Will Hardcore Ever Die? Techno's Resurrection of the Breakbeat

Hardcore will never die – we’ve all heard the old adage. Except over the last ten years, hardcore did kind of die. The breakbeat, once supreme champion of dancefloor percussion, just wasn’t cool anymore. Meanwhile all the genres that worshipped at the altar of these chopped funk breaks: drum’n’bass, jungle and hardcore, began to stagnate, left to the die-hards with their perma-gurns as the school of the new millennium turned to grime, garage and dubstep, or indeed back to the worthy institutions of house and techno. The use of breakbeats within hip hop has a long history and continues to bear fruit, but it’s only recently that the percussive style has seen a re-emergence in the dance sphere.

For years the breakbeat scenes haven’t seen much in the way of progress, the last notable exception being DnB’s Autonomic phase spearheaded by the likes of Instra:Mental and dBridge. Yet listen closely and the winds are changing: there has been a sharp increase in the use of breakbeats in modern dance music in 2013, whether they appear as retro ornaments or something altogether newer: conventional drum loops twisted, distorted and recontextualised into fresh shapes. While others have charted the re-emergence of new forms of drum and bass, this article will explore the practitioners who are recontextualising breakbeats at slower tempos, in techno and beyond. 

Paul Woolford - Mindwash

One of the men at the heart of this revival (and the inspiration for this article) is none other than man of the moment Paul Woolford, who is currently attracting all the right attention with the rugged productions of his Special Request moniker. With a name that references (perhaps even mourns) the pirate radio stations that birthed his sound, Woolford’s Special Request tracks are ferocious club monsters, where familiar breaks are squashed into tough technoid forms, glorifying hollow, compressed kicks and elastic breakbeat loops. Yet Woolford’s compositions are not just throwback. On each of his celebrated white label releases (along with an ace recent EP for Houndstooth), he adds a distinct flavour to the gritty soundcraft, keeping it personal and modern. For example, while the superb Mindwash may give way to a tear-streaked breakdown of breathy vocals and eternal synths in pure 90s style, it has at its core the restless pursuit of a maniacally sinuous melodic line which would only be heard this decade.

Pev – Aztec Chant

As most of the music that heavily used breakbeats hovered around the 160bpm mark, some of the more interesting re-appropriations of the beats have come from artists who have slowed them down. Livity Sound head-honcho Pev (formerly Peverelist) is one of the UK scene’s leading lights at the moment, honing an utterly unique style of techno which incorporates various elements of the UK’s hardcore and dubstep lineage. Hear on this year’s Aztec Chant how the breakbeat is just one of the track’s percussive components, nestled amidst panning melodics and frayed hi-hats, looping like a broken record until it finally takes centre stage for the track’s final two minutes. Yet it is not just scene stalwarts who are reclaiming the breakbeat: A Sagittariun, one of the country’s more intriguing new techno producers, constructs a moody scifi soundfield on his stylish Eye Against Eye, only for a slo-mo breakbeat to steal the scene, a perfect fit for the slick Detroit atmospherics.

DJ Haus – Cold As Ice

It’s not just individual producers who are looking to reclaim the hardcore sound: certain labels seem particularly intent on pushing the 90s revival. Chief among them is DJ Haus’ inimitable Unknown To The Unknown, who topped our list of 2012’s best labels. Besides a hilarious Youtube channel and bizzare cover-art, DJ Haus has used UTTU to resurrect some of dance music’s less popular genres, from electro to bassline garage. Proving that these old styles have life in them yet, some of UTTU’s breakbeat experiments have been pure gold: one need only look as far as Haus’ own Cold As Ice for an achingly cool lesson in hardcore, replete with a tacky synth breakdown which I wouldn’t have any other way. Elsewhere on the label, Lords Of Midnite’s excellent Drown In Ur Love EP took the breakbeat on a scifi odyssey for its epic analog title jam.

Andy Stott – Up The Box

We’ve seen a clear renewal of interest in the noble breakbeat, with a variety of artists co-opting those breakneck rhythms to their own ends. Yet outside of the dancefloor exists another group of hardcore operators, dealing with decay and disintegration, resulting in what is perhaps the most fascinating material that the breakbeat has to offer today. These artists can be loosely grouped around the experimental Modern Love and PAN imprints, the former’s Andy Stott being a perfect example. The formidable Up The Box, from his ace 2012 album Luxury Problems, is a semi-experimental piece which loops a locked breakbeat, jamming like machinery in a slowly building gale of static noise. After three minutes it drops away, and after a few atmospheric shifts returns with a phenomenal compressed kick in toe, an exhilarating fusion of jungle and techno that combines the tough distortion of each without even a moment’s relief. It may also be worth noting the possibility of Stott’s involvement in Modern Love’s ultra-limited Unknown / Hate project, a purist exercise in pitch-black junglism which yielded uncompromisingly destructive club tracks.

