Jamie C – SUF Projects 015 (SUF Projects)

Jamie C’s Shitbag is a monster tune, one of my favourites in recent years, but I have to admit I wasn’t too fond of the follow up, SUF Projects 010, which felt a wee bit ponderous by comparison. Now, after a stonking remix of Chemical Generation for Acid Test, he’s back with a gleaming newie on SUF Projects and is once more fleet of foot and nimble of finger, producing a bit of a bloody classic in the process. The A-side, Bakers Butchers is where it’s at for me, with two, maybe three acid lines blasting away so sharp they might as well be wielding flick knives, and a filmic vocal sample that should get all you sci-fi acid heads moist with desire. More to the point, it rocks like a bastard. Totally essential.

Get it from:  909
Jamie C Soundcloud

Aaron Noseday – Aaron Toolsday EP (Lord Cal)

Aaron Noseday is the alias of Thomas Collard, a Belgian Acid fiend whose own label Lord Cal  specialises in unpredictable 303 experimentation, equal parts Mike Dred and SUF. The six tracks on this latest EP collude to create a formidable statement of intent.

A bruising, atonal six-minute 303 workout, A1 kicks us off by shearing away Acid Techno’s latent funk and repositioning the TB as a weapon of brute force, teaming it with thundering, tribal drums.  One Interlude later, the second proper track A2 unleashes rubbery gabba drums which underpin pretty keys and all manner of maelstrom-like noise. Somebody belches and again that stentorian drum starts up  for the set’s longest and most idiosyncratic track, B. You wouldn’t call it a beat – it’s a pounding, and around it orbit all manner of queasy disorientating noises. Fans of Rephlex, Planet Mu, or  hard uncompromising Acid, you might just want to check this out.

Lord Cal on Facebook

Rene Reiter, Black.Art, Maxx – Carbon Audio 05 (Carbon Audio)

Defqon 3 is a tale of rising panic, with a subterranean, echo-soaked kick supplemented by siren motifs and a truly terrifying central riff. There is an epic, slowly unfolding quality to it as well. Imagine a really hard-assed remix of a Sabres of Paradise tune circa 1996 and you get the idea.

Defqon 5, meanwhile, is a showstopper, up there with the best of the year. A magnesium flare, a wired and wide-eyed blast of utter madness, it starts hard and fast then around the halfway mark throws off its kimono and with a synthesised scream goes bonkers, chucking riffs around and unleashing some of the best and most brutal acid known to man. It’s the kind of track that makes you grin; that makes you do that whoosh thing with your mouth; that reminds why you got into Acid Techno in the first place.

Over to next door, and if there was an exact point where industrial techno met the wide-eyed riff-frenzy of acid techno, Black.Art’s Rust would be it, a lovely old-school flavour to this track. With Maxx and Rene Reiter’s VD galloping us past the finish line for what is an exceptional, nay, essential release.

Release date: August 1, 2013

Carbon Audio online

Zenith Distribution page (including samples to download)

Champion Breaks – Sex, Drugs & Love EP (Kut Off)

“You know how to get a girl going,” says the vocal for Sex on the Decks, the EP’s opener. Held fast by the kind of bassline from which speaker cones run terrified and screaming, breakbeats attack like fleetfooted assassins until after a minute or so, when the 303s start up and the whole thing fireworks into a kind of joyous, controlled pandemonium.

Therein lies the appeal of the Champion Breaks sound. It’s the rawboned attack of old skool breaks – that first-heard smiley, rushy feeling – meeting the relentless drive and funk of 303. It’s hectic, man. It’s wired on sulphate and wide-eyed with its own potential and it springs off cackling in unexpected directions.

So on Love Me Always, a fidgety acid line and sampled vocals do the hard work, whereas Music For Drugs plays with a more traditional-sounding jungle bassline, lashed by a high-pitched, squirly 303. Where is the sound going? You’re never quite sure. What’s it like? It’s like being on a bus that’s been hijacked by killer dolls on nitrous oxide. Like that.

And there’s more where this came from. In a former life, Mr Champion Breaks himself tore it up as a DJ/producer in Acid Techno, but for the last three years he’s tinkered to refine the project he’s calling ‘the future (pirate) sound of London’, or Acid Breaks for short. Infused with a sense of humour to match the jaw-clenching propulsion of the tunes, the project’s wellspring is the website, here, where Breaks’ guiding philosophy harks back to the freethinking optimism of rave (its principles not dissimilar to System Rejects, in fact) and you can download plenty of tracks for free.

