THROWBACK THURSDAY: Steve Poindexter – Computer Madness [1989]

By the end of the 80s, the initial acid house wave had given rise to serious experimentation; with legends such as Larry Heard, Mike Dunn and Armando Gallop crafting psychedelic soundscapes built around steady 4/4 rhythms.

One of the standout examples of this was Computer Madness, the B-side of Muzique Records co-founder Steve Poindexter’s debut EP, Work That Mutha Fucker.

The title track would go on to be one of the most played, and remixed, ghetto tech tracks of all time, but in Computer Madness, he created arguably the most bizarre, and hypnotising, acid house tracks of this nascent genre, built around a minimal, Roland TR-505 beat.

Poindexter gave an interview to Resident Advisor in 2014, in which he revealed that the tracks from Work That Mutha Fucker had been doing the rounds for a couple of years before the EP was released.

“‘Work That Mutha Fucker’ actually came out a year and a half before it was even on vinyl,” he said. “Armando [Gallop] used to play it. Frankie [Knuckles] used to play it. It was just something that we played at the parties to get the crowd fired up.”

To create the EP, Poindexter and music ally Wesley Green used a ‘Roland TR-505 drum machine, a Kawai drum machine, a Casio CZ-101 drum machine, a Sony keyboard and a small, battery-powered Casio keyboard whose sounds they sampled’, according to the article.

“On ‘Computer Madness’ I was tweaking, playing the drum machine, but I was moving stuff. I was trying to change the filter sounds. Wes, my partner, he came in, he’s like, ‘OK, while you’re playing that, I’ll just tweak the keyboard sound.’ So we tweaked the sounds, and we got them just how I wanted it, and I was like, ‘This is it—computer madness! It just sounded like something that was out of the future.”

[Kudos to Sound of 88/92 for the YouTube upload]

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