Acre – Nocturnal Memories

The Manchester-based producer speaks with Aurora Mitchell, revealing the long-standing relationship with Pinch that resulted in Tectonic releasing his debut album Better Strangers. 

There are a lot of reasons why we come across producers operating anonymously. It gives well known artists breathing space to experiment in a different genre to the one they’ve established themselves in; it’s a protective veil for those wanting to keep their lives private and has even worked as a way to give more attention to unknown productions. For Manchester’s Acre, the intention is solely to allow his tracks to be the centre of his identity as a producer. There’s not even a birth name that we can tie to him.

Acre reached an interesting moment in time when he did an all-original productions mix for Dummy last year. Up to this point he had only portrayed himself as an entity visually lurking in the darkness of shadows, however now we are being shown something more. Artwork for that mix shows Acre sat on a deck chair shielding his face from the flash of a camera with the back of his hand, and here we’re able to see more than just a silhouette of a producer behind a growing catalogue of gritty grime and techno hybrids. When I speak to him just before he heads across the Atlantic on a trip to LA, there’s still an air of detachment to him as a person in our method of communication – email.

While Acre may come from Manchester, the grimy techno he’s been putting out fits in more with the current sounds and scenes of London and Bristol. Despite his sound resonating with what’s happening in other UK cities, it’s Manchester that Acre considers his musical home as well as place of residence. “There’s a lot going on here, mainly club nights like Project 13, Faktion, Swing Ting and a new, really good club called Hidden has just opened up,” he explains.

Instrumental grime and techno have both blossomed in recent years in the UK but it’s only recently that we’ve begun to properly witness the two merge together. Night Slugs really paved the way in those terms, with releases on the London label from Helix, Egyptrixx and Neana between 2012 and 2014 being the first wave to sonically experiment with the boundaries of the two areas while making us question the relationship between them. The melting of the two genres into one mould is still relatively new though and at the moment Acre is at the forefront of this amalgamation along with peers Filter Dread and Air Max ’97.

Acre started releasing music through a few labels in 2013, but prior to that point he met the man who’s been a constant throughout everything he’s done – dubstep pioneer Pinch.  Before the Tectonic boss put out any of Acre’s music, however, the Manchester producer found a release to Visionist’s label Lost Codes with the five-track EP Forgotten. The centrepiece of that was “Physically”, a clanking track with the sound of laser beam shooting ferociously across spacious plains, and it was first given radio play on Ben UFO’s Hessle Audio Rinse show. It’s an important moment of recognition for any producer coming up in dance music. “This one, sounds of Acre, absolutely amazing tune,” gushed the Hessle man on air.

A year and a half after and two releases later, Acre finally solidified his musical relationship with Pinch by releasing the mind melting Icons EP at the end of 2014. There’s a reason, I’m told, why it took so long for the pair to come together on a project. “I met Pinch in 2012 and sent him some of my music and he got back to me saying he wanted to release it,” Acre says. “Unfortunately I had a hard drive crash and lost everything from the first release we had planned so I had to rebuild everything from scratch.”

It was at this point the realities of framing his productions as a debut album started to come together. “After Icons got released Pinch rang me up and asked me if I wanted to do a LP,” Acre reveals. Naturally, he agreed. Some of the productions that ended up on his debut album, Better Strangers, had already been formed in some way I’m told, tracks like “Jouska”, “Dek U”, “Holding Hands” and “Tarantula”. “A few were already pretty much done but I still spent a while working on them and adding more detail,” he says, adding that 40 to 60 per cent of the LP had been completed before he even agreed to release it.

“The album was made on my laptop and headphones in my room, usually around 4-8 in the morning,” Acre reveals. Production-wise, it’s a reflection of his personal taste – having previously said that he doesn’t like music to sound overproduced. Flickering and distorting, much like the warped, bleeding displays of black and white waves of the album’s cover, it often sounds like the tracks are clipping by accident, but that was how he was aiming for it to sound.

“I think it sounds a bit more human when music is a bit rough around the edges,” he tells me, “also, it makes it more abrasive. On the album I use distortion to some degree on every track and that’s something I’ve been enjoying messing with, it all goes towards keeping the album within a similar vein throughout.” The human element is something that was taken into consideration outside of just how the music sounded. The album’s title, Better Strangers, refers to an unfortunate realisation that we have to deal with so many times in life. People come into our lives, becoming so vital and important to us and then leave to exist merely as memories that we reshuffle to the front of our thoughts every once in a while. For Acre, the title was recognition that sometimes separation is needed, that people can be better off as strangers rather than friends.

“The album isn’t like a straight falling in love then breaking up story, even the term ‘better strangers’ for me wasn’t entirely negative, I would say even though there is sadness there, it was also a relief and a moment of clarity,” he explains. There’s not necessarily a specific story tied to those emotions, I’m told, as it was more about being able to express a feeling. “It’s just how life influences what I do creatively. The concept has definitely added a melancholic mood to the record in certain places but I don’t think it’s fully controlled everything that’s going on, there are some happier moments in the album even though they’re quite subtle.” Acre admits he put a lot of work into trying to move his sound forward to get this balance, and create something he’s never done before.

“Everyone goes through these things and my way of dealing with it is to offload those feelings into the music I make, it’s a way to move on.” He continues, “ both “Love” and “Better Strangers” are closely linked, I made them at the same time and they contain a lot of the same sounds and emotions and are both about this concept of letting people go.” It seemed fitting for him to bookend the album with these two tracks, “so it has this sort of cyclical format where it ends at the same point it started.” Both tracks center on a similarly constructed shredded electric organ loop, with “Love” featuring a piercing shrill that sounds off into the distance like a muted scream, a cry out for something lost. The album pulls together the sound of thundering club experimentations, mechanic grime workouts and blistering beatless excursions too.

There are even parts that sound like imagined videogame soundtracks, a character lonely walking along in an interim level, occasionally shooting down targets that wander across its path. It’s an area that Acre would like to be involved in for real. “Yeah I play video games,” he states “I’d love to compose some music for games, I’ve been looking at some of this new VR stuff and it’s definitely a plan of mine to do something in that area.” While there are all these different threads running stylistically and texturally throughout the album, they all come together in a similar way.

“What I wanted to do with the album was to create something that sounds coherent throughout but at the same time explore different ideas and emotions. That was the most difficult part for me because it’s almost like saying I want it to be different, but the same, which sounds like a bit of a paradox,” he feels.

Looking forward to representing these tracks in a darkened club environment, Acre enjoys playing his own music out and wants to transfer that into playing live rather than just DJing. The live set in dance music can be hard to configure and tends to be more of a rarity, working out successfully more for some than others. “I think for the music I make a live set would be more suitable,” he states, “it would allow me to fully explore some of the more experimental ideas I have.”

Interview by Aurora Mitchell

Better Strangers by Acre is out now on Tectonic 

Tectonic on Juno