It’s a quirk of music history that the Roland TB-303 synthesizer, the machine that spawned the many-legged beast we call electronic music, was a commercial failure. Even quirkier is the fact that, of the mere 10,000 made, one of them reached Dunblane—an unassuming Scottish town just outside Stirling—where it was claimed by a soon-to-be reformed punk who went by the name Egebamyasi.
Today, Egebamyasi (“Mr Egg” to friends) is known as Scotland’s godfather of acid house. His name, taken from krautrock band Can’s third album, speaks to acid’s aesthetic: A bit eggy (read: primal, playful, inventive) and, as they say in Scotland, a bit bammy (“bam” means someone with a taste for chaos). It also speaks to the proverbial punch the 303 represented for the nascent producer—its sound so unique it was impossible to ignore—when Egebamyasi started toying with it in 1984.
“It’s as classic a punk story as any other,” he says. In the early ‘80s, Ege’s music career was at an impasse. He had picked up the bass guitar a few years prior, hacking and grinding away at it until he gleaned a passable punk rock sound, before forming The Fakes with school friend Johnny McGuire, guitarist Mairi Ross, and drummer Brian Kemp. The caustic post-punk foursome managed one release, the Production EP on Deep Cuts Records, before tragedy struck when Brian was killed on his bicycle. The Fakes never looked for another drummer. Egebamyasi found himself suddenly bandless, floating about Stirling’s music circuit.
The last band he played with was The Mississippi Groovers. “We were rehearsing just outside Dunblane. There was a complex of a few bands in these cottages,” he says. “I went to visit one of the guys I knew in one of the other rooms and the 303 was there—this wee silver box that somehow attracted me.” Luckily for Egebamyasi, the band wasn’t using it, and he was permitted to borrow the mystifying machine. “Not knowing how to play the bass guitar, it was a bit like not knowing how to use the 303,” he says. “You just switched it on and were pressing buttons and funneling knobs to try and get sounds out of it long before you actually knew how to play it.”
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The overwhelming feeling he remembers from those early days is frustration: “I probably felt like smashing it a few times,” he says. More than once, he fell victim to a fatal glitch, where the 303 scrambled bassline patterns set down on its memory card whenever its battery ran dry. “The amount of basslines over the years that got lost because of the battery issue!” he laments. “You’re left with random notes and pitches. That’s potentially how a lot of the fucked-up acid basslines were used.” What kept Egebamyasi coming back, rather than throwing the machine against the wall? “The sound,” he says. “It was such a unique sound.”
That sound initially was less acid and more electro, with “normal basslines” akin to those played by a live band. “When the machine was made, it was an accompaniment for individuals and bands who didn’t have a bass player,” he says. “It was probably too electronic for the purposes it was built for—the fact that it had this toppy electric sound, but not as good as an electric guitar.” It was only later, once Egebamyasi unlocked the machine’s potential, that acid’s bends, wobbles, and slides emerged. “The good thing about the 303 is you can press anything, and it works. Most things work as an acid bassline. But I tend to be a bit more anal about it,” he says. “The amount of basslines I discard must be hundreds and hundreds. You’re looking for this ultimate bassline.”
Egebamyasi didn’t stay solo for long. Within a year, he was joined by a ragtag troupe of Stirlingers, who together devised a surreal spectacle that bordered on performance art. Egebamyasi credits the avant-garde imaginations of Can and Captain Beefheart as key influences on the group’s visuals. He recalls jumping about onstage wearing a gimp mask. Martin,another group member, constructed a giant plaster penis that sprayed shaving foam. “It’s going to sound really funny, but Martin wanted to be a priest,” says Egebamyasi. “One of his things was he wanted to be whipped on a cross, so he got whipped on a cross. It was all a kind of visual delight.”
The first Egebamyasi release came in 1986 on Survival Records—a hi-NRG electro number called “Circumstances,” the dizzying bassline of which recalled Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.” But it would be another couple of years before Egebamyasi discovered that the weird electronic sounds he was producing weren’t an isolated fluke, but part of a wider musical revolution. As he tweaked basslines from his Stirling flat, acid heads were communing en masse across the UK, attaching themselves to the New Age traveler’s movement with a free-spirited fervor not seen since 1969’s flower children. In tandem with the 303’s synthetic purrs, the Second Summer of Love would be soundtracked by the warped futurism of acid house.