Demdike Stare - Collision

Further into the world of experimentation one comes across Demdike Stare’s recent Testpressing series, also out on Modern Love. Drawing on a profound knowledge of jungle, hardcore and noise, Collision saw the pair at their rawest yet, building four minutes of seething, heatsick noise around a bed of jammed, dysfunctional breakbeats. While Demdike turned jungle to noise, PAN’s Lee Gamble used his superb Diversions 1994-1996 to draw out the ambience of these tracks, dissolving breakbeats in the faded ambience of musical recall, turning the raves of the 90s into the incoherent, mesmerising sequences which now exist only in our memories. In a fitting parallel, a similar trick was pulled off by Anthony Naples on his remix of Special Request’s Mindwash, casting the legend of hardcore beneath the gauze of memory, eroded by time, subject to dissolution and fragmentation. These experimental re-appropriations of breakbeats treat the drum pattern as an artefact of its own time, and through recontextualising the familiar drum loop they pose questions about evolving musical trends and the unreliable nature of memory itself.

Tessela – Hackney Parrot

Before this article disintegrates, weighed down by the fragility of its pseudo-philosophical musings, it’s worth drawing attention to how current, how big these modern breakbeat iterations can also sound. On the following playlist you’ll hear a selection of some of the sounds discussed above, but also some genuinely innovative use of the classic drumloop – DJ Rashad’s minor masterpiece, the emotive Let It Go, which dissects breakbeats with the finesse of a surgeon, or Clouds’ ode to the rave thump on the monumental Future 1. Yet at the same time we have Dance’s curious Still, a ghostly slo-jam that leaves the breakbeat wholly intact, or Shed’s nuanced second outing as EQD, which ranks among the producers best work to date. Then there’s Tessela’s phenomenal Hackney Parrot, doubtless one of 2013’s most memorable anthems, guaranteed to get the crowd moving even if the dancers don’t know their breakbeat from their steak frites.

The lasting impression of this survey is the extraordinary versatility of this simple set of drum loops, which twenty years on are still being used and abused in the most fascinating, exhilarating fashions. Not only are artists continuing to insert breakbeats into showstopping underground hits, but the passage of time has permitted an artistic re-appraisal, with producers subjecting the drums to the decay of memory and time in a way which opens entirely new avenues of musical possibility. Will hardcore ever die? It’s up to the artists, but on the strength of the scene’s ability to appropriate and re-integrate artefacts of our musical past in ever-more innovative ways, it looks set to survive for a long while yet.

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Playlist

Tracklist:

DJ Rashad – Let It Go

A Sagittariun – Eye Against Eye

EQD – EQD 002B (04)

Clouds – Future 1
Point G - Braka

Special Request – Broken Dreams
Ramadanman - Don't Change For Me

Pangaea – Razz

Unknown / Hate – Human Resources
Deadboy - Nova

Special Request – Mindwash (Anthony Naples Eternal Mix)
Lowout - LAS

Dance – Still
Simoncino - Happy (DJ Sotofett Slow Jungle Trippin')

If you want more, check out Boomkat's ace series of playlists on 14tracks.

ON: Signal Shot

In our last comment section, we focused on the rising star of Damiano von Erckert's ava imprint. From label to artist, this week ON features an interview and exclusive download of a very special artist - one who has yet to officially release a track. We're committed to promoting and sharing fresh talent, so I'm very proud here to introduce Signal Shot. Born in Romania, the 24-year old has combined a lifelong interest in music with a career in sound design, resulting in the birth of his Signal Shot side project. While his available tunes are scant, the quality is top notch, and it only seems a matter of time before he's signed up to something.

Here you can read the first interview with the artist and stream tracks throughout. We can also offer you an exclusive download of his beautiful Dependent, a tear-streaked stepper hewn from plucked strings and mesmeric vocals towards the close. Without further ado, here's Signal Shot.

 

 Dependent

Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little about your music?
Sure, I think I can. My name is Jozsef Iszlai and a sizeable part of my life consists of making music on a laptop. Texture and context intrigue me in unimaginable ways.

