90

Prime Madchester rave on here. "Pacific xxx" is always welcome, and fun still to spot that loon sample in the wild occasionally. The rest is lively, if not quite "Voodoo Ray" quality.

This is lovely, never-old futurist minimalism that points the way to another sort of psychedelia in the spaces between beats. In some ways precursor to what was to follow - most obviously, A Guy Called Gerald's "Black Secret Technology" - and straightforwardly stop-go compared to the tilt-a-whirl of jungle that was to follow, but the simplicity draws the ears to the detailing, the squelch, chime and thump.

I was more of a rock guy than dance music guy in 1990, but Pacific State (in all its versions) was inescapable at the time. It is one of the best tracks of late 80s/early 90s UK dance, no argument. It is atmospheric and catchy and compelling, and even the terrible sax playing is weirdly affecting. I have read several reviews that suggest that 808:90 proved that dance music could be an album medium, rather than just singles. Well, 35 years later, there have been plenty of acclaimed dance music albums, but I still lean towards the opinion that dance really is a singles medium. That doesn't work well for this list, as focusing on albums doesn't serve all musical genres or artists equitably and leads to some unfortunate biases. That said, I own this record and the Quadrastate EP and Ooops 12". I think I inherited them from the vinyl collection of Mark Selway (RIP), my friend and former bandmate. Mark went down a deep, dark rabbit-hole of experimental electronic music. You can hear his work on the Lecter Macabre album 13 Hobbs Lane (https://joshshipton.bandcamp.com/album/13-hobs-lane). Be warned; it's difficult listening. Now that I come to think of it, I visited the Eastern Bloc record store in Manchester in the mid 90s because I had heard about it as the early meeting place of 808 State. I bought a really nice LP bag that I still use.

Sikkert innflytelsesrikt eller whatever, men nah.

I'm sure this was probably technically impressive in 1989, but this now simply sounds like something a local maniac with essentially no musical training might produce in a DAW then hit up some online forums with, hoping for some feedback on their pre-programmed instrumental loops and drum samples. It's compositionally nonsensical, and basically unlistenable due to tuning issues, baffling and constant squelching, annoyingly mixed lead synths, and completely unsympathetic, largely random-sounding drum loops. The only song I could stand for more than about a minute or two was Pacific 202, which had quite a nice bird samples that conjured up a far away land. Otherwise complete rubbish.

Everyone on here, including myself, has complained a bunch about this crud. I have five or something albums left and I would really like to feels confident that this will be the last English club record, but who knows man. Anyway, it is just so wild to imagine having the opportunity to compile a sort of pop music directory on the scale of this book, and somehow not talk yourself out of including 50-100 English club records. Is Robert Dimery not capable of stepping outside of himself and imagining the perspective of literally anyone else? Even someone who loves English club records would surely agree that in a vacuum (as in, as a reader of the book who is not necessarily living in the 80s/90s, and doing 80s/90s drugs, and hearing this music in the context it was intended for), this is a pretty inessential niche. I’m talking maybe three records out of 1089, tops. It’s crazy man it’s just crazy. It’s funny to look back on the first couple weeks of this project when I got a Stereo MCs record and thought to myself “ha ha this is uniquely bad I can’t believe this is on here”.

Yeah. Nah.

Often electronics music seems only to be made for dancing. This album has more creativity, different sound, different beats etc. Partly the music sounds like a distant copy of "Art Of Noise". But as a whole the album is in my opinion ok.

Gets into a groove and stays there.

Horribly dated sadly. But Pacific 202 sounds very nice even today.

Irritating.

Wasn’t my jam

2.5. Lowest I can give with still being 3 stars. Must have been groundbreaking or something. It’s “fine” almost “bad”

Je vais essayer de faire comme Félix et de trouver du positif à ce schtyle. Pas facile quand même.

1ere impression: ouache du gros techno. Puis, plus l'album avance, plus je comprends qu'il y a une bonne dose de prog dans les lignes un peu déjantées de synth. Et là comble de l'horreur, je réalise que peut-être, PEUT-ÊTRE, tout ce cancer techno est né du prog rock et de son intérêt pour les synths, avec la suite qu'on connaît avec Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk. etc.