It was via John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 show that other acid house makers filtered into Egebamyasi’s ears. Maurice’s “This Is Acid” first turned his head, and later Sleezy D’s “I’ve Lost Control” and Bam Bam’s “Where’s Your Child?” “For me, those are the two ultimate acid tracks of their time,” he says. “If there was a Martian that came down to Earth and said, ‘Play me the definitive acid house song,’ it would need to be ‘I’ve Lost Control.’ That has all the elements.” Egebamyasi found himself drawn in by the genre’s otherworldly bleeps and chirps. “The frequencies, the silliness, the darkness of the basslines,” he says. “It was just so different.”
By this point, Egebamyasi had departed from the Stirling collective, disenchanted with the supremacy of the show’s visuals. “The music was becoming secondary to all the entertainment,” he says. Newly stationed in Edinburgh, he linked up with Fini Tribe (later Finitribe), the Balearic trio whose single “De Testimony” became a calling card for acid house dancers. This new association opened doors to Finitribe’s kitted-out studio in Leith, plus a fateful trip to the European mainland. “If it hadn’t been for them, things could have turned out different,” says Egebamyasi.
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Finitribe invited Egebamyasi to join them on tour in 1990, where he filled the opening slot in venues across Germany and the Netherlands. “The guy I was doing stuff with was also their sound engineer, and I was selling the merchandise. So in effect, we were the support band as well as the crew,” he says. One night at The Milky Way in Amsterdam, he was approached by Groove Kissing, the Belgian label known for its house and techno releases. “That’s really what kicked things off.”
Egebamyasi released three EPs with Groove Kissing. The first, E.B.Y., infused his acid basslines with other flavors of electronic music. But it would be on Acid Indigestion #1 and Acid Indigestion #2 that Egebamyasi hit his stride. YouTube comments make it clear just how many miles the fierce techno of Acid Indigestion #1 traveled—all the way to Goa, where it wormed its way into the trance raves, and shortly thereafter, the beaches. “That song, for some reason, was massive,” he says. “It’s not psytrance. It’s quite dark, violent and dangerous, but it’s got a vibe.”
This was the turning point for Egebamysi. He followed up with more releases on Slam’s Soma Records (“Acid Nation”) and Finitribe’s Finiflex, including the operatic “Remont (Nymphony No.1 In D Major Op. 35),” a track that was in the running to be on Andrew Weatherall’s Saviours of Paradise, and ended up with a Vince Clarke remix. A chance encounter had put Egebamyasi in the Erasure composer’s path while he was recording for Groove Kissing, laboring from the upper floors of the Amsterdam house where Clarke kept his studio. “It was a song I wrote based on the piano and a girl’s voice. It was quite old school,” says Egebamyasi. “Lucy [Robson] was classically trained, and her voice is spectacular on this song. She gave Liz Fraser [from Cocteau Twins] a run for her money because she didn’t sing words. She sang vocal exercises. Somebody once described it as ‘E music.’ It was so airy and light and summery.”
When it came to writing his first album, How To Boil An Egg, Egebamyasi drew again from Can and Captain Beefheart, striving to move beyond the traditional dance record to conjure something more conceptual. “In between the tracks, there’s stuff going on. It’s not like it’s one track into the next track,” he says. Split into four sections (“Fried,” “Poached,” “Omelette,” and “Scrambled”), the album tracks the trajectory of a night out, starting hard and heavy (“The MacAcid Reel” is a foreboding cyberpunk creeper, while the whirring “Sponge” carries dancers aloft) and finishing with an ambient comedown. Fragments of surreal speech add extra garnish. “My mum is on that,” says Egebamyasi. “She’s reading out the recipe, how to boil an egg. I took the recipe from a paperback called How To Boil An Egg. I got the definitions of each word from the dictionary, and I pieced the recipes together.”
