Moon-ing about
There’s a particular kind of mythology that surrounds West Coast desert raves in the early-to-mid 90s. A moment in time where geography, community and sound collided into a special variation of rave. The debut release on False 9 taps directly into that time and space, reviving Aquatherium’s highly desired ‘Full Moon/Luci In Deep Thought’ for reissue. Produced by Aquatherium (Brendan McCarthy), the record is an example of a time when progressive house was peaking in the UK under figures like Sasha, Darren Emerson and Carl Cox. Yet across the Atlantic, something more untamed was taking shape. In California, the so-called “west coast sound” wasn’t just a style; it was a melting pot of influences: European futurism and trance fused with the full rhythmic history of American dance music in disco, house, electro, techno and breaks, layered into expansive, freeform journeys of a new version of rave music.
The track ‘Full Moon’ in particular feels inseparable from the environments that birthed it: the dusty expanses of San Francisco’s northern gatherings and the ritualistic sprawl of Moontribe parties deep in the Los Angeles deserts. These events were multi-day experiences, self-contained ecosystems where dancers moved from dusk to dawn and beyond, far away from any civilisation. There was no separation between DJ and crowd, no strict schedule, no polished infrastructures. There were just generators humming, manageable sound systems under open skies and a collective surrender to rhythm. The track pulses with a hedonistic energy that mirrored the visitors. “Luci In Deep Thought” is an example at the spiritual dimension of these gatherings. Its hypnotic, almost tribal drumming comes in waves, building toward moments of release that feel like an ecstatic revelation. Talk to the people that attended these events and you get a sense of communal elevation that defined these events like no other. Listening now, it’s easy to trace a line from these raw, open-air rituals to later larger festivals like Electric Daisy Carnival, Burning Man, or Coachella. Yet what’s preserved here is something more intimate and less outside influenced. It’s a snapshot of a scene still inventing itself in real time where experimentation, freedom and community converged under the desert sky.
In this interview, we get a chance to talk to the creator of this record and the special time it helps recall.
Thank you for taking some time to chat with us. Can you tell us about where you are from and what your local music nightlife looked like in dance music?
I grew up in the Bay Area (San Jose) as a Xgen kid in the 70s, I was influenced by everything from rock & roll, soul, funk and r&b. Back then, most of the radio stations played everything and weren’t so divided/specific as they were later on in the 80s. There wasn’t much nightlife in San Jose, other than bars, strip clubs, and country-western clubs that had live music from what I can remember. It was a working-class city and not very sophisticated…yet. As the tech industry grew and more money started pouring into the area in the mid-late 80s, One Step Beyond, an 18+ club, opened up in Santa Clara that hosted DJs and live New Wave acts, where DJ’s spun alternative rock and new wave bands like Depeche Mode, Cure, Cabaret Voltaire, Ministry, Front 242, and Nitzer Ebb. It was really the first time I heard DJ’s playing this type of music, which was new and exhilarating. The San Jose Civic Auditorium would also host live performances of alternative rock and new wave bands that were getting attention through MTV, which is where I saw Berlin for the first time. Experiencing Depeche Mode‘s Violator Tour in Mountain View at the Shoreline Amphitheater in 1990 was awe inspiring for the majority of goth, industrial and electronic music enthusiasts, especially when their opening act was Nitzer Ebb. A night I’ll never forget and a catalyst for what was to come.
How did you get into making music and what were your first memories of getting to the point you would release music?
Well, when I was 5, I started playing piano by ear, and started taking lessons a few years later. Everyone we knew had a piano, so I practiced often, and made things up when I was in the mood. It was a natural progression for me, and soon discovered I had a deep emotional connection with rhythm, sound, and melody at a very young age. The sounds resonated in my mind like a picture, so I could literally listen to a modern-day song and play it out on the piano within a few minutes or hours depending on the complexity. I eventually took proper piano lessons and played Tuba in the elementary school band, which most likely gave me a love for bass. Our instructor did an experiment where everyone played a piece of music except the baritone player and myself, and showed the band members how empty the music was without us. It was my first lesson in tension and release, and how important bass is in music. Since, there was no one in my family who was musically inclined or had a real interest in it, there was no fast track into or extended family members in the music industry.
