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All the info for the weekend you’ll need is up on Soundboard. After the jump are some words that our writers have on some especially notable shows.
Says Miles Raymer about the groundbreaking Chicago electronic trio Phuture, who will be headlining a dance party at Metro tonight, “Sometime in 1985 three producers in the nascent Chicago house scene who collectively called themselves Phuture got their hands on a Roland TB-303 synthesizer. Produced from ’82 till ’84, it was advertised as a simple way for guitarists to sequence backing bass lines, but thanks to its counterintuitive interface it was nearly impossible to use that way. As Phuture discovered, though, if you plug in the 303 and start twisting knobs, it’ll kick out noisy squelches that sound absolutely mind-blowing when paired with a skeletal house beat. So they did exactly that, and when their 11-minute ‘Acid Tracks’ came out two years later it galvanized the burgeoning dance-music scene in such a major way that it became the ur-example of its own genre, dubbed ‘acid house.’”