Meanwhile there’s a supremely caffeinated and justly popular label showcase mix on Soundcloud (called, pleasingly, It’s Intelligent… It’s Acid Breaks… And It’s Still F**king ‘Avin It!) to which you’ll find the link below, plus Breaks’ remix of Oscar G’s Twisted by Nature can be found here. As the Breaks maxim goes, ‘It’s all about 303 acid lines, the old-skool hardcore breaks, and throbbing Reece bass to give you endless thrills!’

Get it here:  Juno Download

Champion Breaks Facebook.

Austin Corrosive, Tassid, OB1, MK303 – System Rejects 01 (System Rejects)

System Rejects is a new label, an “autonomous collective of techno artists and producers” united by a “passion for stomping techno music and  freethinking nonconformism,” which are all things we like here at Rabbits. The stomping techno, the freethinking, the nonconformism –bring it on, we say. What’s more, the label’s founders are none other than Austin Corrosive, Tassid, OB1 and MK 303, who you’ll be  familiar with – or you bloody well should be, at least – by virtue of their considerable talents at making kick-ass Acid Techno.

System Rejects 01, then, and slice my still-beating heart from my chest if it’s not an absolute cracker of a release. The Rejects all take a turn and first off is Austin Corrosive’s Nothing, where thuggish declamatory vocals speed up and slow down before dropping out completely and introducing epic acid of nuclear winter proportions. Meanwhile things get dirty  for Tassid’s Eat Your Own Face, a methylated-spirit-drinking tune, with echo-strewn riffs bouncing off another in their bid to escape an insistent high-pitched siren. The word I’m looking for is ‘cavernous’.

Next, and I’ve talked before about OB1‘s almost surgical precision with the old 303. Here on Factory Grade, he layers them across a patchwork of ravey noises then whips them onto a lithe, funky climax. I think it’s one of the best things he’s ever done.

On a similar high is Matt Knight aka MK303, whose Three Oh Three is very, very phat indeed, letting no-nonsense drums do the heavy lifting while a deceptively strolling bassline is attacked by high-pitched acid lines wielding razor-sharp tomahawks.

So. All good then. Frankly, all brilliant. The ever-so-slightly bad news – especially if you’re a digital Doris like me – is that System Rejects are sticking to their principles of keeping the releases strictly limited and vinyl-only, which means that… well, it means that they’re strictly limited and vinyl-only. You will want these tunes. You will want them a lot. Good luck with that.

Go to System Rejects’ website here.

Listen to the tunes here:

Deuperium – Telemetry EP (Slime Recordings)

Late night,  early morning – who can tell? – Deuperium’s superb Telemetry EP makes a bid to colonise both. The brainchild of Northwich-based producer Matthew Lloyd – his debut, in fact – it’s an EP boasting album dynamics: a four-tracker that makes complete – arguably even more – sense when taken together.

Most EPs, for example, your common-or-garden EPs, would start with Why Not? with its 120 beats-per-minute, bossy, finger-wagging acid and electro stylings. This, after all, is the one you’d choose if you were browsing for play-out material on Beatport.

Not Deuperium. Lloyd is playing the long game, and Telemetry kicks off with Together, a distant cousin of Orbital’s The Box that triggers all kinds of minor-key loveliness, as though John Carpenter had composed an unused love theme for Escape From New York. Squiggles of acid gradually toughen up as the track progress, before it slides into Galaxy News, a gorgeous, drifting dream of a track that, if anything, is even more reflective.

And then – and only then – just when you’re in the mood for something a bit more hip-swinging, do you get Why Not?, and it’s great, and it’s followed by XOX Acid, which works the 303 in a downtempo Melbourne-sounding acid workout to see us to the door.

In all, this is a great release for Slime and, like I say, full marks for that track sequencing, which makes this a genuinely rewarding listen in its entirety. Here’s hoping an album is in the works.

Get it here: Juno Download

MK303 – Circuit Protocol 006 (Circuit Protocol)

New on Circuit Protocol comes this from Matt Knight, aka MK303, and it’s a cracker. Maniacs on bongos kick off Parallel Universe, a riff kicks in and it’s a good riff, it’s a livable riff, but what sets MK303 productions apart is his readiness to take it to the next level, and sure enough he does that here – and how. A cloud of dust heralds the arrival of the 303, which bosses the song from good to brilliant. Another one appears and we’re talking some serious hed-melting, psychedelic shit here, completely nuts and irresistibly funky.

