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Today's Chromatic artist interview is with Live on Acid, this duo from Manchester UK have a raw and raucous acid sound, so ahead of their 3.03 release “Preaching to the Perverted” we thought we would get the inside track.
Congratulations on the forthcoming release of your album! Can you tell us a little bit about your background and musical influences?
Thanks! We’re Matt and Anthony and have been making music as Live on Acid for about 2 years now. Matt’s background is in synth-based pop and nu-disco / italo-disco influences as well as a good smattering of techno and other scenes. My background is very much from a DJing standpoint from breaks and electro. I think we combine all those influences and flavours into our music, and it has a quite a nice, loose, gritty and under-produced feel to it at the same time as being quite dance-floor focussed.
Where are you from? and do you feel that has a big impact on your sound?
I’m from London and Matt’s from the North East originally, but we both met and live in South Manchester. I think the influence that Manchester and its music scene carry can be heard in our sound. We both went to a night a few years ago in a basement under a bar in the Northern Quarter (I think from memory Funk D’Void was playing) – whenever we’ve been producing Live on Acid records I always think – if I was back in that basement and this track came on what would I want it to do next as a dancer so that’s a huge influence on how we arrange and produce our music.
It’s also a great city with everything going on, but it’s gritty, unpretentious and unpolished but with a real sense of humour - and I think that could describe our music too!
What artists and genres do you rate most right now?
There’s so many that are doing great things at the moment – I’m loving the resurgence of breaks and breakbeats people like Kostas G (a label mate on Hello World) are doing incredible things. Also, Desert Sound Colony’s Holding Hands label seems to be pure gold at the moment – there was a release by Galegos last year that we’ve absolutely hammered. In addition, there’s people like Lauer, Dusky and Kink who are always worth checking out. So much great music out there at the minute! Then at the super-star end of things it’s hard to look past the influence of Bicep and the Chemical Brothers too on trends across electronic music.
How would you describe your sound and has this changed over time?
I think people assume we’re going to be acid-house or harder than our music actually is – from our name, I guess. We think of it far more as ‘electronica’ – whatever that means – we have some really ethereal, musical tracks like Ether or Fragile Minds, other ones that are clearly breaks influenced like M.F.A. and then there are more classic ‘acid’ tracks like Chemical Alley and Hype/Reality. But there are also clear disco, techno and house influences on our other tracks. I guess that melting pot of genres and influences makes it closer to the original spirit of ‘acid house’ than the more modern interpretation of it.
On reflection, I think the sound of our album was what we were always aiming for – we possibly just fell short of it with our first few (unreleased/never to be heard) productions. Since finishing the album we’ve acquired two new synths – a Roland SH-09 and a DinSync RE:303 – those have definitely pushed us in a slightly different direction so we’ve written an (as yet unsigned) EP in the last few months and that has a sound that is definitely ‘us’ but it’s also different to the album – in fact it’s far closer to the promo track People that Hello World Records are giving away on their Bandcamp site as a teaser for our album.
How would you rate the Acid scene right now?
I think it’s going incredibly strongly – you’ve got an upcoming compilation from Fabric by TSHA that is completely acid-themed it has tracks on from Posthuman, Wtchcrft, Galegos etc and is obviously a huge platform for that sound.
You can’t talk about acid and that scene without referencing Posthuman, their LP last year is incredible, and their labels (I ❤ Acid and Balkan) and their I ❤ Acid nights are really championing the scene and people in it.
So, yeah despite the pandemic there’s a real resurgence in that sound – albeit at a tougher and more bass-driven end than where we play
Can you tell us a little bit about how you make tracks? Maybe share a story about how you made something from the LP?
Everything you hear on the LP has come from hardware (with the exception of some of the vocal samples which have often come from YouTube). Matt has gear at his house, and the main studio is in my basement, so usually we are starting from a1-4 bar loop that one of us has created in isolation on drum machines (Analog Rytm or Digitakt) and synths. Then we get together and if we both like it we turn it into a completed track.
It’s very rare that we start from completely nothing and create a track together – the only two examples on the album are Lorem Ipsum and M.F.A.
Lorem Ipsum is the last track that we wrote for the album and came about because we were playing with the Din Sync RE:303 when we’d first got it and just wanted to experiment with it. It’s a super simple beat from the Digitakt (using 707 samples I think) and the bass is the RE:303 but triggered as a synth by the Digitakt rather than using its internal sequencer. Then I wanted a classic radio tuning noise to use on it – you know stations drifting in and out of each other as you turn the dial – so we went to YouTube to find something and instead stumbled across a weird video about odd short-wave radio signals that had been captured and recorded. The very last one on it was thought to be some sort of Chinese intelligence broadcast known as ‘Chinese Robot’ which is a woman reading numbers in a really rhythmic way – that is what you hear on the track. The other bleepy synth (from memory) is the Moog Sirin (again triggered by the Digitakt). That’s all the elements there are – super simple but it’s one of my favourites on the album and so much fun to play live!
We all know that the digital revolution has affected sales, but has it affected creativity?
I’m not sure if it’s stifled ‘sales’ (I think more music than ever is being consumed) it’s stifled income from consumption of it which makes it harder to make a living from it. As to stifling creativity, absolutely not – no one was ever recording anything straight to vinyl or CD so production was still done elsewhere whether to tape, DAT or hard-drive.
What it has done is reduce the barriers to entry so it’s democratisied that (and you don’t even need a label anymore) – this comes with positives and negatives as it has removed a layer of quality control. Then finally what is incredible for creativity is how easy it is to make full tracks on a relatively cheap laptop and something like Ableton Live or Reason. For c.£500 you can make stuff that would have needed a studio in the tens of thousands of pounds to do even 15 years ago. That can only increase access to creating music and therefore increase creativity as a result of that additional access.
Can you tell us what’s next for you?
In the first instance promoting the album and hopefully getting some more gigs off the back of that. Separately to that we’re writing new music and have a finished EP more or less ready to go and we have a couple of remixes that are in the pipeline – including one for Jon Nuccles (Player) which we’re really excited about.
If your readers want to keep track of what we’re doing and when then we are @liveonacid on all social media and you can find the rest of our links from there!
Any wise words to share with our readers?
The track is called Kernkraft 400, the artist is called Zombie Nation.
SALES LINK: HYPERLINK
Artist Social Links: https://twitter.com/LiveOnAcid https://www.facebook.com/liveonacid https://www.instagram.com/liveonacid/ Label Social Links: https://twitter.com/HelloWorldLabel https://www.facebook.com/helloworldrecords https://www.instagram.com/helloworld.records/
