The original acid house boom produced an abundance of cartoony fare alongside more serious floorfillers. For every euphoric "Acid Tracks" there was a nutty "Activ 8 (Come with Me)"; the sublime "Voodoo Ray" could effortlessly segue into the dayglo patchwork of "Theme from S-Express". Those larger-than-life acid acts often had an absurd concept attached, or some grandiose scheme in mind. Chris Peat from pop-acid act Altern-8 even stood as a political candidate in the 1992 General Election in Britain, representing his own Hardcore (Altern8-ive) party. Needless to say, he didn’t get far. San Fernando Valley artist Zane Reynolds takes a similarly playful approach to the work he puts out under his SFV Acid alias. On The Dwell, his debut full-length, he's patched together a series of tracks entirely written on equipment set up at his local Starbucks. In 2013, coffee buzz is the new acid rush.
There's a distinction to be made between the conceptual cloaking Reynolds has thrown over this work and the music found inside. Occasionally it's frivolous-- there's a skip in the step to "PT Sex" that comes close to pushing it toward novelty status-- but mostly this is a surprisingly inward-looking work. It's reminiscent of the kind of juxtaposition found when encountering the public and creative faces of Richard D. James or Luke Vibert. Outwardly, they're brash, prone to pranks, rarely keeping a straight face. But the music usually has a much deeper value. The Dwell takes a similar tone, working through mournful late night club jams like "Fresh and Easy" and "Dwell on 2". There's exuberance, too, but even that feels tempered by introspection. "Mocha" pulls hard on the feel of Grandmaster Flash's "The Message", only to dampen it with a bittersweet whistling keyboard motif.
Reynolds has stated that this material was designed to echo the feel of small town moments, providing a soundtrack to the "business parks, strip malls, and diner burgers" he immerses himself in on a regular basis. It adds a loneliness to much of this work, a feeling of someone outside that world looking in. The struggle to connect is key, often throwing up moments of ugliness such as the distorted voice belching through the tinny rhythms of "Money". If the original acid movement sought to escape the everyday through a sense of communality, through people with wildly different values coming together under one roof, The Dwell veers in the opposite direction. The coffee shop recording studio positions Reynolds alone amid a small cross-section of society, where he retreats into his own head. It lends a dual sense of inclusion and exclusion, a feeling of being immersed in the world while being utterly removed from it.
That awareness of a creeping sense of isolation while being connected to society en masse isn’t particularly unique, although it is at least intriguing that Reynolds tried to get there via a template that was once all about finding a common bond. He's mostly let down by the execution, which leans too far toward overly familiar 303 acid sounds and house-y keyboard figures. Often the arrangements are too skeletal, or build a little too predictably. Burial did the "lone raver" concept a lot more effectively, capturing a sense of seclusion that this record only hints at on occasion. Mostly it feels like Reynolds stirred a few too many colors into the mix, lampooning old acid records, working out of a Starbucks, cooking up the "small town" theme, attempting to make something he describes as being "steeped in blue collar luxury." The Dwell buckles under the weight of that ambition, resulting in a work that never really finds a satisfying place of its own to go.
