A History of Hardcore (the Other Hardcore)

 

This looks like a good read - a history of gabber and all its 21st Century extensions and mutations by Resident Advisor's Holly Dicker. 

https://velocitypress.uk/product/dance-or-die-book/

Refreshingly for a music history, the focus is not the far past but recent history that has barely ceased to be the present - dispatches from the frontline of a living subculture. 

Here Dicker blogs about the genesis of her book:

2017 was my flashpoint. From second wave British industrial techno acts like AnD and Bleaching Agent pushing “Reaktor’s most hard-lined techno concept” Unpolished into the red (in the same venue where Amsterdam gabberhouse hardened into hardcore); to hearing my first OG Rotterdam gabber set in the plush Koninklijke Schouwburg theatre in the Hague, of all places, during TodaysArt; to finally witnessing Dutch hardcore history unfold in a human-hive of Australians (tracksuits) and undercuts at the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht for the resurrection of Thunderdome: 2017 felt like a seismic year for hardcore, and I was at the epicentre, living in the Netherlands.... 

I had moved to the Dutch harbour city in May 2015...  after escaping Berlin, where I consumed – and was consumed by – techno (and breakcore) for four strobing years. I experienced diehard club culture beneath the streets of Köpenickerstrasse in Kreuzberg and Gerichtstrasse in Wedding, spending every Friday to Monday – but usually starting on Wednesdays during Boiler Room Berlin stream days (where I interned) – shuffling between repurposed reinforced concrete wombs, feeling truly liberated in the crush of human bodies synched up to sound.... 

Talking about rave culture is much much easier than writing about it. And I really miss my radio shows with Red Light Radio and PRSPCT, which inspired the chatty informal style of the book. I hope when you read this, it feels like you are backstage at a rave with us, eavesdropping on the stories – or around the kitchen table at the inevitable after. This history of hardcore has taken years to complete, and it’s still not finished. It will never be finished because hardcore cannot be tamed to a page or forced into a single narrative. It’s too rich and rebellious for that...

Hardcore isn’t for everybody, but everybody is welcome in this enduring phuture rave movement. And once you’re in, you’re in all the way, diehard and dancing to the death. Dance or Die!

Funny that she says 2017 is the flashpoint, given its significance in the Acardipane cosmology...

de donkere kant

 

Hithouse the label created by the wonderfully named Peter Slaghuis

The Unknown - trio featuring the young Paul Elstak of gabber renown

this track flipside of this tune which comes in a prophetic "Hooligan Mix"

this also a bit uncouth 

great nagging riff + breakbeat combo there  - yet the result has completely different feel to the UK breakbeat tekno 

gabber gabber hey day

 

(via CardrossManiac 2)

the other Santana

a 91 tekno slammer I never heard before

from the Dynomite EP!!  - and yes the exclamation marks are part of the title but come after the EP

also from the EP:









technotronic music has come a long way since '91 - but in a way, it hasn't

Liquid Metal = Omar Santana, the edit maestro



i remember his name first as the edits chappy on Mantronix productions like



and this megamix of the entirety of Music Madness the LP, heard after you'd listened to the whole thing as tracks (the edits credit here shared with Chep Nunez and Carlos Berrios, fellow Edit Kings)




yes his roots go way back to the early 80s - to freestyle and electro

hence the Cutting Records connection





but they go way forward into gabba - like this track from Mokum



subtlety's never been Omar's forte - and he knows it!



(and anyway - as Mike Skinner put it, "subtle" is too often a synonym for boring)



original (c)rude boy




discogs bio:

This tale from the hardside begins back in the early '80's in the metropolis that we know as New York City. John "Jellybean" Benitez's residency at The Funhouse Club in Manhattan had fulfilled the job of inspiring a whole new generation to take the sound of dance music well into the future and beyond.

One of these disciples went by the name of Omar Santana. Straight outta the borough of Queens in New York, Omar slowly began to make a name for himself by Dj'ing as part of the Dynamic Rockers crew, putting on jams, sound-battles and creating a solid underground vibe to rock the city with. Through this, Omar started linking up with likes of Arthur Baker as well as the Tommy Boy and Sleeping Bag Records camps. This led on to much studio action as he started producing in a big way and during the '80's worked alongside some of the true sound pioneers like Mantronix, Boogie Boys, T la Rock and Stetsasonic.

