u/bascule

Marshall Jefferson's "Move Your Body (The House Music Anthem)" is widely regarded as a track that cemented the piano's place in house music.

However, there's a particular style of piano, particularly prevalent in early UK acid house, that takes patterns of blues piano chord changes (primarily m7 mixed with Maj7) and creates rapid fire high energy loops of chopped / stabby piano out of them.

Speaking of acid house, there's DJ Pierre and friends in Phuture back in Chicago who created a track like this in 1988 under the alias "Phortune", called String Free: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g41vK8AZuw

Acid house of course started with the TB-303 synthesizer that became synonymous with Phuture and DJ Pierre, particularly "squelching" via taking its resonance to extremes. However, I am curious if we can also directly trace the style of chopped / stabby piano we also see in UK acid house back to Phuture/Phortune and DJ Pierre. If we can trust some rando on Discogs to quote DJ Pierre accurately, this is how it came about:

https://www.discogs.com/release/2087-Phortune-String-Free-Can-You-Feel-The-Bass

> "Darryl (Ellis) did the pianos, Herb (Jackson) ventured on the basslines, supervised by me; I did all the sequences and forged the 'String Free'"

So, I'm curious, was String Free the origin of this style? Or are there tracks that predate it?

I've been watching the extremely-faithful-to-the-manga new Ghost in the Shell TV Series by Science Saru, which recently lead me to pull my '90s vintage copy of the 1989 Ghost in the Shell Manga off the shelf. I haven't read the manga since the '90s and there's a lot I've forgotten, including that it featured destructive uploads similar to Pantheon, which were featured in the latest episode of the new GitS TV series. (I've previously noted the idea of destructive uploads dates all the way back to what can be considered the seminal work of cyberpunk, Rudy Rucker's 1982 novel "Software")

For those who aren't familiar with Ghost in the Shell, the main idea from the show is that the brain and spinal column can be extracted from the human body into a self-contained life support device called a "cyberbrain" which can be placed into a cyborg body called a "shell". So not really uploading.

But in fact the Ghost in the Shell manga did actually feature destructive uploads similar to Pantheon, something called "ghost dubbing". The uploads in GitS seem more like what Prasad referred to I believe as "Mumbai back alley uploads" in that they are not accurate replicas of the original people but more like degraded copies.

Anyway, if you liked Pantheon definitely check out the new GitS series!

Why it’s Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws! (TRT 2h5m)