Throughout the ‘90s, Egebamyasi shared bills with names like Weatherall and Marshall Jefferson in front of thousands. He recounts playing the Megadog nights in Manchester and London. “They were fairly nuts,” he says. “I remember going on, it’s six o’clock in the morning, at Brixton Academy. The place was absolutely rocking with that sloping dance floor, which bounces up and down.” With 3,000 dancers, Brixton was small-fry compared to the 17,000 that swarmed Edinburgh’s mega rave, Rezerection. “They’d have these things called The Events. It was two big circus tents,” says Egebamyasi. “One hardcore tent, so your classic Rotterdam hardcore, and you had the techno tent.” Here, the discerning listener would find the immortal sounds of Carl Cox, Laurent Garnier, Richie Horton, Dave Clark, and Egebamyasi. “It was like introducing the rave crowd to quality techno,” he reflects.
Faced with such massive crowds, Egebamyasi describes being totally absorbed by the machinery in front of him. “I’m actually quite shy when not playing,” he says. “It’s a bit like being an actor. They hide behind the character. I’m really hiding behind the gear.” This is another quirk of Egebamyasi’s. In an industry saturated by DJs, he has always preferred to play live. “Playing is an extension of the punk thing,” he says. “It just happened to turn into electronic gear.” In the old days, that live setup would have been hefty, featuring the 808, the 909, two 303s, the 707, and occasionally an SR68 mixing desk. “Loads of flight cases,” says Egebamyasi. “There was a mountain of gear.”
With the passing of time, the live-ness of Egebamyasi’s sets has expanded, his evolving toolbox allowing him to jam more loosely. “One of the revolutionary things Roland did is this new T8 series. You can actually write drums as you’re playing,” he says. Where the older machines locked Egebamyasi into patterns that he pre-programmed at home, now he writes on the fly, matching the energy of the night. “You can add in new sounds as you’re playing. It’s much more dynamic.”
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This year, Egebamyasi celebrates 40 years of playing acid with two new releases. “Eggslut,” out on the Dutch label Flatlife, references both its “sexy rude” vocal samples and the club night Egebamyasi now runs in Edinburgh. The other, “It’s An Acid Thing,” comes from Foxbam Inc, the label he co-founded with DJ Foxtrot. One song features his daughter reciting the definition of acid house in comically clinical terms: “She’s introducing the song with the phrase, ‘Acid house is a form of psychedelic music with a strong backbeat often played in nightclubs, where people engage in wild dancing,’” says Egebamyasi. “She’s 26 now, and she said that same phrase on another record when she was eight.” All grown up now, she’s followed her dad into the rave. “She’s a bit of a party animal. I’m surprised I’m still playing long enough for them to have been at quite a lot of the shows.”
With four decades under his belt, Egebamyasi has watched acid house grow from fumbled beginnings to a legacy genre—so it’s ironic that now, in his anniversary year, he’s ready to retire from it. “These could be the potential last acid tracks,” he says. “At one time, to me, acid was a classy sound. There was something about acid that was unique and different and really standout. I think, for me, that’s gone now.” The once futuristic aura of acid may have lost its sheen, but Egebamyasi has found new curiosities in the undulating wubs and bounce of dubstep and garage. “I’ve done my apprenticeship,” he says. “I think I can spread my wings.”
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Swapping out his now largely untouched table of vintage gear, Egebamyasi has turned to Ableton to try his hand at garage’s distinctive patterns. “I just can’t get enough of the wobble,” he says. “They’re into the shuffle and the swing. We used to put shuffle in the hi-hats on the 909.” He credits the producer L.D. with inspiring a hybrid garage/dubstep style that matches his taste for pace (dubstep’s soporific BPM is a long way to fall from acid’s ravey bent). “I’m using more dubstep bass sounds mixed in with garage rhythms,” he says. He has already trialed live garage sets around Edinburgh. Once his toast to acid house is passed, we can expect garage-inflected releases on Foxbam Inc. too.
This new direction of Egebamyasi’s still feels very punk—there’s that telltale appetite for just having a crack and breaching new ground. Though he was one of the few to trial the 303 in its springtime years, he rejects the term “innovator,” instead calling his career “a learning curve.” He’s on another one right now. Perhaps it was inevitable that, after 40 years of fidelity, McAcid’s godfather would finally hang up his 303.
Still, there is one way that acid house keeps beating out other genres like garage and dubstep. “The whole acid thing has never really been picked up commercially,” he says. “I can’t think of many other types of music that’s had that long a life that’s never become that popular. It’s still a bit of a backwater and more underground than anything else.”