Risky Neural Stimulant at first appears to be a more laidback venture than Parallel Universe, until it really gets going. Imagine the bassline to I Feel Love on steroids and you’ve got the picture here. It fair thumps along, with intertwining 303s slithering between skyscraping kickdrum. In short, these are two absolutely storming tunes and this EP comes highly recommended.

Get it here: 303 Acid Techno

Steve Mills, Sterling Moss, Mobile Dogwash, Jack Wax – Braingravy 04 (Braingravy)

With its stellar line-up of Moss, Mills, Dogwash and Wax, Braingravy 4 always promised great things, and lo! Great things have come to pass.

Ride the Snake by Sterling Moss and Steve Mills leads off, and there is indeed something slithering about it – like a vast, mutated alligator feeding off luckless sewer workers beneath the city streets. Accordingly the track gets more and more corpulent, bottoms out to a cavernous, echo-strewn breakdown and then treats you to a delayed drop that, when it comes – when it eventually comes – tears off the back of your head. And that’s a good thing.

With a Parsnip is business as usual for Dogwash. i.e it rocks like a bastard. And how do they get those acid lines so damn filthy? After that, Burnout, from Jack Wax drops the old-school acid, 303 that couldn’t be more different from Dogwash if it tried. In terms of the EP it’s a brilliant change of pace, and hats off for that, while as far as the track itself goes, I’ve got one word: whoosh. It’s a builder, a grower. The kind of tune that like maggots festering beneath an aluminium cranial insert, will gradually burrow its way into your brain. And that, again, is a good thing.

Get it from: Juno Download

Hear it:

OB1 – SUF Projects 012 (SUF Projects)

New from OB1, aka Olly Berry, comes this double-drop from SUF Projects, and it’s the business. As ever, Berry delivers a commanding, dirty-but-funky 303 experience, announced with a rush of far-off sirens and the main vocal line ‘Basic Chemistry’,  a sample from Breaking Bad. It’s used brilliantly here, too; rather than simply lift it, Berry’s attacked it with a pair of garden shears, buried it in the garden for a week, then exhumed it*, so it’s got a real distorted, decayed sound, and when the track breaks down at 2.50 into an extended sample it’s as though we’re hearing it from within the depths of a nightmare trip. Fantastisch!

Clearly Berry’s been caning the Breaking Bad, cos the flip The One Who Knocks rolls out a second quote, this one with an even more fearful edge to it. Pair it with a more ravey, drum and bass vibe and this is choice material. So choice that there’s very little to choose between this and Basic Chemistry, but if you forced me to choose, if you really forced, like, if you threatened to take away my eyeholes, then I’d pick The One Who Knocks.

Get it: 909 London

Hear it:

* Because that’s how you achieve that effect, right?

Acid Kazuals, Mobile Dogwash – Chase Yer Tail 05 (CYTD005)

Eyedropper from Acid Kazuals is an absolutely killer track, the whole thing teetering on the edge of crazy distortion, much like the narrator of the tale around which it’s built, who’s out for a walk when a tripping guy squirts an eyedropper full of acid – twenty or thirty hits’ worth, he reckons – into his mouth. “I realised I was in trouble,” he says, with commendable understatement, and the nightmare begins, soundtrack, this: acid like chainsaws, filthy riffs scuffing in the background, the whole thing seething with the ominous, something’s-about-to-go-horribly-wrong feel of The Gift. Miss it at your peril.

Next up is Make People Run by Mobile Dogwash vs Steve Getz , and it’s another scary sample, this one from Dexter (I think), underpinned by metallic 90s techno and of course a patented Dogwash acid line. It’s surpassed by the next track, Git Yer Freak On, mainly by virtue of those obese peak-time chords that slice through the second half of the tune. Lastly Total Shitstorm is Dogwash seen through the prism of vintage Stay Up Forever. Imagine any tune by Magnum Force torn apart by a pack of dogs and reassembled by silent children with no faces. Yeah, that evil. And then, just when you think you have the measure of it, a murderous acid line appears and the sky tears open. It’s a barnstorming end to yet another essential Chase Yer Tail release.

Get it from: 909 London