The man was now on a proper roll and going from strength to strength by editing and remixing such artists as Public Enemy, Janet Jackson, Simply Red, Quincy Jones and The Rolling Stones. The list is endless..... Omar was in serious demand and very quickly became known as one of the "Editing Kings" who would consequently stand the test of time as an inspiration for all future warriors in the trade of cut-up beats and sound.

The time had come for Omar to create an outlet for his material, so H2oh Recordings the came into being, releasing it's own brand of Hardcore flava, the label built up a strong reputation for itself and such was it's succes that a sister label by name of Tricked Out Recordings was brought into operation to concentrate and add even greater ammunition to the audio warfare in beats that was going on inside his head by setting the agenda for the Hard Hop/breaks sounds in America

new-old (something for your mind)

2019 reproduction-antique junglizm

got the sound down perfect

but using a sample i associate most with the gabbatrance classic on Dance Ecstasy 2001

donder en bliksem (subculture - the meaning of hardstyle)

"this is the thunder running through your veins"

trance + gabba (not enough gabber) + self-empowerment pop = hardstyle

not so much positive hardcore as positive-thinking hardcore



he might be bald and he might use distorted kickdrums, but this man's soul is pure uncut Katy Perry

What's the obsession with thunder? Is this some kind of Norse thing?

This dude is supposed to be the pioneer of H-style



It's like if Marc Acardipane = Motorhead or Sabbath, these dudes = Triumph or Survivor.

Some of the tunes in this set get a tad more interesting on the production front - skidding screeches, hysterical builds, a kind of serrated hygiene



With the "weekend warriors" Valhalla vibe, some of it reminds slightly of what I think they now call "power metal" - groups inspired by melodic metal from the Eighties.... Dio, Iron Maiden, that epic anthemic rousing sound, with galloping rhythms... boy's own stories of glory, an emptying out of the blues base residue in metal, the raunchless evacuation of sex too -  even that crude phallic-pelvic thrust sexuality  - in favor of chaste adventurism.




Was right all those years ago to connect gabba with Nintendo etc

Superheroism as a cheap rousing high

That "No Guts No Glory" looks like Disneyland for slightly older kids

Wait a minute...



"Children's entertainment" as per Alan Kirby



One tune in that Headhunterz set is titled "Dragonborn" - so yeah, very sword 'n' sorcery, Game of Thrones-y, and  Iron Dream-y.

"Dragonblood unites us all" - a  rally cry at this hardstyle festival Defqon -  which is nomadic between the Nederlands, Chile and Australia.



The relentless triumphalism - the density of "up!" words in the lyrics - the crescendo upon crescendo  - the sterile sturm und drang of the sound - it all adds up to a sort of Red Bull / Irn Bru Energy vision of fascism





Hmmm this lot seem unwholesome





Them and all






Back on the amusement park for bigger kids angle,  the baroque arpeggiated stab-patterns go up up up and down down and up up up - very much like a Big Dipper type rollercoaster

That same mix of extreme exhilaration and total control - a thrill-ride to which you are subjected, trapped inside.

Soars galore, peaks and plummets.

Sound is too bright, too clean, frictionless

Super-melodic in a Euro-melodious way, as Spiro in the comments to "kicky and volky (hardcore, intellectualized" post says

Although here it reminds me less of folk and more of "The Final Countdown" / "Winds of Change" /"Life is Life" / "One Vision"






Now if there was yodelling in it i'd probably dig it more

Wait a minute...

!!!















