The Acid Black Girls

The Acid Black Girls are the most well known little known nightclub act of the late 22nd Century. Formed in the ghettoes of the floating city state of Singeapore in 2184 by Filipino Jennilee Maganda, Englishman Arto Willoughby-Strauss, and Cuban Tomas Guttierez, three friends who had grown up poor in the industrial fishery neighborhoods of Singeapore admiring 20th Century American Pop Music, they were soon playing small shows in the alley bars of the Singeapore Low Tide District. Their original three piece orchestrations of Harmonic Guitar (Maganda), Electronic Drums (Guttierez), Keyboards (Willoughby-Strauss), and Vocals (Willoughby-Strauss & Maganda) were soon supplemented by Icelandic multi-instrumentalist Varick Hrafnson who added a variety of fretted instruments to their arrangements. Their ensemble playing was soon very popular among the small unlicensed dancehalls of Singeapore's Dockstreet ghettoes, but it was only with the addition in early 2185 of Marseillean chanteuse and composer Veroniq Ste Sebastien that the definitive Acid Black Girls sound was fully formed. Veroniq added a more traditional roots-rock electric guitar sensibility to the group and contributed in the song writing with her Csound orchestrations and sound design. She also sings occasionally. With the band complete, only one ingredient of the classic Acid Black Girls cocktail was missing, and it was added in the fall of 2185 when Arto Willoughby-Strauss discovered a file cabinet full of unpublished poems by the largely forgotten 21st Century post-language writer JF Quackenbush, Willoughby-Strauss's 12th great grandfather, in the attic of his great granduncles shack on the outskirts of the Singeapore merchant quarter. Willoughby-Strauss and Ste Sebastien were greatly impressed with the poems and neither one of them particularly enjoying lyric writing, they quickly decided to use the poems as a resource from which to draw from in the construction of the Acid Black Girls songs. The band has made such extensive use of Quackenbush's poetry that they have begun to regard him as an unofficial 6th member of the group. They often will describe Quackenbush, who has been dead for 150 years, as their "lyricist" and speak about him in interviews as though he were some mad ghost sitting in a room backstage cranking out lyrics for them. Perhaps it is this supernatural presence then that lends the uneasy, ethereal quality that so many critics have noted in the band's recordings.