I was essentially on my own, and my musical interests were considered folly from everyone in my family. My dad had a fairly advanced sound system for listening and recording, with a turntable and reel to reel, which I used often as I got older, usually without his permission. This experience would eventually give way to my technical aspect of music production….engineering. However, my parents eventually relented, and did get me my first synth for my 19th birthday. An Akai AX-60 analog synth, in which you could have 2 complete separate sounds on separate MIDI channels.
You could however use both layers to create a beefy tone. It rivaled the Juno 106, which I acquired later. In 1987, I attended Cabrillo Community College and took a class called “Computers and Music”, which I dove into head first. The music lab had a few Apple computers, an old EMU Emulator II, an Alesis HR-16 drum machine, and an Ensonic ESQ-1 synth, which was multi-timbral synth with an onboard sequencer. The lab was fairly advanced and I basically lived there. This is also the time where I heard acid house for the first time from a friend’s cassette tape featuring a Todd Terry interview. I was hooked immediately. With a hand me down IBM computer, cheap sequencing software, a MIDI interface, and a Kawai KII synth I purchased later, I started my journey to creating electronic music. After moving to San Francisco three years later to attend SFSU, by freak circumstance in the summer of 1991, I roomed up with a couple of E dealers who were facilitating underground parties in the city. I met people at the house and the rave parties we all went to, who ’til this day influence West Coast house music. This emboldened my desire to become an electronic musician and house music producer, and I eventually purchased an Akai S1000 sampler less than a year later. After that, everything opened up creatively, and soon rented out a studio space at 3rd Floor Productions on Polk St., above BPM, a well-known and influential record store in San Francisco.
–Thinking back to the early 90s, can you tell us what your recording process looked like and what kind of gear were you working with?
Oh lord, it was the dark ages in the 90s considering what’s available today, although I still stick to my roots of music production….analog first, the rest later. Websites were non-existent in regards to downloading the latest pack of Dark Tech Sound bits 5. I had to create, from scratch….from a silent machine not yet pushed. We all had to. It gave rise to true creativity, and it’s why 90’s house music is so unique. To start, I usually visualize myself somewhere or remember a crazy time in my life, or imagine myself performing live to start the creative process. Sometimes the whole song would be in my head already. I would hear some tones or chord progression in my head, and then I would try to emulate them into something concrete on an analog synth, usually my Juno 106 or Akai AX-60. Then sample a few records to grab soome drum and fx samples, and start cutting them up on the Akai S1100.
I would primarily sequence music on MOTU’s Performer on my Apple PowerBook 180 with 8 megs of memory and 80 megs of hard drive space. I used the PowerBook on every live performance, and it still powers up. It’s a beast! Remember, samplers didn’t have much memory space back then, with 32 megs max at the time. They came stock with only 2 megs, and I was poor, so I had to be creative with what I had. It got to the point where I sampled from a turntable at +8, at 45rpm, in mono, just to save a few seconds of memory, and then pitch down the sample in the sampler later. Desperate times…desperate measures. I eventually upgraded the memory, and was able to incorporate more sample sets, layers, and textures into production, especially for major label remix work. Like most house music producers, I created drum patterns on a drum machine or recorded myself on the keyboard via MIDI, and then mixed on an original Mackie 1604 mixer and then fed the mains to DAT or 1/4″ tape. It was simple, but the clock was tight, and you didn’t have to sync to a 2″ reel to reel or ADAT, unless you were recording vocals or instruments, which was rare. Vocals for remixes were usually delivered on DAT, and then re-sampled into the Akai S1100 or Digidesign’s Sample Cell to lay out verses, chorus, adlibs across the keyboard. Time stretching/compression at the time never really sounded right, unless it was a minor adjustment of +/-3 bpm.
