808 State
Formed in Manchester in 1987, pioneers of the acid house movement 808 State were named after the famed Roland TR-808 drum machine and stormed the album charts a year later with their Detroit techno and Chicago acid-inspired debut album Newbuild. Emerging innovators Aphex Twin and Autechre paid tribute while the band continued to raid the charts with top 10 hits including Pacific State, In Yer Face and Cubik.
The initial line-up was Graham Massey, Martin Price and Gerald Simpson of A Guy Called Gerald fame. Andrew Barker joined in 1989, as 808 State further explored variants of IDM and techno, collaborating with Björk and New Order on the album ex:el. Now just Massey and Barker, their seventh album, Transmission Suite, follows a lengthy recording absence. While surrounding themselves with era-defining gear, they embrace the world of hardware recreations and synth plugins.
To name your band after it, the 808 must have made quite an impression on you?
AB: “The 808 had been in dance music a while, starting with electro. Then it went through to British soul and slowly evolved through the dance scene. I guess when we started it was already a commonality in lots of genres of music.”
GM:“We met through a record shop during a culture when those shops were so specialised you’d get laughed out of them. There were two in Manchester, one dealt with the black American music imports and then you had Eastern Bloc, which originally had more of an indie/industrial vibe. But Martin Price, who was originally in 808, was an old soul boy at heart. His knowledge of music was insane, but the 808 was always somewhere in that Venn diagram.”
When did you first come across it?
When I joined, I’d come from a hip-hop/ electro background. We all had our little individual setups and joined them together. Gerald Simpson had a little rap group called MC Tune and he’d bought an 808. I had a Casio RZ-1 drum machine, which was
