Yeah I’m on Acid!

As another endless summer crawls toward a close with a string of oppressively humid days up and down the east coast of the United States, I find myself prone to despair. It’s a familiar mindset in these dog days, in which I am wholly consumed with the impending doom of climate catastrophe and more or less unable to remember a time when i wasn’t slicked in a thin-to-moderate layer of sweat. I went to Europe this summer for a few weeks, it turns out it’s hot there too.

It’s easy to get consumed by these end-of-summer doldrums, and find yourself laying half naked in front of a barely working fan, devoid of all hope. Junk-shop techno tracks, like those constructed of late by the Texas-based producer Shit & Shine for labels like Editions Mego and Diagonal have always made easy bedfellows for this sort of brain-cooking climate. And fortunately, just when I needed it the most, the man born Craig Clouse has re-emerged with a real brain-scrambler called “Yeah I’m on Acid!”

Over a bassline that gurgles like boiling yogurt, Clouse takes samples from the immortal tailgate film Heavy Metal Parking Lot, fixating largely on hedonistic teens loudly shouting their drugs of choice. That’s where the title comes from, of course, but then there’s also a glitchy clip of a guy shouting “Get fuuuuucked up, drink a couple beers, alright,” along with other people just shouting “Cocaine!” and other attendant mantras. If it sounds like a party anthem, it is a little, but it’s stranger than that. Clouse slivers and fucks with the assorted vocal clips, turning the whole thing into this nauseating jam that feels in danger of giving out under its own weight and collapsing in a heap at any moment. In that sense, it feels relatable, an inversion of techno’s Energizer Bunny optimism—it just keeps going and going—for us flesh sacks liable to wilt in the extreme heat. That said, it does have a climactic guitar solo, which offers a sliver of hope that you might white-knuckle your way through the shit anyway.

“Yeah I’m on Acid!” is the first single from the wonderfully named new album called Bad Vibes—due November 9. You can listen up above alongside the video, which pulls the accompanying clips from the film and throws them in a melting-VHS collage.

Correction: The original version of this post had an incorrect release date for Bad Vibes, which is out November 9 on Rocket Recordings.