The Auto-Tune on this one gives it a yodelly sheen and slide



vistas of Edam-colored faces

postscript 6/13

a recent commenter to the "kicky and volky, hardcore intellectualized" post argues that hardstyle is "pure" music, enjoyed for its own sake, devoid of reference to external reality - and that attempts to analyse it ideologically are impositions from outside...

but (putting aside for now the counter-point that the idea of "pure" or non-referential art/entertainment is itself an ideological construct, hardly devoid of real-world implications or consequences), even a cursory glance across the hardstyle spectrum reveals the opposite - the music and the subculture is draped and threaded-through with ideology, it drips with the stuff: the self-empowerment personal uplift themes, the militaristic themes, the Medievalist throwback emotions of glory and honor and revenge

the common theme (as Spiro in the comments here notes) is POWER: whether its sheer sonic might, or positivity / personal empowerment, or the military and quasi-totalitarian references, the combat postures and into-battle vibes, the pyrotechnical spectacle etc etc

kicky and volky (hardcore, intellectualized)

Intellectualized in an essay by Jeppe Ugelvig titled "Hardcore as Folklore" (at NERO Editions)

It's about the other hardcore though.

The Eurorave continuum - Belgcore> gabber >jumpstyle > hardstyle

The peg = an exhibition, Capriccio 2000. Which "traverses electronic dance music cultures in millennial Italy—particularly hardcore—to propose a sensory tableau: of listless bodies, ritualized gestures and neon hues amidst the detritus of suburban life."

Some snippets from Ulgelvig's essay:

 "Compared to techno and house, hardcore is a type of electronic dance music still waiting to be fully understood. Low-brow, peripheral and nihilistic, it stands in stark contrast to the cultures surrounding its related genres, now firmly canonized and critically recouped for their social, political, and musical importance to cultural history.* Conventionally regarded as non-queer, non-black, and non-urban, hardcore is, in fact, antithetical to the three things that have historically defined electronic dance music. Even so—or perhaps exactly because of this—hardcore seems to have seeped into the aesthetic subconscious of continental European youth culture in the new millennium, becoming integrated as a part of a mass-cultural vocabulary.... . Hardcore, I want to propose, may slowly be developing into its very own example of European folklore, complete with its own set of myths, fantastical motifs, and fabled characters"

Some thoughts on gabber-as-folk at the end...

"From its onset, hardcore was reactionary to the fashionable and opulent party scenes of metropolitan cities like Amsterdam and London, cladding itself in a working-class, anti-fashion aesthetic."

True in one sense - opposed to chic elites. But then again, hardcore of every type has always had its own street fashion look. Gabbers played a small fortune for their favored brands of Australian sportswear. Junglists were style-conscious and similarly coughed up a fair amount of dough to look sharp.

"Hardcore’s one-dimensional and almost childish intensity is often affiliated with the deprived, post-industrial landscapes of Europe, while its participants—dressed in cheap sportswear, and with soft skinhead references—are often referred to as an embodiment of the “chav,” “tamarro,” “dresiarz” or “proll” aesthetic. In Italy, for example, the northern region of Pianura Padana became a hub for the hardcore sound in the late 1990s, as it gained traction in enormous “super clubs” along the A4 highway from Bergamo to Venice (connecting the cities of Brescia, Verona, and Padua)."

The "chav" archetype, as a locus of anxiety and condescension, is a Europe-wide phenomenon - and most likely a world-wide syndrome, given that class structures and tensions recur on much the same lines everywhere. Similar social formations crop up - if not necessarily identical in terms of music orientation.

One example is Catalonia, where the raver mentalist sound of the Nineties was called bakalao - after the local foodstuff bacalao, dry salt cod - presumably it has the same "crudely pungent" connotations as "cheesy," with a bit of territorialised regional patriotism thrown in. Note also the mispelling with a "k" in the lumpen-rave tradition of tekno and ardkore.  All the clubs were clustered along a road in  Valencia nicknamed Ruta Destroy, which became the hub of sleepless weekends fueled by pastillas ye drogas of all kinds, with people driving in from all over the country to party there.




Love the raver style touch here of people cooling themselves with black-and-white fans! I remember the daughter of a professor in Valencia  (who had me over to lecture on UK rave and Ecstasy culture in the late nineties) telling me about the scene: how mental it was, people dancing in the most full-on crazed way, jabbing the air with cigarettes almost like stilettos, the bakalao kids clad in black and white clothes. Just before I flew back home, I went to get CD comps of bakalao from a local music megastore, but they sounded fairly cheesy - in the processed, flava-less sense - when I got back to NYC.