So, you would really have to be creative to do a down-tempo remix. Gear? At 3rd Floor Productions, drum machines and synths could be borrowed from each other from time to time for certain projects, which allowed me to learn how to use the Roland’s 909, 808, 707, 727, 505, 303, R-8, Korg M1, Kawai K1II, Sequential Circuits Prophet VS, Roland JD-800, Casio CZ101, and an onslaught of audio processing gear, including a Digitech Multi-Play Delay pedal, with a hold feature. Gritty, but way ahead of its time…When we were asked to do a remix for Dee-Lite’s “Bring Me Your Love”, there was an ungodly number of samples, including all of Lady Miss Kier’s vocals. Since we ran out of sample memory on the Akai s1100 with 32 megs, we had to combine studios to finish the project and ended up using a 32 channel Soundcraft mixing board to handle all the signal paths. 16 channels were dedicated just to the Akai s1100 and Digidesign Sample Cell. It was the only project that really pushed the limits of our technical capabilities. One last note. I ate, breathed, slept, partied, and lived in that studio until the project was finished. You could say I was dedicated.
Growing up on the west coast myself, the futuristic trance sound got mixed with everything from house to breaks to techno. ‘Full Moon’ captures the sound of the 90s desert parties like Moontribe and the first Electric Daisy Carnival events. What was your inspiration at the time and how did this record come about?
The inspiration for the whole EP came from an experience close to my second home town of Ben Lomond in the Santa Cruz mountains. The Full Moon parties were secretly located at a beach in Davenport, in between Half Moon Bay, and Santa Cruz. The Wicked crew made up of 4 DJ’s from the UK (Jeno, Garth, Thomas, and Markie), would hold their Full Moon parties there. People would come from all around to enjoy this outdoor celebration, and since it was in my own back yard, the experience felt deeper. I carried that experience into studio and it just flowed out of me. No doubts or inhibitions, just letting it flow. I literally mixed the EP down in 4 days, which is rare for me.
By 1994, Goa and psy-trance had formed out of the early trance and progressive sounds. ‘Luci In Deep Thought’ has a great balance of sounding mystical, being tribal and feeling hedonistic. Another excellent example of the west coast sound. Did you make music with a certain audience in mind that you experienced or were part of?
Actually, it’s funny you say Goa Psy-trance. DJ Goa Gil was a big contributor to my early production influences, as my friends had a fist full of his mix tapes, which we listened to relentlessly on a weekend trip to Big Sir. From what I was told, he mixed DAT tapes to create his mixes. Not sure if it’s true, but it would explain his abrupt mixing style or maybe it was the mushrooms. As far as an audience, it was the global underground dance music enthusiasts. Right before I started producing music professionally, parties were all a bit hedonistic at the time, with only a few dark lights filling the venue, as shirtless glow painted boys and girls at 2am were dancing to hypnotic tribal beats and pulsating bass lines. Drippin’ hot and sweaty. A true underground experience.
Considering the record being reissued 33 years later, what do you think makes this record along with some of our others, desirable today?
Hard to say, since the public usually decides on whether or not a song is good or great. But any good song endures the test of time. However, I do believe the record has something very primal about it and people seem to connect with it, in conjunction with their primal instinct to dance, hunt, or give into carnal appetites. The record is DJ friendly, has driving percussion, a good timing of tension and release, moody vibes or tones, and it’s balanced in regards to the mix. It’s difficult to find dance records today that have everything, and I think this record represents those attributes well.
–Can you talk about any fond memory of any DJ playing your record or any feedback you got that was meaningful on your music?
Absolutely! When I took my first trip to the UK, I was staying at a friend’s studio in Amsterdam a few weeks after the ‘Full Moon’ EP was released, while waiting for my UK work permits to be issued. As I was walking down a street next to the canals in the Red-Light District, I passed by a bar at the exact moment ‘Full Moon’ was playing. I was half way around the world and listening to my music being played by someone I didn’t even know, at a bar I never visited. It was surreal, electrifying, and exciting, but strange. Was it destiny? It sure felt like the universe was speaking to me, that this is what I am supposed to be doing. I felt compelled to go inside and meet the DJ. Tell him it was my record…my music he was playing. I think he was more surprised than I was, when I told him who I was. But to be honest, I don’t think he believed me. Probably thought I was just another crazy American out of his head.
Shortly after 2000, it looks like your releases schedule slowed down. Did you pursue other careers or what was the reason you stopped releasing music?
