘progressive’ hit in Chicago, selling around twelve thousand import copies. A few years later, house producers, already enamoured of Roland drum machines and synths, started messing around with the 303, discovering applications that the manufacturers had never imagined.
    The 303 is a slim silver box with a one-octave keyboard (but four octave range), plus six knobs which control parameters like ‘decay’, ‘accent’, ‘resonance’, ‘tuning’, ‘envelope modulation’, and ‘cut off frequency’. Having programmed a bass-riff on the keyboard, you tweak the knobs to modulate the pitch, accent, and other parameters of each individual note in the bassline. The result is bass patterns that are as complex and trippy as a computer fractal, riddled with wriggly nuances and glissandi, curlicues and whorls.
    In early 1988, Farley ‘Jackmaster’ Funk told me the 303 was ‘an obsolete, old-fashioned piece of technology that no one had ever thought of using that way before’. At the time, this reminded me of the then indie-rock vogue for the cheesily overstated effects of late sixties and early seventies guitar pedals. As Dinosaur Jr’s J. Mascis put it, these quaint effects units appealed because they provided ‘harsh-eties rather than subleties’. Similarly, the 303 and similar analogue synthesizers were rediscovered by house artists because their gauchely moderne sounds, once laughable, suddenly seemed otherworldly and futuristic again. They were also cheap, as musicians and recording studios sold them to make space for the new digital synths and samplers.
    The first Chicago 303 track, Phuture’s ‘Acid Tracks’, was released in 1987 but recorded a couple of years earlier. DJ Pierre, Spanky and Herb Jackson were messing around with a 303, hoping to get a conventional bassline for a Spanky rhythm track. ‘The acid squiggle was there to start with,’ Pierre has said. ‘The machine already had that crazy acid sound in it that you were supposed to erase and put your own in, because it was just some MIDI gerbil. But we liked it.’ Marshall Jefferson, who produced the track, confirmed the accidental origins of this revolutionary house genre, telling David Toop: ‘“Acid Tracks” wasn’t pre-programmed, man . . . DJ Pierre, he was over and he was just messing with this thing and he came up with that pattern, man . . . So we were listening to it, getting drunk man. “Hey, this is kinda hot,