Acid House

Irvine Welsh has announced that he is working on an acid house album.

Speaking to the Scottish Sun, the 60-year-old Scottish novelist and playwright revealed that the release will be a "counterblast to joyless young artists" making music today.

The Trainspotting author said: "It’s not really banging, full-on mad stuff, but it’s a lot of classic acid house — swirling effects and noises and boomy basslines. Some of it is pretty groovy."

Online retailers Dorothy have listed a poster which maps out the history of rave music and culture on the circuit board of a 303 bass synthesizer.

Priced at £35, the new print celebrates over 900 DJs, clubs, musicians, free parties, sound systems, record labels, radio stations and fanzines that it considers pivotal to the movement.

808 State have announced that they will be going on tour this year to mark their 30th anniversary.

The pioneering acid house group formed in Manchester in 1987, releasing their debut LP ‘Newbuild’ in 1988. They have gone on to release six albums, with a seventh currently in the works. 808 State: 30 Live will see the outfit’s two founding members Graham Massey and Andrew Barker embarking on a nine date tour across the UK in November and December this year.

Trainspotting writer Irvine Welsh is penning a new TV series, dubbed Ibiza87, that will tell the story of the birth of acid house and the rave movement.

Billed as the missing link between "24-hour Party People and Straight Outta Compton", the series has also been written by award-winning screenwriter Dean Cavanagh.

One of the great characters in global electronic music, Mr C is a visionary, artist, actor and activist. He’s been prominent in the underground for 30 years now — famously subverting the mainstream when rapping “Es are good” on prime-time telly when part of chart-topping act The Shamen — and has inspired and helped countless people with their careers in music, and rocked literally thousands of dancefloors. 

Carl Cox and Derrick May are amongst a host of big name musicians set to feature in a new documentary about the rise of acid house.

They Call It Acid collects archive rave footage and interviews with key players to plot "the development of House Music from its stripped down beginnings in Chicago to the big anthems of the outdoor raves in 1989," according to the film's website.

Earl Smith, known to the world as DJ Spank-Spank and a founding member of acid house group Phuture, has died.

The cause of death is unknown, although Smith did suffer a stroke back in May this year. 

As part of Chicago trio Phuture, alongside DJ Pierre and Herb J, Smith is credited with inventing acid house. In 1987, the outfit released 'Acid Tracks', the first house record to feature the Roland TB-303, the synth which defined the sound of the genre.

Still brimming with the enthusiasm of a teenager who witnessed acid house's explosion, Justin Robertson's second album as Deadstock 33s is a dark, psychedelic voyage through the mind of a man who's continually been at the forefront of electronic music's most revolutionary moments. 

DJ Mag has nabbed an exclusive stream of Justin Robertson's brand-new LP for DJ Mag readers — plus read this month's magazine feature below. 

Berlin-based Swedish duo Genius of Time have made 'Acid 01' available as a free download.

Slow and squidgy, it's a seven-minute-long slice of hypnotic acid recorded in a single take.

The free download comes ahead of Genius of Time's highly anticipated appearance in London this Saturday (29^th November).

Nathaniel Pierre Jones was forever tinkering around with electronic devices and mending watches when he was a kid growing up in Chicago. 

“I just naturally had a curious mind, you know?” he tells DJ Mag. “I wanted to find out what made the watch tick. So I would take broken watches apart, fix them and put them back together. Got very good at it, too. So much so that I was repairing watches at like eight or nine-years-old. Crazy thinking about it now.”