{"id":4745,"date":"2019-11-25T21:03:18","date_gmt":"2019-11-25T20:03:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sonicrampage.org\/blog\/?p=4745"},"modified":"2026-03-31T14:12:15","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T13:12:15","slug":"pearsall-presents-30x3-1-your-mind-on-303s-old-skool-acid-techno","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sonicrampage.org\/blog\/2019\/11\/pearsall-presents-30x3-1-your-mind-on-303s-old-skool-acid-techno\/","title":{"rendered":"Pearsall presents 30&#215;3.1: Your Mind on 303s (Old Skool Acid Techno)"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"460\" height=\"460\" src=\"http:\/\/sonicrampage.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/Pearsall-30x3.1-YourMindOn303s.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4746\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sonicrampage.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/Pearsall-30x3.1-YourMindOn303s.png 460w, https:\/\/sonicrampage.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/Pearsall-30x3.1-YourMindOn303s-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/sonicrampage.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/Pearsall-30x3.1-YourMindOn303s-300x300.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 460px) 100vw, 460px\" \/><\/figure>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mixes-upload.pearsall.workers.dev\/mixes\/30x3\/Pearsall-30x3.1-YourMindOn303s.mp3\">Pearsall presents Pearsall presents 30&#215;3.1: Your Mind on 303s<\/a><\/h2>\n<p><em>right-click, save as to download this free mp3 mix<\/em><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" scrolling=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/718391836&amp;color=%23b6de09&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Mixed in Berlin, August 2019<br \/>100% Vinyl<br \/>(112:27, 259 MB, 320 kbps mp3) <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/mixes-upload.pearsall.workers.dev\/mixes\/30x3\/Pearsall-30x3.1-YourMindOn303s.cue\">Cue file<\/a><br \/><a href=\"http:\/\/sonicrampage.org\/mixes\/30x3\/Pearsall-30x3.1-YourMindOn303sBIG.png\">Larger Cover<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/alexmapar\">Cover by Alex Mapar<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Direct link to the mix:<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/mixes-upload.pearsall.workers.dev\/mixes\/30x3\/Pearsall-30x3.1-YourMindOn303s.mp3\">https:\/\/mixes-upload.pearsall.workers.dev\/mixes\/30&#215;3\/Pearsall-30&#215;3.1-YourMindOn303s.mp3<\/a><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><strong>Tracklisting:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><!--EndFragment-->01. Underground Resistance &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/UR-Acid-Rain-III-Meteor-Shower\/release\/18482\">Cyberwolf<\/a> (Underground Resistance)<br \/>02. Tata Box Inhibitors &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/Tata-Box-Inhibitors-Plasmids\/release\/34488\">Plasmids (Placid Mix)<\/a> (Touche)<br \/>03. Hardfloor &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/Hardfloor-TB-Resuscitation\/release\/127935\">Acperience 1<\/a> (Harthouse)<br \/>04. Circuit Breaker &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/Circuit-Breaker-The-End-1991-1996\/release\/15355\">Creator<\/a> (Probe)<br \/>05. F.U.S.E. &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/FUSE-Further-Underground-Sound-Experiments-Substance-Abuse\/release\/15177\">Substance Abuse<\/a> (Plus 8)<br \/>06. HMC &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/DJ-HMC-Dirty-Acid-Trax-Vol-1\/release\/8170\">Dirty Acid Trax Vol. 1 (Side B)<\/a> (Dirty Acid Trax)<br \/>07. HMC &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/DJ-HMC-6AM-Marauder\/release\/7219901\">6 AM<\/a> (Reflector)<br \/>08. Freddie Fresh &amp; Woody McBride &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/Freddie-Fresh-Woody-McBride-Psychopocaplyp\/release\/112580\">Vulture Psycalopic &#8217;95<\/a> (Analog)<br \/>09. Frankie Bones &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/Frankie-Bones-Bonesbreaks-Volume-6-A-New-Generation-Of-Rhythms-Breaks-For-DJs\/release\/98916\">Pure Ecstacy (The Recall Remix)<\/a> (Groove World)<br \/>10. Orbital &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/Orbital-Mutations\/release\/44878\">Ooolaa (Joey Beltram Mutation)<\/a> (ffRR)<br \/>11. Drax &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/Drax-Drax-Ltd-II\/release\/51317\">Acid Generation<\/a> (Oscillator)<br \/>12. Dynamo City &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/Dynamo-City-Urban-Free-Shape-Shift\/release\/31671\">Urban &amp; Free<\/a> (Stay Up Forever)<br \/>13. Morph &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/Morph-Stormwatch\/release\/6043\">X-Ex<\/a> (Synewave)<br \/>14. DJ Randy &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/DJ-Randy-Pandomia\/release\/98231\">Pandomia<\/a> (Smoke Free DJ Tools)<br \/>15. Dogs On Rope &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/Dogs-On-Rope-Acid-Boom-Prozac-Nation\/release\/52725\">Acid Boom<\/a> (Organgrinder)<br \/>16. DJ Misjah &amp; Groovehead &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/DJ-Misjah-DJ-Groovehead-Special-Acid-Edition\/release\/16398\">Delirious<\/a> (X-Trax)<br \/>17. Underground Resistance &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/Underground-Resistance-The-Seawolf\/release\/12484\">The Seawolf<\/a> (Underground Resistance)<br \/>18. The Dentist &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/The-Dentist-The-Dentist-Takes-A-Trip-To-Shroom-Town\/release\/1669172\">The Trip, The Roland A Dentist &amp; His Dagley<\/a> (Boscaland)<br \/>19. Mike Dearborn &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/Mike-Dearborn-Moments\/release\/8590\">Birds On E<\/a> (Djax-Up-Beats)<br \/>20. Nico &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/Nico-Frontiers\/release\/52426\">Hope<\/a> (IST)<br \/>21. Encephaloid Disturbance &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/Encephalo%C3%AFd-Disturbance-Renegate-Ectoplasm\/release\/34595\">Renegate Ectoplasm<\/a> (Dance Opera)<br \/>22. Liberator DJ&#8217;s &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/Liberator-DJs-Its-Fking-avin-It2\/release\/189590\">Mellon Pharm<\/a> (TeC)<br \/>23. Pagemaster &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/Pagemaster-Drug-Center-Platonic-Rain\/release\/108002\">Drug Center<\/a> (Thai)<br \/>24. The Montini Experience &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/The-Montini-Experience-Mind-Expander-One\/release\/94656\">Restriction<\/a> (Nitric)<br \/>25. Jeff Mills &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/Jeff-Mills-Waveform-Transmission-Vol-1\/release\/17518\">Berlin<\/a> (Tresor)<br \/>26. D.A.V.E. The Drummer &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/Various-The-Sound-Of-Smitten-EP\/release\/21608\">Fat Arse<\/a> (Smitten)<br \/>27. Chris Liberator &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/Various-23\/release\/21788\">23 Seconds &amp; Counting<\/a> (Routemaster)<br \/>28. Geezer &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/Geezer-The-Long-And-Short-Of-It-Bubblerap\/release\/11948\">The Long &amp; Short Of It<\/a> (Smitten)<br \/>29. Ramos, Supreme &amp; UFO &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/Ramos-Supreme-UFO-Terminator-Remix-Judgement-Day\/release\/120788\">Judgment Day<\/a> (RSR)<br \/>30. A&amp;E Dept. &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/AE-Dept-The-Rabbits-Name-Was-Cool-The-Gang\/release\/31669\">And The Rabbit&#8217;s Name Was &#8230;<\/a> (Stay Up Forever)<\/p>\n<p><em>Note from Pearsall: <\/p>\n<p>No single sound has defined my life in electronic music like the sound of the Roland TB-303. This Japanese synth, originally designed as a fairly prosaic bassline synthesizer, contained a secret power that was waiting to be discovered, one that was first revealed to the world by a group of Chicago house music producers in the mid-1980&#8217;s: with a little creativity this funny little synth could issue forth some of the strangest and most magical sounds known to man. The acid box, as it came to be known, was the fuse that detonated the UK&#8217;s second Summer of Love in 1988, as acid house arrived like a missile from Chicago and detonated in the heart of Thatcherite Britain, altering British youth culture forever.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>By the time my family arrived in the UK in the 1990&#8217;s the aftershocks were still very evident and very obvious, even to me as an American youth who had previously only liked heavy metal.