There were a multitude of factors, including toxic relationships, romantic, professional, or otherwise, and I could feel industry burnout. I was creatively and emotionally drained with very little new or inspiring experiences to draw from. Something needed to change, and I wanted to experience life differently and more positively. So, in 2001, someone I knew from High School asked if I wanted to go to Hawaii and be his field audio engineer for his video production company. It was a chance to travel again and do something I’ve never done before. I did however bring my music gear and records, but I ended up DJing with budding music producers Cory Wells, Scottie Soul, and Corey Baker in Waikiki more than making music. No pressure, no expectations, just peace and getting to know myself again with positive people around me. It was fun again and swimming in the warm waters every day to cleanse the spirit was detoxifying. When I came back to San Francisco in 2004, I did collaborate and release some music on vinyl and digitally with a few labels and connected with a few digital download websites and distribution companies, but received very little return. One digital label owner in Holland said he didn’t make enough money to buy a cheeseburger from McDonalds on one of my releases. Ouch…I did however license an unreleased track called “Porn Star” for the Sopranos video game on PlayStation, which was the highlight of my 2000’s. After purging all or most of my music off the digital platforms, I ended up getting a job at 2K Games as a game tester and eventually became a IT Desktop Support Tech. At least my job title had the word “tech” in it. And it’s not like anyone was banging down my door for me to release or create music. So, I moved on. But, I also realized I wasn’t alone. So many other producers and DJ’s were experiencing the same situation, so I didn’t feel like it was a lack of anything I could have done. Sign of the times.
In regards to making music, do you have any regrets or wishes if you could live through it all again?
Not really, but I feel my departure in 1996 to the UK was a bit premature, as I was still trying to build my name globally and develop as an artist and music producer. I was getting known in the underground music and DJ community and just starting to have paying clients book sessions with me, outside of my own production. I was also starting to be booked outside California, so things were looking positive. 3rd Floor Productions and BPM was a very special place for all of us, and it brought everyone together from the electronic music scene. I don’t think there was a local DJ or House Music producer who didn’t visit or rent a studio up there. There were at least 6 studios simultaneously making electronic music at any given time with everyone doing their own thing. It’s where many San Francisco producers started, or at the very least create their first record. It was special, one of kind, and I miss the eclectic and unpredictable creative energy. But I believe we, including myself, DJ Rasoul, DJ Digit and DJ EFX from 3rd Floor Productions, who left San Francisco to the UK should have gone, but came back after a month or two, instead of years, to continue what we were achieving at home, while continuing to build solid connections throughout Europe. Don’t get me wrong, I had a blast travelling and playing all over Europe, but I never felt grounded like I did back home. And it’s not like we couldn’t come back. There’s something attractive about international artists, especially from the West Coast, which was new and sounded significantly different from Detroit, Chicago or New York. In the end, it all unraveled for us in the UK due to conflict of interests and lack of direction. I was always under the gun to finish new projects and remixes, so it was difficult to find time to diversify my musical skills to other instruments. So, I do wish I would have had more time to develop creative sound libraries for future projects, pick up a new instrument to learn, and/or bring in talented musicians to help develop ideas.
Do you still make music and how does your music being reissued to a new generation make you feel? Does it inspire you to put out music? Or perhaps revisiting some unreleased music you might have?
Sure, but I own and run a growing coffee shop and I’m married now, so my time is limited. I have around 20 projects and four remixes, to finish up, but we’ll see. You’ll have to ask my wife when I can have some time off. But I’m starting to act up at work, so maybe it will be sooner rather than later.
Is there anything else you wish to talk about or share with us?
In light of all the online infighting of old vs. new DJ’s, techniques with the new technology, social media DJ’s, sync buttons, AI generated music, etc., all of you, will you please, for the love of God, Alah, or Buddha, “shut the fuck up!”. Good talent will always shine through. It might not be right away, but the atrocious falsities that continually plague the music industry will always be noticed and discarded, one way or another. So don’t worry about it. Do your thing with passion, respect, and most of all…love.
Tim Humphrey
Pre-order ‘Full Moon’ EP on vinyl here
