X-Mix – Jack The Box – Hardfloor – May 4, 1998, !K7 Records
X-Mix Jack the Box is a 1998 mix album from German acid techno pioneers Hardfloor. It’s packed with seminal acid house classics alongside some of Hardfloor’s own tracks.
It is the seventh in the popular 90s X-Mix series, which also featured contributions from Laurent Garnier, Dave Angel, DJ Hell, Richie Hawtin & John Acquaviva, Ken Ishii, Dave Clarke and Mr C from The Shamen.
Jack The Box is named, of course, for the famous silver acid box, the Roland TB-303 Bassline. Released in 1981 it was the toy that nobody wanted, a bass player in a box that sounded nothing like a bass guitar.
Many models found their way to Chicago and Detroit, two cities with high concentrations of session musicians, who rapidly grew frustrated with the notoriously glitchy and difficult to programme machines.
So they languished in pawn shops until the original dons of Chicago house music, scouring for cheap synthesiser solutions, unlocked their true potential.
So, today being 303 day – third of March innit? – I thought I’d share something special, a mix that perfectly celebrates that sound.
A Lesson From The Old Skool
For Miles Davis it’s the trumpet, for Jimi Hendrix it’s the electric guitar.
For Cologne duo Hardfloor, their virtuoso instrument is the Roland TB-303.
Oliver Bondzio and Ramon Zenker first began releasing tracks in 1991. Their back catalogue includes timeless anthems like Acperience and my own personal favourite Mahogony Roots, the effortlessly funky Mahogany Roots.
Bang The Box features three Hardfloor tracks plus a who’s who of original house music innovators and acid originators, including Fast Eddie, Phuture, Marshall Jefferson and Adonis.
If these names are unknown to you don’t worry, Hardfloor have prepared a little history lesson.
When this mix was released, ten years had already passed since the original summer of love, dance music had evolved rapidly and a whole new generation of ravers had joined the scene.
By 1998 the tracks on this mix already sounded quite dated, though their classic status was long since enshrined.
You’ll notice, also, that since house music was in its infancy it was almost compulsory for producers to include the word “house” or “jack” in their track names.
Bonus points if you have someone say it on the track. Extra bonus points if you utilize your sampler’s st-st-st-st-stutter feature, manually, of course, to ensure the sample regularly goes out of synch with the rest of the track.
I mean c’mon, it was the 80s and nothing quite like this had ever been heard before.
Unboxing The Jack
X-mix Jack The Box begins with Hardfloor’s own track, I Can’t Complain, which itself is a retro-style acid house throwback.
In fact, another recurring pattern you’ll notice throughout this mix is the prevalence of pitched-down voices, which we always referred to as “Darth Vader vocals” because of their James Earl Jones-style baritone.
It’s also used to great effect on the second track, Bam Bam’s Where Is Your Child?
Four tracks in we get Phuture, the original trio consisting of Herb J, Earl “Spanky” Smith Jr. and DJ Pierre, and their track The Creator.
Phuture, of course, are the group credited with inventing the acid house genre with their 1987 Trax Records epic Acid Tracks. Their appearance on this mix is therefore pretty much mandatory.
Another noteworthy entry is Armando’s classic Land Of Confusion.
This one’s as pure as it’s possible to get. It’s just a Roland TB-303 synched up to a Roland TR-909 drum machine, no big buildups or breakdowns, just live beatbox jamming and slippery, bubbling acid tweaked live for several minutes.
Jam The Box isn’t wall-to-wall acid however, other styles of old classic house music are also represented including some piano house from Fast Eddie and the old skool anthem (how-how-how-how-how-how-how-howhowhow) Housenation from Housemaster Boyz.
Yep, that’s gonna stay stuck in your head all day now, isn’t it?
Housenation’s a true earwork, though obviously modern ears will be more inclined to pick up on the various rough edges, the bum notes, the slight tape warbles and the endless cascades of out-of-synch utterances of “house nation”.
Still, it only serves to gives us a deeper appreciation for what these guys were doing and how far the music and technology associated with it has progressed.
After Housenation we get to one of my all-time personal favourites, Too Far Gone by Adonis.
Frankly a lot of the tracks on this mix are practically prehistoric by today’s standards but Too Far Gone still holds up.
Me and a friend I used to DJ with, we both love this tune and dropped it a lot in sets, so I can attest that it still works well in sets to this day.
In fact, of all of the tracks on here, I think this one has aged the best.
Another stone-cold classic, which hits just before the halfway mark, is Box Energy by DJ Pierre.
Again, you’ll note that the production on a lot of the tracks here sounds comparatively rough, but, like Adonis, this one also seems to have held up quite well.
Fast Eddie appears twice on this mix and rightly so. Second time around we get his 1988 classic Acid Thunder.
This is another essential acid track so its inclusion is pretty much obligatory on a compilation like this.
It’s also one that should sound instantly familiar, because even if you’ve never heard it before you can still hear echoes of its influence to this day.
The House That Jack Built
If you’ve never heard of Phuture or Fast Eddie, then you don’t know jack.
It’s time educate yourself.
Because these guys are the godfathers of house music. And without their contributions, we wouldn’t have the world-sprawling scene we have today.
Yes, some of these tracks have aged better than others, but even the ropier ones are essential listening, not just for their influence and place in history, but also for their purity.
We live in an age of Instagram DJs, ghost producers and studio setup porn. These guys had none of that.
They came from an era when the dancefloor, not the DJ, was the main focus of the club. So if you wanted to make a name, you had to make a good record. That meant doing it all yourself using whatever gear you could get your hands on.
These were literal box jams. Generally recorded in a single take, adding and removing rhythm patters and other elements on the fly.
And since these were regular guys with zero training and even less of a budget, it was all figured out by trial and error.
That’s how the acid house sound evolved, as a happy pure accident, twisting knobs on a box making unexpected sounds, “hey, what’s that you’re doing? Keep doing that.”
These janky drum machines, fussy 303s and other bits of rudimentary equipment were wired up together and every record was a wrestling match to keep them all in synch.
No computers were involved at any point throughout the recording process.
Any cuts or edits which were done would have been done physically, by cutting and resplicing actual rolls of magnetic tape.
This combination of rough cuts and tape warble also explains why so many of these old tracks are so tough to mix and naturally stray out of synch when played on vinyl. But one can also argue that these tiny imperfections are precisely why these early tracks are so funky. Because they’re closer, in a way, to how a real human drummer would sound.
It’s worth keeping in mind, also, that when these records were made the notion that house music could become a true global force with DJs the new rock stars was fantasy.
These records were cut for local DJs to play in clubs. But acid house became far more than that.
A failed product that became a cultural icon, a happy accident that inspired a whole new style of music, dance records for local clubs which got played around the world, kickstarting the rave phenomenon.
The original Godfathers of house music kicked down the doors of the music business. Without their initial contribution, their willingness to experiment and persevere with the most basic of equipment, house music wouldn’t be what is today.
We should never forget the contribution these innovators made. And Hardfloor’s X-Mix serves as an ideal love letter to the originators of house music while also serving as the ideal introduction for younger ravers eager to learn more about house music’s roots.
It’s also the perfect soundtrack to 303 day.