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>For me, my first exposure to the magic of the Roland TB-303 came in the mid-90&#8217;s when I first got into dance music &#8211; my ears always perked up when I would hear acid lines percolate through tunes, but this wasn&#8217;t that common to begin with for me, as jungle \/ drum n&#8217; bass was my first love in electronic music. What really changed things for me was buying the 1997 Liberator DJ&#8217;s mix compilation<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.discogs.com\/Aaron-Chris-Julian-Liberator-Its-Not-IntelligentAnd-Its-Not-From-DetroitBut-Its-Fking-avin-It\/release\/168270\"><em> It&#8217;s Not Intelligent\u2026And It&#8217;s Not From Detroit\u2026But It&#8217;s F**king &#8216;avin It!<\/em><\/a><em> &#8211; besides having one of the best mix titles ever, my mind was thoroughly blown by the combination of punk rock attitude, high bpms, and nonstop 303 hijinks. One benefit of having friends with older siblings who were into the London underground rave \/ club scene was that within a year we were joining them at the London squat parties where this acid techno sound was really thriving. <\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>It&#8217;s hard to explain how amazing these parties were to me as a 17 year-old &#8211; pounding kicks all night, all laced with this strange and compelling sound that could twist and turn all kinds of ways &#8211; spaced out and psychedelic one moment, and as intense and direct as any 1977 punk single the next. On a large sound system the acid lines would slither through the speakers like a sonic panther, or rear up and roar like a monster from folklore; dribble down the walls or strafe everyone like a crazed future soldier with a lazer rifle.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>With the decade about to end, therefore, I wanted to create and share with you a special and very personal project &#8211; a mammoth dedication to my encounter with this life-altering sound.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>I call it <strong>30&#215;3<\/strong> &#8211; three mixes, each with 30 tracks, each dedicated to a different chapter in the story of how electronic musicians have utilized the Roland TB-303. I will be presenting the next two chapters over the following Mondays.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>This first mix in the series is thus a celebration of that raw 90&#8217;s acid techno sound &#8211; that pounding synthesis that reverberated around raw warehouse spaces from Detroit to Berlin to London to New York to Rotterdam to Melbourne and beyond; all cities that are represented on this mix. <\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>As ever, my goal with this mix is to tell a sonic story, to craft an audio narrative that works over 30 tracks, so that you can move from the beginning to the end in a way that makes sense as you listen. I also mixed this like I always do, with plenty of cuts, spinbacks, fast mixes, and surprises &#8211; because this is the style and attitude that I learned to love in those dark, loud post-industrial spaces, and this is the attitude that ever since I have wanted to put across in my mixes.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>S<em>ince this mix is about my love of all things acid techno, I thought this would be a good opportunity to republish my good friend Marc Mewshaw&#8217;s essay on his London squat party memories, originally published with my mix <\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/sonicrampage.org\/blog\/2011\/09\/pearsall-presents-beyond-the-valley-of-the-acid-vixens-new\/\"><em>Beyond the Valley of the Acid Vixens<\/em><\/a><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/sonicrampage.org\/mixes\/beyondvixen\/MARC__ERIC__DAN__AND_ME.JPG?w=474\" alt=\"\"\/><figcaption> <em>The morning after the night before \u2026 (L-R) Marc, Me, <a href=\"http:\/\/snapcracklingpop.blogspot.com\/\">Dan<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vinylpimp.com\">Eric<\/a>, July 2001<\/em> , London<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><em><strong>Squat Party Memories<\/strong> by Marc Mewshaw<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ll begin this little essay with a disclaimer: I\u2019m nowhere near as<br \/>\nwell-versed in the minutia of hard dance as Pearsall. The man\u2019s<br \/>\nknowledge, to put it simply, is compendious. Not just of dance music,<br \/>\nincidentally. In a pinch and need some statistics on steel production in<br \/>\n pre-colonial India? Ask Pearsall. Need to know what brand of aftershave<br \/>\n lotion Napoleon used? Talk to Pearsall. He\u2019s an old-school<br \/>\ntrainspotter, Pearsall is, and, in deference to his frighteningly<br \/>\nretentive brain, I\u2019ll leave the long guided walks through the annals of<br \/>\ndance music history to him. What I do have to offer are some fragmentary<br \/>\n reminiscences and meditative noodlings on the subject of squat<br \/>\npartying, circa the millennium.