Honeysmack is Australia's Acid Punk Rebel

You may know David Haberfeld as Honeysmack: He's been coxing the Roland 101, 303, 808 and 909 to scream songs of acid and techno since for over two decades. Throughout the '90s he was somehow simultaneously the guy playing warehouse raves alongside underground legends and festival stages alongside guitars with people attached to them—people who have long been forgotten while Honesysmack remains.

Standing on the other side of a new millennium acid's moment can feel like a far away thing, all painted over and explained. A cultural phenomenon: the emergence of ecstasy, Thatcher's Britain—and you dumb kids will never see anything quite like it. But acid still lives and for Haberfeld getting impregnated started with early hip hop and electro, "that really fucking blew my mind. I thought this is outer space. This is outer space."

At university, dreams of making exploitation films started to fade in the face of an Australian film industry output  of pablum like The Man From Snowy River. However, universities have equipment and access to analogue synths and tape loops, generating the realisation that: "hang on, I can kind of put this together. This kind of sounds like the music I like". Money was saved and an Ensoniq ASR-10 sampler was bought.

He recorded an EP with Philip Samartzis as Hysterical Systems, and got it released on the defunct UK-based Kickin Records. David says he was "an obnoxious cunt" at the time, and without the instant feedback loop of the Internet it took "UK magazines start reviewing and putting articles about you and it starts to reverberate back to Australia. Then people start saying 'oh, hang on, this loud mouth idiot is actually, you know…'" He stopped there out of unwarranted humility.

For reasons that still seem confusing to him, he was known mostly "known as a hardcore and gabber DJ", playing as DJ Speedball. He wrote a declaration for Inpress saying; "you know, this kind of artistic wank bullshit, I said I just don't play that, you know? I play other music as well, and so I just kind of then began Honeysmack."

With the name, a long career of playing acid and techno live began—something rare to this day. "I don't understand why people go and see a DJ. It blows my fucking mind. Whereas a live act—I'm not talking about someone with a laptop  I'm talking about someone who brings out some gear—it's just like seeing a band. A real live performance is like, okay there's something there. You can see the person, the artist composing or performing. And that's what I was passionate about."

I don't know why he talks in the past tense, the passion is still evident when you hear him talk about the equipment that defined an era. He's no snob about the sound, "pretty much any monophonic analogue synthesiser can make a 303 sound or close enough thereto"; the appeal is something more subtle, "each machine has its own funk". Playing off each other without the lockstep of a processor, "Analogue synthesis is the sound of electricity" he says. Asking, "you think all the Detroit composer and DJs, you think they wanted 303s and 101s and all that? They wanted digital synthesisers. They wanted the future. This analogue equipment is what was accessible."

Haberfeld says of Detroit during the '90s, "people in Melbourne felt very connected to places like Detroit, we had connections to Detroit. We had a lot of the DJs and artists come over. As artists we were sending stuff to labels in Detroit and we had a connection with people like Dan Bell, Claude Young. The Derrick Mays and Jeff Mills would come over as well. They were considered a bit more harder to in contact with. But that was just because promoters kept them, you know, close at bay". Haberfeld befriended people like Freddie Fresh, "Freddie Fresh came out here and he played the most. There used to be a crew called Teriyaki Anarki Saki and they put him on and he just played techno party, he played electro. He played like early hip hop electro at Teriyaki. And the place went fucking apeshit. I remember he was at my place (beforehand), he was falling asleep. I said 'they're going to fucking love it'. He was new to the kind of success that these guys were starting to receive. Then he saw this massive queue in the middle of fucking Melbourne. What the fuck is Melbourne? And he was just so humbled by it."

Haberfeld has always stood within and without acid and techno in Australia. He's an punk iconoclast when all we seem to imagine is smiley face t-shirts and hugging. "I always existed on the fringes, on the peripherals. Because people had a hard time chewing what I did, or digesting my moniker or stage presence, you know. It's like: I'm not going to fucking explain it to you. It's like telling you a joke and then explaining it. That wasn't up to me." Not that everyone even knew who he was. "I would hear every second week, Honeysmack was two Japanese guys in Sydney, it was a guy in Adelaide. I felt like, should I be telling people who I actually am? I thought, why the fuck should I tell them? It makes no difference what I say to them so I may as well just embrace the fucked-upedness of it all. The weirdness of it all. The anarchy of it all. You tell me who I am."

Famously, Haberfeld's clip for his well-known Burt Bacharach-sampling track "Walk on Acid", was banned. Directed by Phillip Brophy, Coca-Cola had a problem with their logo being featured so prominently. Now this could be parlayed into all the internet-fuelled hysteria an artist could ever want. But in another reminder of how quickly things have changed, he recalls not being able to generate any publicity out of the censorship. "I remember my manager got on the phone ringing every major media outlet, lined up a stack of interviews and basically they all just said "sorry, we're not interviewing him because they're one of our major advertisers".

Despite this, it did lead to some recognition:  he was signed to the now-defunct Zomba Group alongside Britney Spears, who was promoting her movie Crossroads at the time. He was asked to support her at a promotional performance at Fox Studios, Sydney. "It went down like someone taking a shit in an elevator. It was a joke. People screaming at the top of their lungs 'Britney, Britney!' If anything could deafen the sound of a 909, a MPC, and a 303 it's 30,000 prepubescent girls screaming for Britney Spears." A titan of acid brought down by children.

Though not really toppled at all. He's still doing it, releasing on his label Hand Made Acid, still plugging in the machines, still finding "another space to investigate. Whether it's a creative space, whether it's a sonic space, compositional space." And although he disavows sounding like an "old, wise sage", there's something profound about his question: "Isn't it amazing that the future sounds like something that was made 30 years ago?"

Kane Daniel makes dumb jokes on Twitter here: @kanedaniel