In amidst the endless how-to-hakken reels....
... and the countless clips of scanty-clad female deejays jiggling as they performatively tweak the knobs
... driving huge crowds inexplicably wild with the tame-old same-old sounds of an endless, extending-into-perpetuity 90s (and not even the good parts of the '90s!)...
in amongst all that, you do come across some nerdily informative reels of a historical bent on Instagram
Such as the triffic little micro-essays done by DJ Zinc, where he'll break down the technology and techniques used in a classic track, enumerate the samples and the breaks... position the track in the unfolding dialectic of the nuum.... maybe even have a tale about where and when it was made and how long it took (usually a matter of hours) ... and often he'll throw in a few personal memories of first-hearing or first-playing it out himself at the Roller Express or somewhere like that
He did DJ Vibes's "Obsession (Music So Wonderful)" the other day... talking about what it was made of... how it came along at this moment when happy hardcore and jungle had still not yet branched off from each other - such that a tune like "Obsession" could be played alongside "The Dark Stranger", Dougal could do a set in between Randall and Hype.
It reminded me what a teeeeeeeearin' tune it was and is
Seemed to be on the pirates incessantly at one point
I always forget it's called "Obsession", so indelible is the hook "Music So Wonderful" (or is it "Music's So Wonderful" - on the original track by Vivian Lee it's definitely "Music's")
But it's aptly titled, it does have a feverishly obsessed feel - that fixated-feeling 4/4/ that comes in every so often before the breaks take over completely
Along with the Think and the Amen and the Vivian Lee vocal and the T99 noise, Zinc indicates a chunk of Alec Empire's "You Must Confront" in there - the doomy horn-like fanfare-blare.
Zinc also had a bit of an exclusive: some prototype artwork for the Asylum label shared by Vibes - mockups done by an artist called Deano or probably more likely Dino (can't trust the AI captioning)
I follow Zinc too. “Obsession” is exactly the sort of record I’ve been working through in a book I’ve just finished on darkside and early jungle: that four-to-the-floor drive and euphoric vocal, then a straight-up jungle drop, with the Cape Fear-like fanfare giving the whole thing a dark charge.
ReplyDeleteThe Dougal/Randall/Hype memory places those combinations within shared circuits. That gets at what I’ve been calling latency. Looking backwards, we call “Obsession” a hybrid, as though the worlds it supposedly combines were already separate. The separation itself is what needs explaining.
The Asylum mock-ups fit beautifully euphoria could picture itself in a straitjacket.
Zinc’s breakdowns also make the construction available for further work. He’s returning the decisions along with the sounds. A genre can become settled history while its procedures remain unfinished business. Could a record sound unmistakably 1993 and still do something you weren’t prepared for? That seems the live question for revival...
Ooh that is a book I want to read!
DeleteYes good point - knowledge of what happened later warps our understanding of what it felt like in realtime. There was no split in 93, no reason to think things would branch off - all the elements were turbulently roiling inseparably
Thanks, Simon , I’d be delighted to send you the manuscript. “All the elements turbulently roiling inseparably” gets right to the experience I’m trying to understand. I’ve found the contact address on your profile, so I’ll send it over by email. Best
ReplyDeleteThat would be awesome - thanks. the gmail is the one with 'writer' in it, is that the one you found?
ReplyDeleteHi Simon , yes, that’s the one. I’ve just sent it from didac@manrusionica.com. Thanks again!
DeleteZinc’s videos are brilliant I agree!
ReplyDeleteIn these Instagrammology posts you’ve mentioned a few things adjacent to hard techno atm - schranz, cloudy, and of course the hakken. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the current hard techno movement in general!
Purists say it’s not really techno at all, in many ways it’s more of an umbrella term for ‘modern hard dance music’ than a strict genre. It’s very wide ranging movement/term, akin to ‘rave’ or even ‘techno’ itself in the late 80s/early 90s (possibly similar to ‘Pop’ in the 60s?). At the big events like XXL or Terminal V you’ll hear everything from the 90s influenced trance/hard house you mentioned here, through hard techno headliners like Holy Priest and Restricted, to acid techno like 999999999, schranz like Klangkuenstler, all the way to really hard industrial stuff like SLVL and Kruelty. But everyone wears a Teletech or 44 Label T Shirt, drops a pill and enjoys it all the same.
It’s defo the biggest emergent movement in uk and global dance culture for years, I still find it surprising that something so extreme has become so popular (especially in the uk, where nuum-derived styles or various forms of house have generally dominated in the last 25 years)
Musically, it’s very non-purist, much of it seems to be more like the latest development in the euro-hardcore continuum rather than having much to do with “proper” techno (a good thing in my books!) - 90s trance stuff aside. It certainly has been shaped by the atemporality effect of the internet you mention in these Instagrammology posts, you’ll hear digi-maximalist production and the latest hardstyle kick innovations (zaag, kloenk, microwave etc) alongside 90s gabber kicks and synths (the biggest track last year was a new version of DJ Bounty Hunter’s Woops, a 94 release on Bonzai!). But listen to a Holy Priest or Klofama set, it doesn’t sound like the 90s at all. For pure viscerality and hyper dedicated acolytes, it’s unmatched in 2026
As a dance music fan I have a very similar feed on IG: Some interesting things ive noticed on my feed are a) old promo vids/ads for 90s eurohardcore/gabber raves and compilations b) reels playing vinyl of stuff in that vein, oftentimes tracks that are absent from streaming services for whatever reason c) maybe its just because I'm a huge dark psytrance/psycore fan but I get a lot of reels of psycore parties mostly in India/Brazil/Eastern Europe. that whole dark end of psytrance has progressed a lot since the 2000s from conventional darkpsy to hi-tech (a sort of brighter, faster, and cleaner variant of darkpsy) to psycore (dark psytrance at hardcore and very often speedcore tempos of 200-300+! bpm). its interesting because the music seems too fast to dance to and people dance and groove to it but to an underlying halftime pulse. im sure there's a lot of ketamine involved.
