I’ve been waiting years for someone else to repeat the original Chicago manifesto that acid wasn’t just about twiddling a TB 303. Now Gerald Simpson has come out as he explains the sound of his remarkable new album which, although created using two laptops and a DJ mixer, sounds like it could’ve been created in Phuture’s basement 20 years ago. The man responsible for ‘Voodoo Ray’, who now resides in Berlin, describes the sound as ‘proto acid’, or ‘how I feel house/techno music would have sounded if the whole rave thing hadn’t happened in England’. Hence the 24 tracks tracks effortlessly steer from bass-heavy funk-throbbers like the opening ‘Marching Powder’ and ‘Xray’ to corruscating jack-ups of ‘Voltar’, taking in ghostly house vamps like ‘Monday’ in the process. The ‘Smokebelch’-recalling ‘Feel The Heat’ and jazzy ‘Sweet You’ show that one of the most important ingredients in this music was soul and emotion. As we start to mark over 20 years of this music, Gerald has appeared again to make one of its defining statements.
5 Out Of 5
Reviewed By: Kris Needs
