The term pioneer is often used when it really shouldn't be. Many artists write great tracks but there are only a handful of producers that have and continue to make ground-breaking contributions to contemporary music that influence a whole generation of producers.
A Guy Called Gerald has always produced music that's beyond it's time, some call it visionary, others innovative, but however you describe it you won't have heard anything like it before. In 2006, 2 years since re-locating to the nu-musical mecca of Berlin, Gerald presents his latest interpretation of electronic music, 'Proto Acid - The Berlin Sessions' released on Laboratory Instinct.
'Asked to describe the album's sound, Simpson says, "To me it's proto acid; it's how I feel house/techno music would have sounded if the whole rave thing hadn't happened in England. When I was younger, I would go to soul and funk clubs and you could easily mix a techno/house track into your set without spoiling the environment. Could you imagine playing a techno track at an r'n'b club today? Things have splintered and fragmented and floated so far apart that funk seems to have dropped through the cracks. I'm one of those preserved creatures that basically loves to use genres as a palette. So when I say proto acid I'm saying this stuff has direct lineage to Chicago and Detroit in the mid-to-late 80s."
Don't think that, for Simpson, acid's definition is limited to something as obvious as the 303 either. "I find it really interesting how the TB303 has come to be fetishised as an acid machine," he says. "For me, acid was all about the tweaking of synths and riding a groove, you know what I mean? Like, before the masses thought the Transistor Bass machine was a special tool for doing acid house music, I was already bored with it and had moved on to tweaking envelopes on other Roland machinery, so I never really possessed that value for the 303 like everybody else did. I feel like I followed my own path and was inspired by what was going on in Detroit and Chicago but always did my own thing. To me, the new album is acid and acid's a part of everything I do."
www.aguycalledgerald.com
www.laboratoryinstinct.com