Yahey! Another pointless british EDM album. Like, I understand why the Primal Scream album is on the list, even though I hated it. This one? Pointless

Jesus Christ, awful.

Roller skating rink music. I don't doubt that building this music and putting it together in a coherent way is very challenging, and it certainly has a beat that can carry you. But just not into the sounds, the style, the little laser-beam beats. Mercifully, just 39 minutes long.

que clase de joda electrónica es esta

Kae ovo frende. Prva pjesma kriminal. Nis nisam cuo, bas ono cudno. Cudan skroz album. neke pjesme se cak i mogu poslusat, ali kvaliteta nije bas nekaj. Najbolja pjesma: 808080808

Another rubbish album in this list!

I went into 90 thinking I might have to be careful about cliché. A lot of the sounds associated with late-eighties and early-nineties electronic music have been copied, recycled and eventually reduced to preset vocabulary so thoroughly that it is easy to hear the ancestor through the descendants. That turns out to be one of the traps of listening to this album now. Something sounds familiar and the immediate response is, yes, of course, that sound. Except sometimes the right response is: hang on, was this one of the records that made it sound obvious in the first place? The other surprise was how quickly the historical exercise became irrelevant. 90 is not interesting because I can admire what 808 State were doing in 1989. The bloody thing bangs. What struck me first was simply the size of the sound. “Magical Dream” feels enormous without being particularly crowded. There is a sense of things being placed at different distances inside a synthetic environment, with the vocal floating through it in a manner that immediately reminded me of “Idiot Country” from Electronic’s debut. It is partly the cadence: that relaxed, conversational, rather Mancunian way of putting a voice over dance music without adopting either the virtuosity of an American rapper or the mannerisms of a soul singer. It is rhythmic speech more than flow, almost lounging across the beat. That was the first recognition that I was not approaching 90 from quite as far outside as I initially imagined. In 1989 I was listening to Soul II Soul, On-U Sound, Technique, De La Soul and Electronic, some of it absorbed through the record collection of Virginia MacNaughton, who was sharing a house with my girlfriend Isabelle in Wakefield. “Pacific State” was certainly already there. The period itself is much harder to reconstruct. I had finished at Bretton Hall, was back in Grantham wondering with diminishing conviction whether there was any point in trying to establish a theatre company there, and travelling constantly between Grantham and Wakefield. I was increasingly unsure why Grantham remained the base at all. The music seems considerably more coherent in retrospect than my life did. “Ancodia” is where the record’s real mania starts to become obvious. It is restless, slightly busy, forever fiddling with the expectations it has just established. At points the length of the phrase seems to be deliberately disrupted: the four-beat grid establishes itself firmly enough that when a couple of beats disappear and the next section arrives early there is a tiny physical jolt. Whether one chooses to notate that as a momentary 2/4 bar or simply as a truncated phrase is almost beside the point. What matters is the reminder that the machines are not running automatically. Somebody keeps reaching into the mechanism. That becomes one of the defining pleasures of the album. The drum programming is astounding. Not impressive merely in the sense of being complicated, but expressive. Fills appear and vanish. Accents move. Density changes. Patterns are shortened. The same machinery can twitch and fidget on one track and then come down like a hammer on another. There is no attempt to pretend these are acoustic drums or that a human drummer is hiding somewhere behind the sequencer. The achievement is stranger and more interesting than that: 808 State make the rigidity of machines itself expressive. Given what was available in 1989, some of it sounds murderous to construct. “Donkey Doctor” in particular is so fast and so full of little programmed events that I kept wondering how much labour must have gone into making it feel so spontaneous. The sequencing sometimes sounds almost like an arpeggiator until you listen closely enough to realise that it is not merely cycling through a simple automatic pattern. The bass riff is insistent, the drums continually interfere with it, and then there is a section where the chords are pitch-wheeled out of shape and the whole harmonic floor seems to bend underneath you. It is not simply a chord change. The room itself briefly goes rubbery. Yet that enormous density hardly ever damages the flow. This was the paradox I kept returning to. 90 is cognitively