Analogue aces Stefan Nelson and Greg Young, sometimes collectively known as Virus, have revisited their past and brought it into the present. Their latest work, The Bubblebaby Experience, features the main genre of their earliest release, Analogue, but the construction and execution of the music continues a trend from their last album Odd. Nelson and Young return to acid house on The Bubblebaby Experience, while continuing forward in the progression of their sound.
Two different sounds together create this genre called acid house. "Acid" refers to the squelching sounds, drawn out or chopped into various length notes or beats, creating the melodies. The house rhythm delivers the driving beat and is built with "real" percussion sounds (hi hats, snares, cymbals, bass drum, even clapping) and piano riffs, though sometimes the latter reveal a synthesizer instead of a baby grand. Every analogue sound imaginable and even the unfathomable are used throughout the album. "Sounds" fails to describe their musical quality and melodic use, but rather tries to communicate their diversity. A creative example of this diversity is an undecipherable voice sample in the track "VCO" that is manipulated and looped into the score as notes.
Each song begins with a single rhythm, sometimes the bass line. Then the song progresses by adding more rhythms, one at a time. Multiple rhythms and a driving bass line provide the songs with high energy. The energy climaxes with all the rhythms present. Then the song ends with a single rhythm, quicker than it began.
With all the rhythms you would expect them to run together and the songs to sound cluttered, but they don't. The whole sound is very clean and has great clarity. I believe this begins with the individual beats. Analogue's beats are sometimes distorted, sounding frayed at the beginning and end, causing them to run together. Odd and The Bubblebaby Experience are characterized as having very accentuated beats and notes where the beginning and end of each is apparent. This clean execution of all the beats makes for great clarity as the beats are placed together to form rhythms. The BubbleBaby Experience shows a progression in sound being constructed like the recent Odd.
The BubbleBaby Experience contains some outstanding individual tracks. The track "The Big Blue" is tentatively to be released on 12" vinyl and has the most complex melody on the album. It also best demonstrates the scope of acid sounds. My favorite is the title track where the beat and rhythms are pounding at 188 bpm but the melody is played slowly, at half that speed. With the rhythms so fast and overwhelming and the dual tempo stretching your listening ability, this track has a mind-numbing trance-like effect.
This album is well-produced techno by two outstanding artists. Nelson and Young have continued to create acid house and kept it current by applying their progressing sound.