<\/p>\n<p>First, some background. My own love affair with dance music began, as<br \/>\n these things often do, with an unexpected conversion experience.<br \/>\nWithout prompting one night, my friend Dan Durnin played me a mixtape.<br \/>\nWhat came out of the speakers caught me by the guts and refused to let<br \/>\ngo. It sounded like a platoon of robots playing didgeridoos at ballistic<br \/>\n velocities and high frequencies, the screeching riffs slithering<br \/>\naround, building and plunging, entwining, copulating, all of it<br \/>\npunctuated by a kick drum whose every thump registered as an intestinal<br \/>\nfact. I asked Dan what this lunacy was. Acid techno, it was called. What<br \/>\n an evocative label. I pictured gouts of highly corrosive fluid melting<br \/>\nthrough shrieking circuit boards \u2026<\/p>\n<p>Prior to that fateful night, my taste in electronic music tended<br \/>\ntowards the mainstream. I listened to Orbital, the Chemical Brothers,<br \/>\nthe Crystal Method \u2013 the sort of stuff that, while not without its<br \/>\ncharms and different enough from Blur and Oasis to make me feel<br \/>\nrecherch\u00e9, was undeniably engineered for mass consumption. But this acid<br \/>\n techno business was rawer, purer, purpose-built for one end only:<br \/>\nwhipping ravers into a fury. In one of my previous teenage incarnations,<br \/>\n I\u2019d been a fan of death metal, and it seemed to share a certain<br \/>\ndriving, primal energy with that genre but, thankfully, without taking<br \/>\nitself half as seriously. That was ultimately what I came to like most<br \/>\nabout it: that its fierceness was put in the service of fun. Like death<br \/>\nmetal, it was angry, crackling with aggression. But unlike it, acid<br \/>\ntechno, in its irresistibly danceable rhythms, contained the antidote to<br \/>\n that anger. You couldn\u2019t listen to it without developing the sudden<br \/>\nirrepressible itch to thrash around and enjoy yourself, whereas I\u2019d<br \/>\nalways found death metal encouraged me to withdraw and think about<br \/>\nharming kittens. As I soon discovered, the same tension between ferocity<br \/>\n and unabashed, balls-to-the-walls fun at the heart of acid techno<br \/>\nextended to the atmosphere of the parties themselves and \u2013 for me, at<br \/>\nleast -was the defining feature of the underground experience.<\/p>\n<p>The squats of my teenagehood were dark, grotty, intimidating places.<br \/>\nSome of them were downright sinister. Merely getting to them often<br \/>\nentailed a long trek through blighted industrial wasteland (granted, as a<br \/>\n baby-faced nineteen year-old American, all of London east of Islington<br \/>\nlooked like blighted industrial wasteland.) And when finally we did<br \/>\nmanage to track down the squat, my anxiety was usually in no way allayed<br \/>\n by the sight of the bleak industrial ruin hulking in front of me, the<br \/>\napproach to which was almost always hemmed in by a gauntlet of drug<br \/>\npushers and assorted scumbags. (Once, as Pearsall and I were staggering<br \/>\nout of a squat at dawn, we witnessed a small group of Italians who,<br \/>\nhaving just arrived, took one look at the skinheads, rude boys and<br \/>\nYardies milling around at the front door and hopped right back into the<br \/>\ncab that had brought them there.)<\/p>\n<p>Once inside, things weren\u2019t much more reassuring. There was a rank,<br \/>\npervasive funk about the places \u2013 a stew of curdled milk,<br \/>\ndumpster-in-summer and wino-ass. (And often, if you explored upstairs,<br \/>\nyou\u2019d find the source of the stink, the squatter encampment itself, a<br \/>\nmiscellany of sleeping bags, butane cookers, jugs full of urine, etc.