Another example is Córdoba, Argentina, where working class and lumpen youth rally to a sound known as cuarteto - which is not electronic but based around high-energy live-bands. It's territorialized: youth follow a particular band and band-leader (the most famous is La Mona Jimenez) year after year. They go to see these bands perform more or less the the same show - raucous, risque - every week, in all-night parties that really kick off in the small hours and apparently get pretty wild. Raves, then, just without rave music.




Back to Ugelvig's essay:

"With over thirty years of endured presence in European music culture, hardcore can no longer be understood as a mere trend or fad, but qualifies instead as a kind of abstract aesthetic motif recognized by a broad range of Europeans born in the last two decades of the 20th century—from the right-leaning hooligan of the suburbs to the fashion worker of the metropolis, crafting fashion editorials that glamorize its pseudo-skinhead aesthetic.... These plural, contradictory, and mythological connotations of hardcore—escaping exact definition, yet seemingly omnipresent as an aesthetic motif—perfectly qualify it as a kind of folk culture."

One thing I'd add here on the subject of "folklore": there is something going on with the dancing in  gabber / jumpstyle / hardstyle that plugs into folk music traditions in Northern Europe. I don't want to say the music has "reactivated a race-memory," as that makes it sound dodgier than it needs to be. But there is something that's seemingly resurged instinctively within the younger generation (who probably have had only a limited exposure to traditional music and its attendant dance modes) where they move to these Eurocore beats in ways that come from the same place as Morris dancing and Irish "step dancing" (as in "Riverdance") and doubtless forms of Dutch and German etc dancing I'm unaware of. The dancing largely takes place below the knee, and doesn't involve the hips or the pelvis much at all. The body stays perpendicular and straight-spined; the arms swirl around almost like the ribbons of a Maypole, with the body as the pole.  It's not groovy, it's kicky - kicky moves for kick drum dominated / domineering music. Unfunk, perhaps even anti-funk in a sense - but it looks like a lot of fun.





Ugelvig mentions in passing an exhibition in the Netherlands three years ago called "Energy Flash - the Rave Movement"

Now admittedly I don't own the words "Energy Flash" - Joey Beltram does if anyone - but still..

slammige cru (let us now praise Lee and Michael)

tuff tune, with delicious proto-vocal-science of that elf-girl gurgle at 0.57 seconds and passim

heard while making my way through the Leaving Earth list of rave LPs

from the good old days when "techno" didn't promise hair shirt longeurs and triple turntable tedium -  when techno banged, slammed, kicked (and even shoveled, now and then!)...  when a tune might actually contain, well, a tune -  as opposed to just a grackling sound and a nail-gun beat

GTO -  another example of the  personnel and sonix flow between industrial and techno

Started as Greater Than One, than proliferated under a thousand aliases, in multiple modes of slammige - bleep, hard techno, near-trance, jungle-ish, gabba



tearin' tune - B-line like concrete liquifying  (as the Man like Me said once upon a time)

another version












fame at last

GABBERS GATHER - Crossbones + Drop The Bomb = Ravers Graveyard (New Cross, London, May 26)

On Saturday 26th May, veteran free party crew Crossbones join forces with rave promoter Drop The Bomb to bring you a night of the darkest hardcore techno music - Ravers Graveyard - running the full spectrum from primordial Dutch / Belgian darkrave through to gabber and gloomcore.  

Location is The Stretch, Dixon Road, New Cross.

DJs and performers include: 

Fifth Era -  London's original doomcore pioneer 

Mental Fear Productions (Frankfurt) - 100% live hardware set 

Easygroove - UK's pioneering gabber DJ

more information about tickets, full line-up, times etc here

"nothing but hardcore (no mellow beats)" 

freez-E style

tracklist:

01. Tanochinjaii - Fallen Angel 02. 8 A.M. - The Fog Track 03. Cypher - Marchin' Into Madness 04. Rave Creator - Thru Eternal Fog 05. Pilldriver - Impossible X-T-C 06. Cypher - H-Flash 07. Rave Creator - Bleep Blaster 08. Freez-E-Style - Doom Dancer 09. Reign - Show 'Em 10. Cypher - Skyhigh (Rave Creator's Black Gold Mix) 11. Pilldriver - Pitch-Hiker 12. The Mover & Rave Creator - O.K. Bassquake 13. Freez-E-Style - Awake In Neo Tokyo 14. Freez-E-Style - Enter The Gates Of Darkness (Stay Strong, Raise The Flag And Spread The Spheres Of Light) 15. The Mover & Rave Creator - Atmos-Fear 16. Pilldriver - Apocalypse Never 17. The Mover & Rave Creator - Astral Demons 94 (Cold Planet Remix) 18. Marshall Masters - Stereo Murder 19. Marshall Masters - Stereo Murder (Reign's Olymp Remix) 20. Tilt! - Hell-E-Copter

mix by Low Entropy, maker of many tributes to hardcore of yore

like this  Praxis trib mix



and this trib mix to Lory D and Rome's Sounds Never Seen label



and this early French hardcore mix



dude's Youtube channel is a trove of  deepest underground hard-fast-dark-doomy  -  some of fearful obscurity, names I don't recognise at all

like this lot!

slaves to the raves

not a cover

perhaps hommage?

Marc Acardipane's favorite current artist

although current isn't quite correct since he's been putting out stuff since 1997


the original is still the greatest

but which one?







I think it's the PCP mix that I always loved

Never even heard these takes







what's this? earlier 'Slaves'?!





ooh quite exciting that one, a real slip n slider of a riff

and this is a later one



which has stolen the title, but the sound is stolen from DHS 'House of God'

Masters of the Universe

and brand new

GABBING ABOUT GABBER: a brutalitarian resurgence a/k.a the return of apocalypso-disco?

Resident Advisor says that 2017 was the year that hardcore came back strong. 

Certainly it was the year of the Mover fulfilling his chiliastic promise "see you in 2017" with a return to high-profile deejaying at techno festivals and the release of a remastered anthology of his greatest ravefloor smashers, although the heralded new full-length album by Marc Acardipane under his most famous moniker has been bumped back to 2018, marring slightly the neat circularity of his comeback coming in 2017 as promised earlier thisyear.



The RA report also points to  Paul Elstak penetrating the Netherlands pop chart for the first time in a long while...




... to the Parisian squad Casual Gabberz's parties and its Inutile De Fuir compilation of this year





.... to the activities of Poland's WIXAPOL and Sweden's Drömfakulteten collectives...






 ... to the Gabber Eleganza blog and its roving The Hakke Show performances....





.... to the punitively intense Unpolished parties thrown by Amsterdam's Reaktor Events (which they trumpet as their "most hard-lined techno concept" and a "yearly ordeal"!) ...





... and to various other manifestations of a renewed appetite for brutalitarian aesthetics.


It makes perfect sense that the ravenous maw that is retroculture would sooner or later turn  for nourishment to possibly the last remaining un-ransacked resource of renegade commitment, outsider ferocity - an un-exceeded extreme. 

Incidentally, four of the nine trends that defined 2017 according to RA's overview involve the prefix "re" - the return of Electro (what, again?);  the resurgence of Eurohardcore;  the fact that it's a boom time for "new old" music, i.e. the rediscovery of forgotten music or recovery of never-known-about or never-even-really-released music from the archival electronic dance past;  and yet another rediscovery / rehabilitation / revisionism syndrome, i.e. the rewiring of techno with EBM and Industrial influences (M.E.S.H. , Perc, Tzusing, Phase Fatale,  et al). That last one possibly feeds into, or makes logical, the rehabilitation of gabba, given that it's part of the prehistory of Eurohardcore (although the nu-EBM is a lot slower). 





Also talking up the vintage gabba is this post + mix at Marc Dauncey's Mutant Technology blog -  titled"Gabber House" and described as "an hour and forty minutes exploring the murky world of hardcore techno, gabber and a sprinkling of jungle and breakcore, ranging from 150 to well over 240 bpm, from 1992 right up to the present day." Excellent stuff with a disconcerting large number of names and titles unfamiliar to me, but then  fully tracking the raging and ranging enormity of the Eurohardkore Kontinuum through the Nineties would've required total commitment to the genre / area, and I've always had ears for too many other things  





And finally a reminder about ArteTetra's recent gabber-influenced cassette release Svelto: the Hakken Tuner  (discussed in this earlier blog post) by  DJ Balli - who I had the pleasure of meeting in Bologna last week - and Giacoma Balla. 