wildly dense. Something happens every few seconds. A sample appears. Speech is chopped until it stops behaving like language and becomes mid-range percussion. A bass sequence mutates. A bar is clipped. A synthetic sound chirrups past. Chords become slightly unstable. A drum fill interrupts whatever equilibrium has just been reached. And the whole thing flows magnificently. I barely stopped the album. When I did, it was usually because the record was interfering with my ability to think verbally. At one point I managed to merge the titles Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret and Non-Stop Ecstatic Dancing into the completely imaginary Non-Stop Ecstatic Cabaret because too much was happening in my ears while I was trying to construct the thought. That tells me something about the album. It can function perfectly happily as an environment. I was quite content simply inhabiting it. But the moment I tried to perform another cognitively demanding task alongside it, I realised how much bandwidth it had quietly occupied. The phrase I eventually landed on was “techno jazz”. Not because it sounds like jazz in any superficial sense. Nobody is attempting to turn a 909 into Elvin Jones. It is the relationship between stability and variation. There is a framework strong enough to tolerate constant intervention. The pulse acts almost like a rhythm section. Within that, everything else is allowed to rephrase, interrupt, answer, disappear and return. Rigid machines, improvisational thinking. The mangled speech in “808080808” is a perfect example. It ceases to be something that needs semantic decoding and becomes texture and percussion. The track itself is almost pure dance-floor euphoria, with the drum machine repeatedly descending like masonry, but the internal activity never stops. There is still constant movement inside the larger certainty of the groove. It feels less like somebody assembling loops than a group of musicians who all know where the one is and therefore have permission to mess around everywhere else. That comparison with jazz also helps explain something I had previously associated more with Bernard Sumner and New Order. Sumner clearly understood the possibilities of sequencing, repetition and electronic rhythm, and Technique often feels like a band trying to enter this new language. But New Order generally still seem to be writing songs which are then carried by machines. On 90, the people making the record appear to be thinking natively inside the machines. The programming is not accompanying the composition. The programming is the composition. “Pacific 202” is fascinating precisely because it is a little less frantic about demonstrating this. It contains fewer simultaneous ideas than some of the tracks around it, and that may be exactly why it became such an enormous record. The opening creates space before the groove fully arrives. The melodic material is given room to establish itself. There is a moment where the track drops down towards the bass and suddenly the architecture underneath everything is exposed. And then there is that chirruping synthetic sound running through it. That did something none of the more obvious hooks managed. It took me straight back to 1989. Not general nostalgia, not a vague recollection of clothes and record sleeves, but that peculiar involuntary recognition produced by a tiny timbral detail which the brain had apparently stored for nearly four decades. I had gone into the album wondering whether 90 might merely have been adjacent to my soundtrack. At that point it became clear that at least part of it had been absorbed into the bloodstream. What makes “Pacific 202” even better is that it refuses to become uncomplicated bliss. Harmonically it is just strange enough to remain slightly unsettling. There is a faint crookedness underneath the beauty, a little question mark inside the euphoria. It would have been very easy to make something merely lush. Instead it smiles while remaining fractionally unstable. “Sunrise” finds another route to the same tension between construction and apparent freedom. Samples play off one another beautifully, almost conversationally. There is a lovely hollow bass sound beneath them, resonant without becoming heavy. For quite a while the track behaves almost like a dreamscape. Then the drum machine finally arrives properly and it feels less as if the dance track has started than as if something that had been latent all along has finally declared itself. A dreamscape with pure dance underneath it. That delayed arrival matters. After an album so full of intervention, it demonstrates that 808 State also understand restraint. They know when not to give you the kick. There is another historical line running through all of this which I found impossible not to follow because Soft Cell are such a foundational reference point for me. Non-Stop