Britain’s Acid House Finds a Home in L.A.

Acid House--a controversial musical and cultural movement that has swept through the British underground scene--is coming to Los Angeles.

Randy Moore, a nascent local club entrepreneur who tested the waters at two locations with his club SextacyCQ last month, is headed for Britain to meet with London Acid House kingpin Paul Oakenfold, who Moore said is interested in being a partner in the L.A. club. As of now, Moore plans to open Sextacy in mid-December at an as-yet undetermined location with a capacity of at least 800 people.

Acid House’s adopted symbol is the bland, innocuous “smiley face” that adorns many patrons’ T-shirts. But in Britain much of the press coverage has focused on a not-so-innocent connection with--as the name implies--hallucinogenic drugs.

The death of a young woman last month at a London Acid House club has been attributed to the drug known as Ecstasy. Moore, 23, acknowledged that both Ecstasy and LSD have been big parts of the Acid House scene in Britain.

Moore, who says his only experience with hallucinogens came when he was once slipped a dose of LSD without his knowledge, believes drugs will play a much smaller role in Los Angeles. He cited cultural differences between here and Britain. The high rate of unemployment in Britain leads young people to grasp onto diversions with great fervency, he said.

“In England, anything that takes young people further away from their (bleak) future is big,” he said. “That’s what punk was--forget what’s going on, we have no future.”

However, Moore did describe Acid House music and club designs as being intended to create and/or enhance psychedelic experiences.

The music, a beat-heavy extension of the electronic dub and “house” styles, is being made in England by groups such as Oakenfold’s Electra and bands with names like D Mob and 808 State, Moore said.

“The music is basically not songs,” he said. “It’s tracks of sound, very heavy on the low end and very heavy on the rhythm. They generally run at 120 to 130 beats per minute, really loud--bam, bam, bam. . . . It’s not really melodic. It’s almost all instrumental, really spacey stuff. . . . The slides, films and lighting effects in the clubs are designed to take people to another state. The beat is hitting them so hard it makes them move, and the music takes them to another plane. They’re just lost in a trance all night.”

There’s an active quality, Moore said, that distinguishes Acid House from its ‘60s drug-culture forebears. “(In the ‘60s) it was a mellow-out-mood kind of thing where people would relax and groove out with it,” he said. “LSD was taking people down where they would sit and stare at the walls. . . . (With Acid House)people instantly start moving and get consumed with it.”

But he does see some bond with the past. “I really think the whole mentality and the idealism of the ‘60s is going to come back through this scene,” he said, claiming that Acid House is less about fashion posing than other underground scenes. “It’s not this real pretentious dress-up thing. It’s about putting all these different people in a room no matter whether they’re black, white, gay or straight and get them together.”

EXCHANGE STUDENTS: With British psychedelia about to come to Los Angeles, it’s only fair that Los Angeles’ new psychedelia is grabbing attention in Britain. L.A.’s Shiva Burlesque has drawn raves from the British rock press far exceeding any attention it’s gotten at home--despite the fact that the band has never toured Britain.

According to singer Jeffrey Clark, it started when David Fricke reviewed a Shiva Burlesque concert in New York for the British rock paper Melody Maker. From there coverage snowballed, with a Melody Maker feature and a review of its recent debut album in the magazine Q.

“Maybe it’s the weather or something in the tea,” Clark joked about why the British seem to like his band.

Now Shiva Burlesque is starting to attract major label attention here, just one of several rising L.A. acts that represent a new kind of psychedelic sound. But this is not the flower-powery pop sound associated with Los Angeles’ “paisley underground” of the early ‘80s. Today’s bands play variations on a murkier, swirling sound that calls to mind the darker side of the first psychedelic music of the ‘60s.

Foremost are Jane’s Addiction (whose recent Warner Brothers debut has been highly praised) and Caterwaul (which has just issued an intriguing EP on IRS, with an album to follow in early 1989). The core of this new sound, though, can be found on the Nate Starkman & Son label, which boasts Shiva along with Savage Republic (a veteran band that just released an album titled “Jamahiraya,” with a sound related to Pink Floyd’s early, cruder experiments) and Red Temple Spirits and Drowning Pool, both of which have darkly hypnotic albums due out soon.

“I think there’s always going to be a revival of these ideas,” Clark said. “They’re strong ideas, the idea of consciousness expansion. We’ve been compared to the Doors and Echo and the Bunnymen, but that’s a facile comparison. As far as writing goes, I’m more interested in people like John Cale and Leonard Cohen.”

But as to the murky textures of the band’s sound, Clark said that some of it came by accident: “We recorded our album with very little money. The murkiness may come from having to record in a tiny, dark room. The next time around I think we can expand it. It’ll still be psychedelic, but not murky.”

BUZZWORDS: Bogart’s in Long Beach is instituting a monthly open microphone night for acoustic musicians and poets. The first will be Nov. 30. Admission is $1.