In his sleevenotes to Acid Rain, the DJ and producer Terry Farley makes some pretty grand claims for the music contained on its five CDs. He compares its importance to that of Chuck Berry or Miles Davis and John Coltrane: it has "resonated across the decades" and continues to exert such a vast influence today that it's hard to imagine what music in 2013 would sound like had it not existed. There are those who would doubtless scoff at this kind of thing, but equally, there are those who would tell you that counts as underselling its impact. Some people will swear blind that – in Britain, at least – acid house and the culture it inadvertently inspired actually led to lasting social changes, affecting everything from how offices are designed to how late the pubs stay open; had breweries not been so horrified by the number of people eschewing alcohol for ecstasy in the 90s, they wouldn't have lobbied so hard for a change in licensing laws.
One thing is certain: the music on Acid Rain was audibly not made to last. Most of the tracks here had to be remastered from vinyl. At the exact point in the 1980s when the music industry began thinking seriously about curating rock and pop history, because it realised there was money to be made from memories – the era when painstakingly compiled, carefully annotated CD box sets like this one first started appearing – record labels in Chicago didn't keep the master tapes of their local producers' work, because the idea that anyone in the future would be interested seemed laughable. To say that the people who made it had ambitions that extended no further than the city limits might even be stretching it; some of them had ambitions that extended no further than one of the city's clubs. Powered by the hypnotic alien chatter of an overdriven Roland TB-303 bass synthesiser, acid house's relentless, churning repetition often seemed like a concerted effort to capture the hedonistic abandon of the Muzic Box on Michigan Avenue: the first acid house single of all, Phuture's Acid Tracks, was so associated with the club and its legendary resident DJ that it was initially known as Ron Hardy's Acid Track. In fact, Hardy had already attempted to capture the drugged madness of the Muzic Box. Acid Rain contains his 1985 single Sensation – so brutal, minimal and utilitarian it makes your average early acid track sound like the height of complexity. It didn't have the weird futuristic quality of the 303-driven tracks that followed, but you can almost smell the perspiration and the smoke as it plays.
It's intended as no slight to his rival Chicago DJ Frankie Knuckles (for whose club, The Warehouse, house music was originally named, and whom you can hear on Acid Rain inching towards its sound on a previously unreleased 1984 version of Bad Boy, a weird, gay, black take on European synthpop) to say that Hardy's shadow looms largest over the music on this box set. Frankie Knuckles was big on house music's spirituality: though he was capable of making music as luxuriantly filthy as his other contribution to Acid Rain, Baby Wants To Ride (simultaneously a fantastic record, and not so much a song as a man loudly drawing attention to his erection for eight and a half minutes), more often something of the gospel tradition and the godfearing midwest seeped into his grooves, as on Your Love and Tears.
As perhaps was to be expected from music born out of a shocking bacchanal, presided over by a heroin addict whom even his biggest fans concede was a bit of a horror ("Everybody hated Ron Hardy, he was mean and nasty," recalled producer Marshall Jefferson, represented here by Virgo 4's R U Hot Enough and Sleezy D's I've Lost Control, "but he was the greatest DJ that ever lived"), acid house was fuelled by a noticeably darker energy. You wouldn't describe the sound of a track like Dr Derelict's That Shit's Wild as funky so much as writhing. There's nothing uplifting about the music Jefferson came up with on I've Lost Control: instead, it feels hypnotic, obsessive, deranged. If you didn't know that this was music that came to be inexorably associated with the euphoria of ecstasy, that soundtracked something called the Second Summer of Love, you'd never guess. You listen to Bam Bam's astonishing Where's Your Child? and wonder how bewildering and terrifying it must have sounded to a parent who caught it spilling out of their kid's bedroom at the height of the UK's moral panic about acid-house raves and ecstasy: a voice slowed down until it sounds demonic, delivering a kind of public-information film voiceover – "Don't let your kid out late at night, they don't know wrong from right" – punctuated with cackling laughter and the sampled screams of a baby.
It was supposed to be parochial, intended to evoke something local and unique. As it turned out, the makers of acid house had hit on something universal and timeless. No music before or since has better captured the sweaty, blank-eyed intensity of being lost on a dancefloor in the small hours: you didn't have to be in the Muzic Box, surrounded by people so maddened by drugs and the sheer volume at which Hardy played that they would cry or faint or start having it off with each other, to know that weird, simultaneously elated and faintly troubling otherworldly feeling. It's one of the reasons why the music on Acid Rain doesn't really feel dated, despite being packed with sounds that were the cutting edge 25 or 30 years ago: stuttering n-n-n-n-nineteen vocals; harsh sampled orchestral stabs; drum machines that sound like machines, technology having not yet worked out how to make them sound like drums. There's something shocking about the fact that Laurent X's Machines dates from the same year as Bros's When Will I Be Famous? and Hue and Cry's Looking For Linda: it sounds like it could have been released yesterday.
Acid house, at least as defined by this box set, could communicate more than the feeling of temporarily losing your mind in front of the big speakers at 3am. At the end of Acid Rain comes another Jefferson production, Jungle Wonz's Time Marches On. It seems wistful and heartbreaking today, a kind of eulogy for a moment in time long passed. But that wasn't how it would have sounded 25 years ago. Then, its lyrics – "Nothing stays the same, there's always change" – must have seemed a defiant statement of belief that the future belonged to house music, an equivalent of one of those ancient singles that bullishly predict rock'n'roll's longevity. And like those records, its predictions proved to be exactly right.