Ecstatic Dancing is a fascinating early precedent: club-oriented, deliberately disruptive, chemically informed electronic music from the north of England, made years before ecstasy became culturally fused with British rave. But Soft Cell were still remixing songs. However radically they stretched or damaged those songs, the song was still there underneath. Verse, chorus, vocal identity, something recognisable being worked upon. Their experiments were still asking what electronics, clubs, drugs and remixing could do to a song. Something has changed by 90. The song is no longer necessary. A piece can now be organised around pulse, recurrence, timbre, accumulation, interruption, mutation and release. Its identity might reside in a bass sequence, a drum pattern, a sampled fragment, a particular synthetic texture. “Pacific 202” is unquestionably memorable, but there is no conventional chorus required to explain its memorability. That seems to me an astonishing conceptual shift in popular music. Music has become more abstract without sacrificing mass appeal. Usually abstraction threatens accessibility. Strip away the singer, the lyric, the story, the verse-chorus structure and the obvious melodic refrain and one might expect to arrive at something increasingly specialist. 90 does something close to the opposite. It abandons much of that familiar architecture and becomes intensely immediate, physical and communal. Perhaps the groove has taken over some of the work once done by melody. Recurrence can perform some of the work of a chorus. Timbre becomes identity. Build and release provide drama. A tiny sonic detail can become a hook without behaving remotely like a conventional hook. Even writing it like that makes the whole thing sound more systematic than the album feels. 90 is continually rushing ahead of its own explanation. Every time I thought I had identified what it was doing, it did something else. “Oh God, lads, what next?” became the recurring reaction. There is a wider northern electronic lineage here, obviously: Soft Cell, Cabaret Voltaire, Heaven 17, New Order. But 90 also feels like a moment when the emotional function of those machines has shifted. Northern electronic music had often carried alienation, melancholy, industrial severity, irony or emotional chill. Even New Order’s dance music can retain a melancholy undertow. Here the machines discover joy. Not simply pleasure in technology, but proper communal, ecstatic, turn-of-the-decade joy. “808080808” is not contemplating the dance floor. It is flattening it. “Sunrise” builds its own little sensory environment and then reveals the pulse underneath. “Pacific 202” manages to be strange, spacious and euphoric simultaneously. That is why listening in 2026 requires a certain historical correction. Electronic music spent decades absorbing and recycling this vocabulary. So did other forms of digital culture. Throughout the album I kept hearing the grammar that would become familiar in 1990s game soundtracks: sequenced bass figures, short repeating cells, synthetic percussion, sampled voices, constant variation over stable loops, music capable of sustaining continuous activity without requiring conventional song form. I would not claim some direct documentary line from 90 to particular Nintendo composers without evidence, but the affinity is striking. Once popular electronic music liberated itself from song architecture, it became extraordinarily adaptable to environments where music had to maintain movement rather than tell a three-minute story. The danger is therefore to hear some sound on 90 and think, yes, that old electronic cliché. Sometimes the chronology runs the other way. Don’t hear the clichés that came afterwards. Hear people helping invent them. Even “Cobra Bora”, folding “Do the Hustle” into this new electronic environment, feels like part of the same process: fragments of older popular culture being turned into raw material rather than treated as inherited form. And then, after all the meticulous construction, The Fat Shadow (Pointy Head Mix) finishes the album with about a minute of complete barminess, as if the record cannot quite tolerate the idea of ending with dignity. One final nervous twitch and it is gone. I began 90 thinking I might have to make allowances for its age and historical importance. By the end I was doing almost the opposite. I had to keep reminding myself how early it was because the record itself required no allowance whatsoever. The programming is extraordinary. The bass sounds are repeatedly superb. The sampling is imaginative. The harmonic language is just crooked enough to keep the euphoria interesting. It is wildly restless without becoming incoherent, cognitively dense without becoming oppressive, meticulously constructed without sounding laborious. Most of all, it makes abstraction pleasurable. My brain was very happy.

