O.S.T. -- the old school tweeker -- is Chris Douglas, who has also worked as Rook Vallade and in The Church Steps. The San Francisco electronic music technician looks at "acid" as much more than a percolating Roland 303 drum machine building up to ecstatic, club-stompin' crescendos. Douglas interprets the origin of acid house -- Phuture's ground breaking 1987 single "Acid Track" -- not as a utilitarian means of making music but as an electronic storm of naively explored alienation. ...show more

O.S.T. -- the old school tweeker -- is Chris Douglas, who has also worked as Rook Vallade and in The Church Steps. The San Francisco electronic music technician looks at "acid" as much more than a percolating Roland 303 drum machine building up to ecstatic, club-stompin' crescendos. Douglas interprets the origin of acid house -- Phuture's ground breaking 1987 single "Acid Track" -- not as a utilitarian means of making music but as an electronic storm of naively explored alienation.

Furthermore, he has always understood the equally potent definitions of acid both as the hallucinatory brain fry of LSD and as the more commonplace term to describe a oxidizing chemical agent. After more than 10 albums and numerous singles under his various monikers, Douglas remains well outside the established parameters of electronic music. His work is a malevolent mutation of techno into arrhythmic patterns, interwoven digital textures, and amorphous melodies. "Cuivre," from O.S.T.'s 1998 album Fashion For Passion, is an abrasive electronic cut with whole chunks of psuedo-musique concrete uncomfortably situated against a tense polyrhythmic clatter.

O.S.T.'s enigmatically titled album Is Mallachd Gluasad-Inntinn offers "Untitled," whose flanging squeals and terse digital clickery is much closer to the megalomaniacal electronics of Karlheinz Stockhausen than most of what the electronic music scene has to offer these days.. ...show less