<br \/>\nall patrolled by unfriendly dogs.) And, of course, squats were always<br \/>\nsoaking in darkness. Klieg lights set up at the DJ booths were the only<br \/>\nsource of illumination, opening little pockets of visibility at the<br \/>\nmargins of which lapped an inky unknown. To get from A to B, you had to<br \/>\ngrope your way, hand over hand, taking little shuffling, exploratory<br \/>\nsteps, through the mazelike bowels of the building, careful of the<br \/>\nrusted, jagged bits of metal rebar poking out from the walls and hanging<br \/>\n down from the ceilings and trying their hardest to claws at your flesh<br \/>\nand jab you full of tetanus, perils made all the more hazardous by the<br \/>\ncocktail of mind altering substances one was typically operating under<br \/>\nthe influence of. In health-and-safety-obsessed Britain, all of these<br \/>\nfeatures combined to make squats feel like a kind of parallel universe<br \/>\nnetherworld, a negative image of society at large, a faintly nightmarish<br \/>\n escape from the sanitized, regulated, market-force-driven realities of<br \/>\nlife.<\/p>\n<p>Often, just as ominous as the ambience was the human landscape.<br \/>\nAnarchy hovered at the edges of any squat party worth its salt,<br \/>\nconstantly threatening to close in and strangle all the fun. Not only<br \/>\nwere there any number of rogue opportunists, rip-off artists, and<br \/>\npredatory-minded fuckheads skulking around in the darkness but it wasn\u2019t<br \/>\n uncommon to see squats degenerate into sordid carnivals of debauchery<br \/>\nby night\u2019s end, half crack-house, half-shooting gallery. No big deal,<br \/>\nright? But there were also frequently a lot of children around, and<br \/>\nthose children were doing things no father, not even Mr.<br \/>\nMillwall-Supporter H. ASBO himself, would be keen on knowing his<br \/>\noffspring were doing. I remember vividly sitting in a sweaty, steaming<br \/>\nheap on the floor during a comedown and feeling my all my illusions of a<br \/>\n benevolent order in the universe collapsing as I watched a kid, no<br \/>\nolder than twelve, smoking crack with a few older boys.<\/p>\n<p>But \u201canything goes\u201d meant anything went, whether you found that<br \/>\nmorally distasteful or not. And, indeed, there was a sense of having<br \/>\nchecked your membership in society at the door, of having entered into a<br \/>\n space where law and order, as conceived of and enforced by the state,<br \/>\nwere suspended. (Recently, in Rome, I was caught in a riot and there was<br \/>\n the same vertiginous feeling of the safety net having been taken away,<br \/>\nthat anything was suddenly permissible.) The playing field having been<br \/>\nleveled, the referees sent off, the tug-of-war between light and<br \/>\ndarkness was free to take place all around you without interference, and<br \/>\n the only force capable of counterbalancing the threat of chaos was<br \/>\nsomething coming from within the partiers themselves, some instinct that<br \/>\n had nothing to do with what authority figures were telling you, on pain<br \/>\n of imprisonment, to do. It was freedom at its most unadulterated.<br \/>\nSelf-regulating autonomy. Of course, this freedom carried risk. But the<br \/>\npotential for things to go catastrophically wrong \u2013 a very real<br \/>\npotential, as I learned when I was mugged at a squat \u2013 was, for me, what<br \/>\n invested squat parties with an almost mystical potency. This lurking<br \/>\ndanger made it all the more awesome (in the traditional sense) to see<br \/>\nhow often, against the odds any moderately realistic student of human<br \/>\nnature would predict, a kind of tribal warmth and closeness \u2014 cemented, I<br \/>\n think, by that fact that you were all dancing together and experiencing<br \/>\n the ongoing narrative of the music in lockstep, achieving trancelike<br \/>\nstates of consciousness inaccessible under the circumstances of everyday<br \/>\n life \u2013 prevailed over the dark side. Some might be tempted to chalk up<br \/>\nthis communal glow to drugs, and they certainly had a role, but I don\u2019t<br \/>\nthink the use of substances invalidates the transcendent, sometimes<br \/>\nquasi-religious nature of the experience of stomping around, along with<br \/>\nyour fellow man, for hours and hours on end in the belly of a massive<br \/>\npost-industrial dungeon\/cathedral and not caring one bit how much you<br \/>\nlooked like a fuckwit.