Nah. Not even enjoyable on my daily walk.

I guess this was groundbreaking acid house music at the time? To my 2026 (and not acid house-oriented) ears it just sounds like average nightclub background music.

sounds like the future we were promised. still better and denser than so much techno released since

First time listening to an electronic album—let's see what we can find. "Magical Dream" — Vocals were pretty bad on this one. Is it just me, or are they completely off-beat? Pretty rough start to the album. "Ancodia" — Nice transition right out of the opening track. Night and day compared to the mess on track one—the fast, computer-generated beats and repeating keyboard patterns bring way better energy. "Cobra Bora" — All right, now we're picking up. Oh, that change in the middle was awesome! It almost sounds like a chopped-up intro to Michael Jackson’s "Bad." That was genuinely fun. "Pacific 202" — Great job. Not as explosive as the previous track, but the smooth, floating background sounds and hypnotic beat make it my favorite so far. "Donkey Doctor" — All right, I'm really enjoying this one. Welcome to Techno City! Loving the heavy, thumping low end and crisp machine drum rhythm here. "808080808" — Really interesting use of that deep, punching bass drum sound! The whole rhythm pattern carries serious energy. "Sunrise" — Not as great as the previous two tracks. It gets way too repetitive, and there aren't enough big changes happening to keep it interesting. "The Fat Shadow" — Nope, not a good way to end the album. Easily their worst track here—just feels like a cluttered, noisy mess at the end. Nothing much to say about this overall—it’s totally new territory for me. Coming off the masterpiece that was Pacific Ocean Blue by Dennis Wilson yesterday, this was a bit of a disappointment. But I'm not complaining since it's randomly generated, and I did enjoy a few solid tracks! First-Listen Verdict There are some good tracks here, but this particular album isn't going to make me start listening to a ton of electronic music. Still, I'm hopeful that there are better electronic albums out there to discover! Rating: I'll give it 3 stars. ⭐⭐⭐ Favorite Songs: "808080808" and "Pacific 202" Will I listen to the album again? No, not as a whole album. But a couple of those tracks definitely earned a save in my library just in case I'm building a playlist for party jams. Will I recommend this album? Yes. If someone asks me for an electronic album recommendation, I’d still suggest this one.

solid 1 star. literally cant even listen 💀💀💀

It's like the soundtrack to a side-scrolling indie game, decent but not particularly memorable

I cannot imagine anyone listens to this for enjoyment. At best it’s the soundtrack to a shit 90s driving game.

Ja jongens, nog meer bonkibonk pieperdepiep, na eerder meneertje L.T.J. Bukem. Het is... gewoon... zo... ontzettend... saai... De vogelgeluiden (ijsduikers) levendigen de zaak nog een beetje op in track 4. Ik kon de verleiding niet verstaan en heb op Wikipedia nog wat meer vogelgeluidjes opgezocht, en die opgezet terwijl ik de rest van het album liet doorspelen, want anders viel ik echt in slaap. Ook wel lullig trouwens, dat als je op de Nederlandse Wikipedia-pagina van deze gasten kijkt, je een foto krijgt van een of andere kalende ouwe sok. Ook dit soort technokids worden oud...

Maak ik een opmerking over oude jungle/rave, krijg ik per direct 808 State. Toch bekend van het nummer Cübik, dat in Nederland op alle toonaangevende mixen stond. Van House Party tot Ben Liebrand. Met een simpele krachtige melodielijn die het snel het label house geeft, maar nog met een breakbeatje als basis. Dat blijkt dan weer van een album later te komen. Hier staat die andere dance-hit op. Pacific 202 kwam (als 707) ook op menig mixalbum terecht. Dit nummer zoekt een veel rustiger sfeer, maar dat kon in die tijd nog prima samengaan. Het album is wat vreemd opgebouwd. Net of ze het eerste nummer wat ze maakten op nummer 1 hebben gezet en hun volgende creatie op nummer 2. Want het album is in het begin eigenlijk niet zo interessant. Het bouwt op naar het genoemde Pacific. Wat dan toch niet zomaar naar boven is komen drijven. Daarna worden we toch nog naar wat rave geluid gebracht. Die energie is ook wel nodig. Om naast Experience toch maar weer eens een krachtig rave-album te noemen (begrijpelijk buiten de lijst). Conquers Your Love van Praga Khan is in onze contreien een klassieker.

