We Call It Acid by Organ Donors and A*S*Y*S

This slightly truncated version of the song is the best I can find on youtube, although you can hear the whole thing on spotify. (https://open.spotify.com/album/2PssKYtcCHrzs4xI5yM7pb)

This is another song that reinforces my central premise; to me, a year ago, this was a fairly typical acid techno song, of the type that I was familiar with from the rest of A*S*Y*S's output.  Of course, I was wrong about that, A*SY*S doesn't do acid techno so much as they do acid trance and hard trance.  Discogs calls this song electro house, and the youtube description calls it subground.

EDM is over-split and over-categorized.  Nobody really cares all that much about the finer distinctions between the styles.  And they're too finely defined if the same song gets categorized differently in different venues, or—as happens in the youtube comments section of a lot of these—people argue endlessly about what exactly it it.  Personally, I find that I like the trance structure with build-ups and drops, quite a lot, and I like the really hard sounds of hardtrance and some of the hardstyle when it isn't caricaturish and noise.  I'd probably find plenty to like in hardcore or gabber if I got into it, although given how much hardtrance and before that hardstyle blew up my collection, I'm reluctant to explore it much. (And my limited exposure so far hasn't been all that promising.)

I might even like a lot of British hard house.

But I don't worry too much about genre labels.  If some hard house makes it's way in, I hardly even notice, much less complain.  If some regular trance with boosted bass makes its way in and doesn't sound out of place, I don't care.  My DJ set mixes are mostly hard trance and acid trance, but feature a fair number of early hardstyle songs, acid techno songs, and even a few classic trance songs and subground songs here and there.

In fact, although I keep saying that I'm not really in collection mode right now, I do still keep finding more stuff.  I recently got a bunch more DuMonde tracks (which is funny; they were on my radar from the very beginning, but I put them on the back burner until just now) and I've filled up a few corners with Max Savietto (and his various aliases) stuff, including some new "Loop Hole" remixes from 2012 and a whole new collaboration that I'd missed, Evergray.  I earlier got a fair number of tracks from Resonate: The Brutal Sound of Hard Trance which was a British collection.  There's seven such collections, and I only did a cursory scan of the first one.  This collection says hard trance, but according to most, it straddles a line between hard trance and hard house a lot of the time.

Loco (Black Mix) by DJ Scot Project & A*S*Y*S

Ultra prolific artist (and especially remixer) joins forces with fellow German and pretty prolific himself Frank Ellrich, using his best known alias, A*S*Y*S to release this one-off track.

Project is Frank Zenker, and like I said, he's fairly prolific as an artist, but especially prolific as a remixer, and his remix style almost defined hardtrance, at least after the millennial rollover.  Frank Ellrich, on the other hand, works under more nom de plumes, and although he does a fair bit of remixing too, he's more of an artist, I think.  His best-known work is as A*S*Y*S, but the best known work of A*S*Y*S is when it was a duo; with Kai Franz (Kai Tracid).  Franz later split and went and did more of his own thing (including getting into running a yoga fitness center for a few years, apparently—but he was also extremely prolific under a variety of names throughout the 90s and 00s—and Ellrich retained the name, but he released stuff under his own name too.

Arguably this isn't really hardtrance, and some newer A*S*Y*S stuff is veering into hardstyle and subground, and other more "derived" electronic music genres.  I'd actually call this particular song probably a subground song, actually.

But I don't really get into overly proscriptive genre splitting, as I've said many times here before, of course.  And my "hardtrance" collection does include some "regular" or progressive trance here and there, some early hardstyle, some trancy subground, and various acid trance and even acid techno songs.  I think the genre splitting in EDM is out of control.  Most of this stuff doesn't justify being called a different "genre" really.  Sure, it can sound a little bit different.  But Def Leppard sounds different from Motley Crue.  Is anyone really going to say that they're different genres of music, as opposed to two bands that have their own approach to the same genre?

Right?

 

Acid Nightmare by A*S*Y*S*

There are a number of metrics one could use to determine favorite songs.  How often do you come back to it over the years?  How many versions of it do you have?  Despite the fact that you've got well over 3,000 songs on your phone, which are the ones that you deliberately seek out the most?

By any of those metrics, one song which is a completely different kind of electronic music than any that I've shown here on this blog yet, has to be one of my favorite songs of all time; "Acid Nightmare" by A*S*Y*S*.  Along with the Pump Panel Reconstruction remix of New Order's "Confusion" I think this is some of the most iconic samples of acid that you can hear.  Sampling a bit of the Nightmare on Elm Street soundtrack, the drop into a tortured 303 bass line from that is just freakin' incredible (at 3:10).

Some of the remixes out there make it somewhat less acid and more trance, but given that Kai Tracid was one of the early associates of A*S*Y*S* and his nom de plume is made by jamming together the words trance and acid, that's perhaps not too surprising.

Anyway, like I said, this is a far cry from the kind of stuff that I normally post on this blog, but my electronic music tastes do tend to be somewhat esoteric.  I like the purity of some techno, trance and other related genres, although they do tend sometimes to get monotonous over time.  The later acid stuff, like A*S*Y*S* is really hard and intense, though—especially compared to early acid house like Dr. Phibes or Phuture.