What were your early experiences with music? Have you always had a sense that making music was something you wanted to do?
Well, let’s see...at first I got this right-handed guitar from my mother when I was 13 and being left handed I didn’t exactly know how to play it, so I started learning everything upside down. Lots of things have changed since then, but one thing stayed with me for quite a while: the ability to find myself intrigued by approaching musical ideas differently.

"I started thinking a lot about music as architectural design"

How long has electronic music in particular been a focus for you, what music sparked off that revelation?
It hasn’t really been a focus of mine up until two or three years now. I wouldn’t want to sound snobbish but I think that ideologically speaking late modernism sparked off my interest. The idea was to make music which aimed to deny musical canon and conventional forms of musical language. Many great romantic composers tried to isolate themselves from convention as well but I think the difference lies in the fact that during modernism (from the start of the 20th century) there was this general denial of music and sound. This made musical texture and small, simple structures all the more important. This then spawned the ideology of musique concrète, which I consider it to be a magnificent historical turning point.

Most of the intelligent electronic music out there is highly textural, let’s just take an obvious example: the use of white noise in electronic dance music. Texture is what shapes the sound. Lo-fi is all about this as well. And when I realised the enormous importance of texture I suddenly started loving the craft of sampling, editing - basically everything that could be interpreted as a collage or montage of sounds. Something fantastic and alienating happens with the aid of texture (for example a hum or noise) and that’s what I find fascinating in contemporary electronic music. Besides this I work in audio post-production, which opened my ears as well.

 

 Swamp

So how exactly does your line of work affect the music that you make?

There is a relationship which I think is self-reflexive. First off I was only doing sound effects and design for a couple of videos and then I started thinking a lot about music as architectural design. Because that's what you basically do in audio post-production as well. Sound is music, there's no way to argue with the fact that all sounds on the planet could be arranged as music. So I started feeding off that thought and then it all evolved into this weird flow of thought where music should be part design and part melody/chords. Juggling between those two distinctive processes is a method which I find particularly interesting. 

"I started learning everything upside down"

While perhaps not overtly dancey, there are clear traits of dance music in your productions – I see a lot of resemblances in particular to the early stages of dubstep when it was more aligned with spacious, atmospheric garage. What are the musical touchstones for your sound? 

You’re probably more familiar with genres than me. I don’t know what my music resembles but I can feel some familiar moments in many producer’s music out there. We’re somehow related to the decay of dance music, it’s a somewhat apocalyptic approach to me. It’s like we’re all driven by the same flame inside of us. We’re sonically connected through the flame in our souls. I find that a beautiful thing to experience. I’m connected to all sorts of musical touchstones, it would be a shame to not name everyone and unfortunately I can’t do that, but here’s a few: Bach, Debussy, Miles Davis, Stockhausen, Dauwd, Autechre, etc.

Neon Glow

Can you give a few examples of those modernist artists, particularly for those (like myself) fed on electronic music, sans classical education?

There are too many, really. And again, who would be comfortable arranging all these great composers hierarchically? Let's see, some particularly interesting people to dig up would be Debussy for his intricate arrangements on piano, John Cage or Karlheinz Stockhausen for their interesting uses of texture and sound after the fifties or sixties. Three names I absolutely had to mention, the latter two are partly non-musical, there's this denial of music within their works which makes them really interesting. Quite influential on the krautrock movement as well, go look up Neu! or Can, their music comes even closer to the electronic sounds of today. I'll just stop here, but not before I mention some of my favorite musique concrete artists: Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, etc. It's better for you if you start listening, check out related stuff, find the music you like! 

Thankyou!

ON: ava

Hello, and welcome to a new regular column of White Noise. In On, I’ll take a more personal approach, sharing particular sounds or discussing key issues in the scene at the moment. The series could focus on specific artists or labels, or explore and draw links within the scene as a whole.

For the inaugural edition, I’d like to shine a spotlight on the Cologne-based ava imprint, a label run by rising star Damiano Von Erckert. While the label evidently excels because of its music, I have to admit that I was first attracted to the label due to its aesthetic. A vein of nostalgia runs through each of ava’s releases, drawing influence from the sounds, sights, music and films of the 70s, 80s and 90s. These references are especially evident in the label’s record covers: photos and titles borrowed from films (Reservoir Dogs, say, or Fight Club). It’s clear that for Von Erckert, ava is a labour of love, each record handmade and issued as a limited release (the cover of his debut collaborative album even featured real feathers on the cover).