Acid house uit de 80s, dat is meestal niet zo aan mij besteed. Gelukkig blijft het bij dit album bij 40 minuutjes, dat moet wel vol te houden zijn. Dat het uit de 80s komt, dat hoor je wel. De bliepjes en takjes zijn wat aan de houterige kant. Alsof ze niet meer geluidjes ter beschikking hadden, 8 bit. Track 2 klinkt ook alsof het de beat had kunnen zijn van een Madonna-nummer. Totdat er een synthesizer doorheen komt, dan is het weer meer Mike Oldfield. Op track 3 gaan we ineens via een soort "James Brown is dead"-rave naar megaman op de nintendo. En zo gaat het naar Pacific, wat me wel bekend voor lijkt te komen. Het geheel is toch best afwisselend, qua sampletjes en geluidjes. Het combineert de beats met toch ook wel een sfeervol geluid. De maffe geluidjes hadden van mij niet allemaal gehoeven, maar goed, ik heb me hier toch aardig mee vermaakt. Ik draai nog even de plaat die Eric opnoemt in zijn review erachter aan, eens kijken of ik die ook herken. Nee, daar herken ik niks van, of het moet weer die rave-riff zijn. Al met al geinig om te luisteren, maar het is duidelijk niet tijdloos gebleken allemaal. En daar hoort een 3 bij.

I get the historic aspect but dance music is supposed to be fun.

Very bleepy and bloopy.

Maybe this was cutting edge when it came out (or maybe I don't have enough familiarity with the genre), but this sounds nearly indistinguishable from most other mediocre electronic music I've heard.

I guess you had to be there at the time.

Pacific State is a tune, but the rest of this was a bit dull.

i mean it wasnt awful but like it was just weird

You don’t have to listen to this before you die.

An album definitely of its time. New and innovative at the time of release, but quite dated now and unmistakably a product of the late 80s early 90s rave scene. It’s a decent example of that style without being especially amazing. I am very fond of ‘Pacific 202’, however, with its ethereal synths and bird samples. More dance tracks should feature the call of the Loon.

A little insight into my reviewing process: normally as I listen I take notes on each track to inform my final 100-word write-up. For this album most just have this comment: ‘same as the previous track’. This is with the exception of the first few, where my notes can be summarised as: ‘drum machines, squelchy bass, mix of different synth sounds carrying the melody (some fine, some annoying), doesn’t do much for me but largely isn’t too offensive either, just boring’. My guess is that it’s called ‘90’ because that’s how many years it feels like it goes on for.

Weird but I was kinda into it. DKC vibes

I definitely get F-Zero vibes from a few songs, especially Pacific 202. Loved 808080808 the last few songs. For me the album got better as it went on.

Pretty pretty cool, very nostalgic electronic sounds. However I feel this type of sound is a bit outdated to me.. There is just so much variety of electronic music these days and this is a bit behind all of that, but I am sure it was highly influential then it came out. So, in regards to that, strong 2 stars.

First couple songs are a bit dated, but once we get into the meat of it this is an absolutely gem! Really brilliant synth programming that holds up today.

(10/1089) Entertaining. Favorite: Cobra Bora, 808080808 Least favorite: The Fat Shadow 6/10

no

295.ok

I liked it. I really like video game music from around this time and this is the closest you are going to get to it. Not all was fun to listen to but I don't think you have to be on drugs to enjoy it.

More mindless uninspired electronic.

Really enjoyed this tbf. Never really been into acid house but it’s great to just stick on and chill out. Would come back to it for sure. 4 stars.

90 is an album that I'm shocked that i enjoyed as much as i did. I had this album on while i was doing homework for one of my college classes and it fit perfectly as background music. This is an album that already works in that regard but it's got a lot going on as just a simple listening experience. There were so much ambient sounds going on that it really helped this album feel full and rich. Granted there were points where this album could get more noisy than it should be but that was only for two of the 8 songs. The rest of the album though is some really nice and deep electronic music which i seriously enjoyed listening to. Best Song: Donkey Doctor Worst Song: The Fat Shadow

if you like electronic music I suppose you'd probably like this. 2/5.

imagine being this band and somehow getting Bjork and Bernard Sumner to sing on your next record. guess that's why we look back at the 90s as the time when anything seemed possible.

