808 State - Newbuild
Pitchfork Media - April 1999
(Original article taken from http://pitchforkmedia.com/record-reviews/e/eight-o-eight-state/newbuild.shtml)
808 State
Newbuild
[Rephlex Reissues]
Rating: 9.8
Remember back in Indie Rock 101, when your floppy, fringed, middle- aged
professor (whose thesis "Black Leather Heroin: Smack and the Factory Pre-Punk
Ennui" you devotedly read in order to commune with greatness) told you that only
38 people bought the first Velvet Underground album, but afterwards those
punters all formed bands? Well, 808 State's Newbuild is the ...And Nico album of
acid house.
Newbuild was originally issued in 1988 on the band's own Creed label and now
Aphex Twin's Rephlex label has saved this masterpiece from becoming just a trace
memory in the cerebella of the 12 people who bought it back when acid house
wasn't luv'd up, blissed up and neutered.
Of course, we all know that 808 State found success with that muzak crud,
"Pacific State," and for collaborating with such underground heavyweights as
UB40. But-- come back!-- 808 State were once avatars for the MDMA set. The
band's key ingredient was Gerald Simpson (later known as A Guy Called Gerald,
and creator of the truly awe- inspiring Voodoo Ray and Black Science Technology
records).
Newbuild is a testament to the band's stop- at- nothing enthusiasm for their
music, and is also the guts and determination of fiercely independent music. The
tape they recorded the album on was removed from a dumpster 'round the back of
the Manchester studios of the BBC; it'd been thrown away because it had been cut
and spliced so often that it no longer met the quality thresholds of BBC
engineers. But these three Mancunian scallywags saw an essential resource and
seized it.
And it's with this spirit that 808 State imbued their debut record. The
instruments were crappy and severely dated (remember, this was 1988, and the
vogue for the Roland TB303 was five years in the future). Simpson, Massey, and
Price recognized that the acidic spikes and snarls of the 303 and the synthetic
percussion of the Roland 808 were exact replicas of the sounds they heard in
their mindspaces. The trio then recorded an album that, after more than ten
years of technological progression, still kicks away every other attempt at the
definitive acid house album. And I mean "album," not just a collection of
individual tracks sequenced together.
Newbuild takes you on an excursion through the jacked up sounds of dendrites
firing, quasars spinning, and the piezoelectric sounds of an electron mist. From
the opener "Sync/Swim" through the body- tingling bass pulses of "Flow Coma" and
the percussive frenzy of "Headhunters" to the closing tribal techno funk of
"Compulsion," 808 State challenge your preconception of how music should be and
prove just how damn funky three tearaways with a beat-up drum machine can be.
The sounds they generated in those days were only recognizable to a handful of
producers, one of which was DJ Pierre, the creator of the first acid track
("Acid Trax"). This machine music, while funky and danceable, was and remains
abstract, avant- garde, and without referent in the real world. One can listen
to a tuba and recognize its low parp, or the sounds of a clarinet's swoonsome
calling. But the sound of the TB303 can only be described in metaphors and
similes. 808 State relished this abstract quality and structured an album on
that foundation.
It's tempting to conclude that by using such unreal, manufactured sounds, 808
State distilled inhumanity in sound; they did no such thing. There's all the
passion contained in Marvin Gaye's What's Going On in Newbuild. It's just that
the trio's passion was not directed at societal ills. They were hellbent on
redefining notions of what constituted acceptable sound. And unlike Marinetti
and his Italian Futurist sidekicks, 808 State, DJ Pierre, Stakker Humanoid, and
a small cadre of similarly- minded visionaries, found an appreciative and open-
minded audience. Stakker Humanoid's debut single, "Humanoid" broke through to
the upper reaches of the British pop charts by selling over 100,000 copies. MDMA
was the tool by which pent-up Britons released their minds (and their unfunky
arses surely followed). The pulsations generated by the TB303 enhanced tactile
sensations previously numbed by unregulated tea drinking. This music wasn't and
isn't for listening-- it's for experiencing.
Of course, popularity diluted the quality of acid house records (reaching a
nadir with D-Mob's rabble- rousing "We Call It Acieeed!"). But, for a brief
while, the music was pure as the Sandoz lab had intended. And Newbuild was, as
your Indie 101 professor will explain in a later class, named after a housing
project in Bolton, Lancashire. The project has since either been torn down or
earmarked for a refit. But 808 State's Newbuild will forever stand; for its
foundations are too strong and its architects entirely negligent about planning
for obsolescence. Newbuild wasn't constructed for its time, or any other time.
It's an awe- inspiring shadow of a dimension that no one can perceive. Don't try
to explain it; just experience it!
-Paul Cooper
(Note: It's "Black SECRET Technology", Paul, NOT "Black SCIENCE Technology") :-p