Paranoid Experience

Under his own name and under aliases like Terrace, Stefan Robbers was one of the most vital innovators in the first wave of European techno — and has three decades of sterling work under his belt. But for all his finesse, he always made sure he kept in touch with the most fundamental verities of the dancefloor, and key to that has been his work with Harold De Kinderen as Acid Junkies. As the name suggests, AJs’ music is relentless acid house. Simple, distorted drum patterns with a four to the floor kick and the eternal gurgling, swooping, whooping and snarling of the Roland TB-303 Bassline synth… The real keystone tracks here are the live ones, where you get the sense of the warping of those 303 riffs happening in real time — the complexity of the timbre and the hypnotic minimalism of the riffs creating powerful alterations of physiological and mental states in the moment. It’s ecstatic, not in the purely euphoric sense of the word but in the original Greek sense of “ekstasis” or stepping outside the self — this is music that can dissolve the ego and truly induce trance states.