Another rave oriented blog...

You know your mind is screwed up when you wake up from dreaming about your blog. Especially when you spend as little time on it as I do. The post I dreamt about was about hardcore techno, and I figure that's a good reason to write a blog about just that. So put on your headset and fire up soulseek/last.fm/spotify or whatever, and get ready.

Way back in 1992 I was first subjected to the roots of hardcore techno. We are of course talking about Human Resource and the track Dominator. You've probably heard it. It's a really cool track, with nifty vocals and a really fantastic synthesizer track. Their album Dominating the world was very much an example of what was going on in the techno scene at the time, but with one very important innovation that was to crystalize the early hardcore style: the hoover. No, not the thing you use to suck up dust from your filthy floor, but a synthesizer sound. Put on nearly any hardcore track, and you'll hear it. It sounds like something halfway between a lazergun from the fifties, an angry wasp and a vacume cleaner (hoover for the brits).

Soon after hardcore techno proper was born, and a flurry of styles (all sounding more or less the same) was fronted by artists with such fascinatingly mature names as DJ Fistfuck, the Speedfreak, the Nightraver and so forth and so forth. Cities like Frankfurt, Berlin and perhaps most of all Rotterdam became synonymous with a very loud four on the floor beat and scratchy hoover-synths. The louder and faster the better. The various styles were represented mostly by a number of different compilation series: Thunderdome, Razorshock, Terrordrome, the Best of Rotterdam Records, Nightmare in Rotterdam (and similar) and others whose names elude me at the moment. The hardest was ofcourse the various compilations from Rotterdam Records, whose style was also the most eclectic. The wonderfully humorous poing from Rotterdam Termination Source was one end of the scale, while extremely angry and noisy techno was on the other end.

Every other month or so the various forms of hardcore picked up another five bpms to their average speed, and got more and more crystalized in terms of genre. Suddenly you had gabba (gabber to the brits, utlizing the hoover sound), Happy Hardcore (mostly fronted by Technohead and Scooter) and whatnot. Hardcore was really happening at the time, and more and more acts appeared on the scene. The Thunderdome compilations went completely overboard and released new comps in tempo you can't imagine. And the music tended more and more towards happy hardcore and simplistic childish hooks.

I kind of lost interest, especially since I absolutely abhorred happy hardcore. The kid who used to run around town spray painting "hardcore will never die" on various walls in his little shithole town got off the hardcore bus.

That is untill a few years later, when a chance visit to my favorite record shop in Oslo had me laughing with disbelief for days. I was under the impression that hardcore was very dead, and that noone over 18 would ever listen to that stuff, except for as nostalgia, when I heard 180bpms worth of "boomboomboomboom!! I'M GONNA FUCK YOUR MOTHER!!! Boomboomboomboomboom!!" Out of the speakers at this aforementioned record store. I had been subjected to power noise for the first time, in the year of our lord 1999. While power noise can be alot of things a great deal of it quite simply a less childish variation of old skool hardcore techno. Quite hysterical to think of actually. These two styles had existed side by side throughout the nineties, but while hardcore attracted ravers with umpteen colored baby suckers in the gabs, power noise attracted goths and "rivetheads". I never did find out what that track was, but I ended up byuing a few records by other power noise acts. They range from the really good stuff (Imminent [pictured], Noisex, Converter, NKVD) to absolute crap (Terrorfakt, Iszoloscope). Power noise is of course fronted by the flagship event Maschinenfest every year.

But hardcore wasn't entirely dead in its own right either. There were these little cells operating out of backwater towns practising a style known as break core. The local act Sunjammer is particularly worth checking out. To me it sounded like hardcore with slightly better production values and sometimes more interesting beats, and also something called speed core, apparantly a grandchild of nordcore. (All these cores are making my head spin. Which is kind of cool.) M1dy, the albino from Tokyo (pictured), is a prime example of doing the right thing at 350bpms. Many of the people who paved the way for hardcore in the early days are still active. Rob Gee, Human Resource, DJ Paul Elstak, and whole lot of other guys. Even Rotterdam Records.

And, people over 18 can certainly listen to hardcore, and not be embarassed. The crappy happy hardcore days are over, and with it most of the short lived acts that were in it for the rage of it. Hardcore has matured in a way, and has found its own little niche.

I like it.