ReplyDeleteIHP - That's the interesting that about all social media is that your picture of the world is constituted by the algo learning from what you slow down to look at and giving you more of that... and so we all end up in slightly different worlds.... it's a real entropic, shattering-of-monoculture thing... i wonder if you could push back at it by deliberately looking at the things you are least interested in and then it would gradually widen out.... but yeah i haven't seen the psy-trance stuff you refer to even though I was quite taken by psy-trance as a subculture at the end of '90s, early 2000s... so it's still going strong then? still evolving? the speeding up / half-time thing is interesting, independently coming up with the same internal structure division that jungle did
DeleteYeah the whole psytrance sphere has evolved a lot since the 90s particularly in the darker and harder end of the spectrum… never rly made the connection between the halftime grooves of psycore and similar patterns of movement dancing to jungle but you’re correct about that.
DeleteOne thing I’ve noticed about psycore is that frequently the tracks will have a half note crash or other percussive pulse which people move to while the kick and bass run at the full 200+ bpm — overall what interests me most is that the music is at nasenbluten/terrorcore tempos but the overall feel of the music is less aggressive and frenetic, almost closer to dark ambient at times (indeed, there is a subgenre called Slambient)
People at psycore parties generally tend to gently wobble around to the music rather than dance super frenetic like a Hakken https://youtu.be/BZa3qX0E8Pg?is=fDg7979ENiil7yTy (this above all else is what gives credence to the ketamine factor seeing as it’s hard to dance in a k-hole)
Spiro - interesting, now you've got me intrigued.
ReplyDeleteAfter posting this post, I realised there was a bit of contradiction in me kvetching about the endless-90sness peddled by these deejays and then me enthusing about a different kind of 90s-forever, i.e. the nerdy breakdowns of old skool tracks by greying deejays about ten years younger than me (he looks good though Zinc, whereas some of the other veterans are looking a bit rough, on the portly side).
But now you've got intrigued by talk of zaag, kloenk, and microwave and digi-max tricks...
I suppose definitely i ought to be ideologically on the side of this massive pill-monster sound that seems to be largely critically ignored
It doesn't come across on a phone, i'm sure it's much more electric in situ.
i will give Holy Priest and Klofama a listen... SVL, Kruelty and Klangkuenstler too
it sounds like it's a sort of omni-white, omni-Euro sound, like the things that are not in the mix (i.e.African American influences, Afro-Caribbean influences, actual contemporary Africa influences) define it as much as it's actual components... and there's a 45 year span of euro-hardcore-trance-etc tried-and-true elements to draw on and rework
Hard techno does seem to be ideologically Reynolds-coded! critically disparaged, with many of the exact same criticisms levelled at ardkore: “it’s not proper techno”, “it’s just drug noise”, “it has no soul”, “it’s just for kids” etc.
ReplyDeleteA bastardised form of techno, based around a scenius dynamic, kick and screech innovations evolving incrementally, month by month at the hands of the collective, rather than lead by auteurs. That’s where the increasingly extreme and abstract kick design evolves from - kloenk & pvc evolved from gated, microwave evolved from zaag which evolved from piep, barrel evolved from industrial etc
It’s mutated at a speed rarely seen in the modern era: only a couple of years ago, the music was less harsh, more simply constructed, now it’s much more sound design focused and harder and darker with the turn towards industrial kicks
Excluding the bouncy trance-leaning style, it’s a rare example of futurism (Futurism?) in contemporary dance music. obviously dystopian rather than utopian, it revels in it - parallels to 93 darkcore here. there’s an explosive, obliterative jouissance in hard techno, the will to power and to become the master of destruction
There’s a strong element of theatre in amongst the sturm und drang - many DJs wear full face masks and gothic/militaristic outfits - Vendex, Holy Priest, Kruelty, Carv etc
The phrase “dark times hard techno” is thrown around semi-ironically in the scene, on t shirts etc, I think there’s actually something in that. As we descend further into the era of stagnated growth and squeezed living standards, global instability, and political division, this music feels like an appropriate response - as pressure-value, or social mirror, rather than UR-style, erm… resistance
I agree it’s an omni-white omni-European sound. A distillation and intensification of the most effective elements in the euro-nuum. Roots n future for sure, but it’s the euro-volk roots of the hakken and Moroder and the Rotterdam docks and Marinetti.
A few sets I’d recommend:
Restricted @ Hive fest. Consummate, definitive introduction to the genre
https://youtu.be/TxCMRS23Dy8
Holy Priest @ Tomorrowland
https://youtu.be/M66W6tETI0E
Kruelty @ Verknipt
https://youtu.be/3HJAZUXsklw
Dyen @ Nacht Wacht
https://youtu.be/v_Yrz2IeZ-s