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.

Piledriver

Piledriver is not just a fun social activity, if your girlfriend is feeling acrobatic, or a machine that punches columns into the ground. Nor is it just a way to hurt your wrestling partner. It's so much more than that.

Many years ago, by mere chance, I discovered a band from Oslo named Piledriver. (Not to be confused with the rather infantile canadian metal band by the same name btw.) At the time I was 15 years, and Piledriver was some of the heaviest music I had ever heard, and in addition it had the digital edgy drum beats I so craved at the time. Piledriver managed to combine naive synthesizer melodies, dry unemotional drum beats and punk guitars in a most abbrasive way. The uniquely hard core aggression of Are Kleivans vocals completed the package. I remember all too well when they played in Arendal, in 1996. I have never since taken out so much energy in one evening, and I certainly had the black and blue marks on my body to prove it. Thinking back now, as an over the hill guy with a growing belly and gray streaks, I wonder how I survived. Absolutely one of my best musical memories.

Their name was an obvious reference to the way their drums sounded more or less like the industrial machine by the same name. Piledriver started out sometime in the first half of the nineties and released a very dark 7", before finding their unique style and releasing three full length albums and participating on several compilations. They also collaborated with Egil Hegerberg on his anti tagging song, and toured with the most superfluous hip hop act of all time. Sindre Goksøyr also played in the seminal norwegian "dønk rock" band Gluecifer for a while, before they turned into a pop group. They dubbed their way of playing "dunder disco" (thunder disco) and mixed equal doses of anger, humor and great music.

When I first started making music on my own several of the tracks contained obvious references to Piledrivers way of arranging music. I used high pitched repetitive melodies over industrial drums, but without the guitar and vocals. Unfortunately (or perhaps not) all these tracks have been lost by now. But still, Piledriver was one of the first underground acts I heard, and I still love their music.

If you like industrial metal or hardcore Piledriver is worth checking out. Probably not too easy to find though. Piledriver remains one the least known treasures of the norwegian hardcore underground, and as industrial metal goes I don't think most people in the scene have discovered them at all. Hopefully, this will be rectified at some point. Sadly however, they disbanded in 2002 and there isn't much hope for a reunion.