<\/p>\n<p>The fact is, partiers entered squats as strangers and left as<br \/>\nsomething quite a lot more intimate. And the beautiful paradox<br \/>\nunderlying this transformation was that we\u2019d fled to these decomposing<br \/>\nrelics of the industrial age to escape humanity, only to find a purer<br \/>\nway of reconnecting with it \u2013 on own terms, not those dictated by<br \/>\ncorporations or governments. In this sense, squat parties were the<br \/>\nultimate reclamation projects, places in which to take back what the<br \/>\nrelentless, stultifying assault of advertising and social conditioning<br \/>\nhad deadened in us. And what better symbol of that reclamation than to<br \/>\ninvade an abandoned warehouse, a sad casualty of progress, and resurrect<br \/>\n it for a night or two, reanimating a dead shell of concrete and steel<br \/>\nwith the heat of bodies moving in unison to music coaxed by human hands<br \/>\nfrom cold unfeeling machines?<\/p>\n<p>Undoubtedly, a lot of this will sound to English readers like typical<br \/>\n Yankee gushing. And I\u2019ll admit that I\u2019m probably guilty of<br \/>\nromanticizing the shit out of squat parties. That\u2019s why, incidentally, I<br \/>\n don\u2019t want to go to any now and risk sullying my memories of the scene<br \/>\nby seeing it through jaundiced, 30-year old eyes. On the other hand, I<br \/>\nrefuse to apologize if I come off as overblown. I think I revere squat<br \/>\nparties as I do largely because they got to the heart of something I\u2019d<br \/>\nbeen looking for all my life and have ever since, but have yet to<br \/>\nrecapture and fear I never will.<\/p>\n<p>I understand squat parties have become much more bourgeois affairs<br \/>\nthan I remember them being. It makes me feel nice and smug to think I<br \/>\ngot in on the action before it was flooded by hipsters in expensively<br \/>\ntatty clothes and ironic facial hair; before, like everything, squat<br \/>\nparties became a kind of imitation of themselves, clones of clones,<br \/>\ngenetically degrading over the generations into weak rehash tea.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, I\u2019ve no idea if squat parties have become watered down or<br \/>\nnot, but how can I believe otherwise? Because there\u2019s little doubt in my<br \/>\n mind that those who were squat-rocking in, say, the eighties, think<br \/>\nthey\u2019ve got the monopoly on the authentic free party. If anything, this<br \/>\nattitude of possessiveness, which at first blush might seem a type of<br \/>\nsnobbery, is a measure of the singularity of free partying \u2013 it\u2019s such<br \/>\nan immersive, intensely personal adventure that it\u2019s somehow offensive<br \/>\nto think others, five or ten years later, might be experiencing the same<br \/>\n thing.<\/p>\n<p>But maybe that\u2019s what made \u2014 and for all I know, still makes \u2014 squat<br \/>\npartying what it was: no matter when it was a part of your life, it was<br \/>\nyours. It presented a doorway you stepped through into a darkness where<br \/>\nyou ended up finding yourself, a frightening, alien place where it<br \/>\nturned out you\u2019d belonged all along.<\/p>\n<p>\u2013 Marc Mewshaw, London, 2011<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>30 tracks each for 3 mixes to celebrate the TB-303, the legendary synth that launched the acid sound; this mix goes back to the original 90&#8217;s acid techno vibe with an all-vinyl selection of tracks from Richie Hawtin, Hardfloor, DJ Misjah, Underground Resistance, Chris Liberator, D.A.V.E. the Drummer, Frankie Bones and many many more<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[225,11],"class_list":["post-4745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mixes","tag-30x3","tag-acid"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonicrampage.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonicrampage.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonicrampage.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonicrampage.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonicrampage.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4745"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/sonicrampage.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4745\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5979,"href":"https:\/\/sonicrampage.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4745\/revisions\/5979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonicrampage.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonicrampage.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonicrampage.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}