#rave

maybe if i were in a club at 3am.

Peak 80’s instrumental jams

Right band. Wrong album. It's very good acid techno. Smooth and warm. But it's boring compared to their next album Ex:el - which is a far, Far, FAR more fun and alive way to blow out your speakers, and get hooked on bizaaar enjoyable surprisingly techno. It also has Björk's stunning voice to make you smile, and "we are the music makers" from Charlie and the chocolate factory. This (ninety or 90) is their breakthrough album which showed you could get warm pleasant expansive feels in techno. Pacific State being the standout gem on the album. Transitional influential albums are like missing links in paleontology, precious. Revered. Proof of your discerning expertise. In academia, phylogeny, musicologists mind maps this album may well be an important "node" or "branching point". But I wouldn't necessarily include it in a list of 1001 albums you need to listen to before you die. Because if the idea is to get people to fall in love with a genre and really explore it, this is the wrong album. Go for Ex:el instead.. I'm giving it five cuz it's a great album but it's not their best

I absolutely love this album. It's a nostalgic trip back to a time when electronic music was truly unique, with each artist having their own distinctive sound. Unlike today's EDM scene where many tracks sound alike, the artists of this era, including 808 State, maximized the potential of their equipment, often limited by what they could afford. This album showcases the creativity and ingenuity of that time. While I understand why some may give these old-school electronic albums low ratings, to truly appreciate them, you had to have been part of that era and understand the cultural context of the time, as well as what was happening in the music scene.

Not bad for some beeps and boops. "Pacific 202" is a great SPA/relaxation track.

Really nice old school electronic rhythms. Love the bass and the brighter synth sounds.

Decent electronic for vibing Fave track: Pacific 202

Nutty stuff. The negative reviews are carrying on way too much. 3.5/5

Solide album de house mais il fait son âge (le son de saxo oskour)

LFG

2.5/10 - This project has taught me I like some jazz, a little country, but so far no Electronica/Big Break/EDM.

This wasn't my favorite album from this genre on this list. 3/10

Do I like acid house now??

3.5

#444 Pacific 202 is a classic but the rest didn’t do loads for me, maybe if I’d dropped a couple of E’s it’d make more sense! I know this is influential but I can’t imagine I’d return other than for the odd track. Heard before? ❌ Would I revisit? ❌ Listen before you die? ✅ Fave track(s): Pacific 202 Rating: 6/10 ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Club music. Like the guy said, if you’re on x and in an abandoned warehouse this might be ok

I remember the scene in the early 90s. Techno, we called it, and I was not a fan then. Not much has changed.

Det her va fascineranes, og om det hadde dukka opp på et anna tidspunkt ville æ nok synes det va ganske enerveranes, men akkurat i dag traff det godt, og det føles helt klart som nokka som e fra seinere enn 1989. Ikke nokka æ kommer til å høre særlig mye på igjen, men et ok bekjentskap en tilfeldig fredag.

I’d forgotten that I actually quite like Acid House

Refreshing piece of acid house by one of the pioneers.

Pre Listen: It's been a while since I've gotten an album of which I have no idea who they are, what genre this could possibly be, and can gleam absolutely nothing from title or cover alone. No expectations! Notable Tracks: Magical Dream - Not a fan of these lyrics/singing, but the beat is alright I guess? Pacific 202 - Favorite of the album, would be going on my playlist if it did away with the bird sample after the first minute or so. Otherwise, it's a pretty funky song, got the best energy. Sunrise - Another highlight, it's got this Half-Life type melancholic feeling while also being sorta bumping? The Fat Shadow - Least favorite track, thankfully it's only a minute long. I guess this is where the artist finally greened out after taking all those drugs. Post Listen: That was an album alright. I don't think I could've expected any of that, even if I tried. I feel like if this album had released as part of a soundtrack to an early console/pc game, it would've been revered as some of the most influential soundtrack music of it's time. That said, this album offers the strange trend that for every cool/high point of the album, there is an equal and opposite baffling/low point of the album. It occurs in literally every song, it gave me whiplash. Every good sample is followed up by a miserable one, every neat synth rhythm is followed up by forks on plates. My opinion of the overall sound Reminds me of Pizza Tower's soundtrack somewhat. Tentative 3/5, with only it's innovation keeping it from lower. Might come back to that later though, idk.