Tito Wun - The Way U Do It

The music itself is a refreshing blend of styles which, despite its obvious nostalgia for music past, manages to sound distinctly modern - one could never mistake ava’s output for lazy throwback. Many of the releases start with a core house template but incorporate elements of soul, funk, jazz and hip hop, threaded together with warmth and an eye for killer grooves. Motor City Drum Ensemble would be an obvious touchstone; but the ava stable are more adventurous, straying further from the standard house template.

So who are ava’s key players? The first call has to be von Erckert himself, whose particularly impressive releases have marked some of the label’s finest moments to date. After receiving rejections from a series of labels for his promos, von Erckert decided to set up ava and offered its first solo release in the form of 2011’s I Think We Agree, The Past Is Over. The EP's highlight came in the form of Housem, a glorious slice of filter-disco shot through with swooning diva samples and an irresistible 4/4 groove (for those who missed the vinyl, a remastered version will be available as a WEB on his forthcoming album). Von Erckert most prominently stepped out with this year’s mini-LP Mr. Pink, What Have You Been Smokin’, a collaboration with local beatsmith Tito Wun. The release is a delight from start to finish, taking the form of a woozy lover’s mixtape which blends soul, hip hop and house sounds with a surprising level of cohesion. The album also showed von Erckert's versatility as he nimbly stepped from the emotive strains of Leave Uuu to the upbeat funk workout of The Dude Loop, a track fortified by a tough house backbone. Nor should collaborator Tito Wun’s offerings be ignored, the superb The Way U Do It showing an equally talented producer who could recontextualise dusty funk samples with an unerring hit rate.

Damiano von Erckert & Funkycan - Symphonie of a Brother

Besides von Erckert,  a couple of producers have stood out proud on ava’s roster. Funkycan’s excellently-titled EP, We Were Raised To Believe That Someday We Were All Gonna Have Great Beards, showed a dynamic producer with a specialty in deeper material. Nowhere was this clearer than on the stunning CGN – GZT, a deceptively simple number in which the core loop was all that was needed, a sunken groove layered with deep, melancholy melodics which don’t get old no matter how many times you hit repeat (I can speak as something of an authority on this point.) Attention should also be paid to the superb von Erckert / Funkycan collaboration Symphonie of a Brother, the highlight of ava’s first release, a blisteringly soulful groove laden with soaring strings and a striking vocal sample championing the pen over the sword:

I said, “Arm me, send me on a mission. I’m ready to kill whitey right now’…This brother opens his desk, and he pulls out – he reaches real low, and I say back to my boy ‘he’s gonna give me a big gun, you see how far down he’s reaching in the desk’ – and he pulls out a stack of books. And I said, ‘excuse me brother, you said you were gonna arm me. And he says, ‘excuse me young brother, I just did’.

Murat Tepeli - Forever (Prosumer's Hold Me Touch Me Remix)

The other artist so far granted a solo release on ava is Murat Tepeli, perhaps best known for his collaborative work with Panorama Bar's Prosumer. On the Fee Fi Foe Funk For Me EP, Tepeli unleashed a pair of raw house grooves, tougher than anything on ava to date but still settling neatly into the label’s style. FFFFUNK and Forever recall Tepeli’s best solo releases to date (which are, by my estimation, Work It and Workinstrugglin), yet the release’s undoubted highlight was Prosumer’s ‘Hold Me Touch Me’ remix of Forever, a dangerous slice of late-nite house where a venomous piano stab reigns supreme.

ava has been going from strength to strength since its inception, but a particularly strong showing in 2013 should help catapult the label into the limelight it deserves. Particular attention should be paid to von Erckert’s first album-proper, LOVE BASED MUSIC, scheduled for release in September. For my money it’s the label’s best release to date, combining all of the label’s interests in an unstoppable package (with more disco flavours than ever before courtesy of some great live singers).

In a musical landscape overcrowded by labels constantly looking for the ‘next big thing’ regardless of style, it’s satisfying to see an imprint so confident of its visual and sonic aesthetic, for whom each release expands and explores the ava sound while remaining loyal to the label’s well-conceived style. The stable's core group of producers collaborate and remix each others' tunes, giving the impression of a label family whose warmth and sense of fun translate well into their music (indeed, look at Damiano's tongue-in-cheek trailer for his forthcoming album).  For that reason they’re more than worth championing and sharing, not just to draw deserved attention to a superb imprint, but because we need as many labels like ava as we can get.

Essential ava tracks:

 

Funkycan: CGN - GZT

 

 Damiano Von Erckert: Housem

 

Damiano Von Erckert: The Dude Loop

 

Damiano Von Erckert feat. Georgia Anne Muldrow: Hollywood

-Tom