A fan of the Italian Futurists as well as Phuture Tekno, Balli also authored - under his full name Riccardo Balli - the aptly titled 2012 book Apocalypso Disco: La Rave-O-Luzione Della Post Techno.  Blurbed thusly at Amazon (excuse the crude Google translation job here):

"At the end of the eighties, the element of techno music was imposed as a viral macrocode on which thousands and thousands of young people recognized themselves. In the following two decades a nuclear fission took place which split it into small atoms: the breakcore, the 8 bit, the gabber, the mashup, the goa-trance, the mutant dancefloor ... An international galaxy almost impossible to tell . In this text Riccardo Balli analyzes the different musical and attitudinal ramifications of the post rave through oral tales, literary remixes, visionary interventions and interviews with producers and protagonists. The goal is focused on the dynamics of a political nature that have generated assault groups, extreme situations and new lifestyles: speedcore, psy community, c8.com, Elevate Festival and the world of chiptunes. A multitude of noises, ideas and movements whose spurious and transversal sound is called Apocalypso disco." 

(I mentioned to Balli my dim recollection of having once operated - in partnership with Margin / Monitor comrade Paul Oldfield - a deejay duo team that traded under the name Apocalypso. We were not hugely successful in our appeal to the Oxford student market)

Balli also is involved in the label / organisation Sonic Belligeranza ("hard-electronics blaxploitation since the year 2000") and a contributor to Datacide, the original  intellectual hardcore / hardcore intellectual zine.

Datacide is still active on the web and intermittently in print too (there's a new issue just out in fact - #17, details of the contents and how to purchase here).

Recently Datacide held a panel discussion about retro both in and outside dance culture, titled next:now - strategies to resample the future - and what do you know, there's a quote from the intro to Retromania right at the front...

"Once upon a time, pop‘s metabolism buzzed with dynamic energy, creating the surging-in-to-the-future feel of periods like the psychedelic sixties, the post-punk seventies, the hip-hop eighties and the rave nineties. The 2000s felt different.…  Instead of being the threshold to the future, the first then years of the twenty-first century turned out to be the ‚Re‘ Decade … revivals, reissues, remakes,
re-enactments. Endless retrospection...."

Hyperstasis  - the apocalypse as atemporality, entropy, the whimper

versus

Phuturism - apocalypse as teleology, conflagration=consummation, the BANG.

FACT  flag up a mix by Soulwax (from a few years ago, seemingly) that involves slowing down gabba and Belgian hardcore to 115 bpm.

Awesome it is indeed, but I have to disagree that the result "sounds vaguely soothing and almost... soulful".  Decelerating gabba doesn't transform it into jazzual  Kruder 'n Dorf type downtempo emollience.  The insurgency and raging madness survive the tempo drop.

In some ways, it becomes even more woozy and drug-fucked. 

No, you couldn't really imagine putting this mix on at a dinner party as background music. It's too imposing, too infernal.

The b.p.m. reduction technique shows that what made gabba and Eurohardcore so intense wasn't actually the speed, or at least not primarily the speed. It was certain musical structures, timbres, tonalities...  and a mood.


FACT also point to the video accompaniment of Nederlands ravers in sports wear or stripped to the waist, gurning and sweating, and say "if you didn’t know better you might think it’s one of the 100% Silk lot having a laugh at our expense," i.e. a hipster house pastiche, a spoof.

And it does look a bit like the retro-rave video to that Miracles Club tune " Church Song".

At first I assumed it was old footage digitally spliced from some rave video-pak merchandise type thing. But many of the Nederavers look at a bit mumsy and dadsy, plump and balding (techno slapheads, but not by choice). So I assume it was done recently and the concept is "gabba for the middle aged".

Just my cup of tea, then.

(Via Eli Bingham)