Holy wow, I loved this album, never heard this artist before

Ça vieilli mieux que tous les autres trucs électro qu'on a eu à écouter à date. J'irais quand même pas jusqu'à réécouter.

The bleeps really be blooping. It's a mid 4

Definitely not my typical cup of tea. It wasn't all bad, but I don't envision myself listening to this often.

Early electronic. Thought maybe some sounds like from the matrix.

Listens: 3 Standout Tracks: Pacific 202, 808080808 I went into this album not knowing what to expect, at all, and came away pleasantly surprised. While 80s drums/synth is usually not my thing, the mostly lack of lyrics made this tolerable and maybe even good for some tracks. I am pretty sure I've heard some of these songs used as samples elsewhere, but I just looked up some of the songs on WhoSampled and alas, I don't recognize any of the artists that did any sampling. Not my favorite, not the worst.

Interesting

This was actually a really fun electronic album

was a pretty good album if your into that kind of stuff

Mesmeric 4.4

Menevää bilemusiikkia. Ehkä pikkaisen aikaansa edellä ollakseen 80-luvun puolella julkaistu? Tuskin kuuntelen uudestaan, mutta ihan kivaa kuunneltavaa remppahommia tehdessä.

8088080800 es arte xdios

Functional but not particularly interesting or impressive, 90 at its best is in its hip-hop & house groove, & at its worst w/ a futuristic edge that doesn’t exactly inspire faith in the future. It’s the ultimate take-it-or-leave-it album, possessing moments of almost bliss but ne'er heeding the fact that it could simply be better. I guess I'm not crazy 'bout reserved electro-beat music, i.e., if you're gonna go electro you oughta go for cheap & dumb, hence my appreciation of The Prodigy & The Chemical Brothers. 90 isn't what you'd call quiet exactly, but it flirts too much w/ art for my liking - if I wanted that, I'd listen to Moby or DJ Shadow. Otherwise, I comprehend the influence of this thing, but not its gravity or its sheer somatic pleasures: decent, okay.

Pretty cool record that keeps one interested. A sort of blend of Orbital, New Order, and a heck of a lot of Yuzo Koshiro

7/10

Adequately enjoyable without overstaying its welcome

Zupełnie przypadkiem odkryłam dzięki tej płycie sampla z Kneecap. A poza tym wprowadziło mnie w jeden z moich ulubionych gatunków, super album.

First listen

Very great dance/house album

1: rythmes un peu bizarres parfois, fait un peu homemade. on dirait que les pistes se marchent un peu dessus 2: kraftwerk eco+ 3: fait plus cohérent, jeu de voiture play2 4: rien a dire 5: le sax c'est cool mais on se fait chier 6: le plus sympa de l'album 7: oubliable 8: qui a mis une fourchette dans le micro ondes ? pourtant c'est un style musical contre lequel je n'ai rien mais clairement l'album est oubliable tout au mieux je ne comprends pas ce qu'il fait sur cette liste. peut etre que c'etait revolutionnaire mais ca a mal vieilli

Lots of fun, interesting beats. It overall wasn't very exciting. But definitely experimental

I see Bjork took a lot of influence from genres like these. Cool early acid house.

Was okay inoffennsive very similar saving grace one half an hour long

The late 80s and early 90s were a period of wild experimentation for the UK dance scene, both with drugs and technology. In the case of 808 State they took the Roland 808 drum machine and pushed it to the limits of what it could do, programming complex beats and patterns to craft pieces that were perfectly suited for getting smashed and dancing in a warehouse somewhere. Listening back to this now, nearly 40 years later is a slightly odd experience. The sound is very much of its time and much of it doesn’t work outside of the original context, but the transcendent saxophone line on Pacific 202 (an unlikely breakthrough hit on the UK pop charts) still has its hooks somewhere deep in my subconscious. Big fish, little fish, cardboard box-tastic!