This tape was made for me in March of 1993 by my friend Carlos, who used to DJ at the Limelight under the name DJ Tera or DJ Teras. This is the second tape he made me and there's an earlier one, an acid house tape I can't find right now which I must have listened to a thousand times at least. In fact, that earlier tape was the influence for this whole project. This tape is pretty damn good, too.
Entitled "303 Unlimited", this is the kind of techno we were listening to at the time, when Carlos was working at Sonic Groove records and they were throwing huge raves in warehouses and roller skating rinks around the NY metro area.
It's easy to make fun of it. It's full of outer space noises, or places where the drum machines drop out and a man says, "It's getting strange. I can feel it ... all around us now", which one is supposed to take as a drug reference. The beat on this tape is relentless. You kind of have to be on drugs to listen to the whole thing. Another problem, listening to this tape in 2009, is that, of course, none of these sounds are fresh anymore. Ubiquity has kind of killed this period of techno. Its sonic palette was borrowed by a later form of intensely bad rave music, and its instruments were all recreated as plugins for every piece of music-making software.
But techno is cool. It's music that sounds like it was made by a lonely dude at a basement, but it's listened to at parties. Even the DJs are anonymous, hiding unseen in a DJ booth and not using their real names. It's the opposite dynamic to a rock concert - here the music's fans are the debauched ones.
That lonely dude in the basement (actually there's no need for a basement, since no accoustic instruments are used, you can just listen to your synths with headphones) is bound by formal constraints of the moment, and one song flows into the next. It takes real funkiness to stand out (Side A, at about 37:20). It takes a lot of restraint not to get very cheesy.
Also, I need to point out Carlos's turntable mixing. It is impossible, without knowing the individual tracks that make up this recording, to precisely detect any place where one track ends and another track begins.
The title of the tape refers to the Roland TB 303 Bassline, a small sliver plastic bass synthesizer that was part of Roland's amazing 1980s synthesizer range, which shaped the sound of dance and rap music.
