Acida Dominga
Her name says it all. Berlin-based artist Acida Dominga lives and breathes hypnotic, 303-driven sound, pushing acid to a new level from her minimalist studio and in her live sets. At the heart of her all-hardware setup is the legendary Roland TB-303, paired with a carefully chosen sampler, drum machine and mixer.
What makes her story unusual is how recent it is. She only started producing in 2023, and it was the TB-303 itself that pulled her in. She describes the machine as her way into music and her teacher both at once, right down to its famously imperfect sequencer, which often does its own thing. She has learned to let those happy accidents happen, and reckons the result is almost always more interesting than whatever she had planned. The perfection of imperfection, as she puts it.
The roots go back further than the studio, though. She grew up around the Belgian and Dutch border as a teenager in the 90s, where acid was everywhere, in clubs and hidden basements, and that raw, hypnotic sound clearly stayed with her. Her own music sits somewhere between acid and techno, built on raw analogue sound and vocal samples, like a collage of fragments and memories reassembled into something new.
She is a genuine 303 obsessive. Her signature "bassline tests" run the same pattern through anywhere from four to ten machines at once, always including the original, and she has a lovely way of framing it: if the real TB-303 is the original artwork, the clones are its serial pop-art version, carrying the idea out to everyone. Her current core rig is deliberately lean and doubles as her live setup, built around an AKAI MPC as the brain, the TB-303 as the starting point of every track, an Acidlab Drumatix for drums, a Mackie mixer she loves for its raw character, and a pair of BOSS reverb pedals for the final polish.
She has just released her second vinyl, a remix EP of her debut "Imagination Creates Reality," with four artists reworking her material, including her life and creative partner Italo Brutalo. Being remixed, she says, feels a little like becoming a grandparent.
