FeelsLikeAcid

FeelsLikeAcid is a musician from Saint Petersburg who performs live on synths and drum machines. Not a DJ set: everything is played on hardware, in the dawless format, with no laptop in the chain.

He has been making music for ten years, most of it on machines, and playing live for about eight. The turn to hardware started as a practical decision — he wanted a sound he could not get on a computer. The gear brought him to club shows, where the response came quickly, even from people who could not tell what was happening on stage.

He began with old-school rave: 80s acid house and 90s Chicago house. Later he widened the range, picking whichever boxes suit the job — 90s boom bap, Memphis rap, intelligent jungle, dub techno, ambient. For him the point of hardware and the dawless workflow is the depth of hands-on experimentation, the kind computers do not reproduce.

His Bandcamp collects mostly live recordings rather than studio productions — live mixes such as Crematorium Rave (Live Mix) (July 2021), Ambient Waves, Intelligent World (Live Dawless mix) and Night Dub (Live Mix). In August 2024 he put out the ten-track album Underground Essentials, Vol. 1.

For Sonic Shift #31 he played a classic acid house live act on a Roland rig: MC-707 for drums, arrangement and FX, TB-3 for acid bass, SH-01A for leads and sequences. Filmed on three cameras with direct audio.