gloomcore and harshstep, 1998

Spin dance genre-watch column, June 1998

By Simon Reynolds

Once, there was just "hardcore"--rave music at its most flipped-out and

euphoric-aggressive fierce. Then, circa 1992, came the great parting of the

ways. English hardcore DJs mixed in hip hop breaks 'n' bass to create a

hyper-syncopated bedlam that eventually evolved into jungle. The rest of

the world stuck with techno's monolithic 4/4 stomp-beat and kept upping the

b.p.m's to ever more punishing extremes. For a while, the Dutch--in the

form of the Rotterdam sound called "gabba"--were harder than the rest. Then

other outposts--labels like Brooklyn's Industrial Strength, Milwaukee's

Drop Bass Network, France's Gangstar Toons Industry,  Australia's Bloody

Fist, and many more--took it further still.

By 1996, though, hardcore was banging its head against a brick wall

of  shlocky ultraviolence and 250-300 b.p.m. velocity. The more astute

producers took a step sideways from this braindead end. One escape route,

followed by Frankfurt's PCP and its sister-labels Dance Ecstasy 2001 and

Cold Rush, involved a style that just cries out for the absurd oxymoron

"ambient gabba": an atmospheric, slightly slower sound, heavy on cavernous

reverb, glacial textures and sorrowful melodies. Following awesomely

desolate dirges like Renegade Legion's "Torsion", the PCP crew have reached

something of an aesthetic pinnacle with Pilldriver's "Apocalypse Never",

the tenth Cold Rush release.

Pilldriver is one of many pseudonyms (see also The Mover,

Mescalinum United, Alien Christ) used by the mysterious Marc Acardipane,

probably hardcore's most visionary producer. "Apocalypse Never" harries the

listener with synth-stabs that sound like a swarm of bat-winged and

trident-wielding demons, while the unrelenting 4/4 kick-drum is so cleverly

inflected you never register it as monotony. For more glorious gloomcore,

check out the PCP compilation Bigger Bolder Better, plus Superpower,  a

six-track EP collaboration between PCP's Hypnotizer and New York's Oliver

Chesler, on the latter's Things To Come label.

Another increasingly popular "step sideways"  involves mixing

gabba's Teutonic terror-riffs with techstep jungle's paroxysmic breakbeats

and murky bombast.  From Drop Bass Network's sub-label Ghetto Safari and

Frankfurt's Chrome to the Paris imprint No-Tek and London's Ambush, this

new hybrid--known variously as  "splatterbreaks", "hardbreaks" or

"harsh-step"--is the emergent renegade sound at squat-raves.

Superficially, harsh-step seems to have much in common with Alec

Empire's Digital Hardcore, which also combines gabba's killer-bee drones,

sped-up breaks and fuzzguitar-like midfrequency noise. But unlike Digital

Hardcore's adrenalizingly one-dimensional scree, the Ambush producers

leaven their  assault with a superior sense of dynamics and space. Jackal &

Hide's Escape From South London EP is a lo-fi holocaust of industrial

effluent, eardrum-shredding snares and low-end turbulence. Aphasic & Scud's

Welcome To The Warren EP sounds like metal-bashers Einsturzende Neubauten

getting on the good foot. Best of the lot is the Give Up EP by David Hammer

(a.k.a DHR artist Shizuo), who interweaves different kinds of distortion

with a sensuous awareness of  audio-tactile texture.

Although Ambush's sound verges on outright avant-gardism, DJ

Scud--who recently played New York's Soundlab alongside DJ Spooky, Alec

Empire and Manhattan's own harsh-step crusader I-Sound--says his real

inspiration is the populist rave of 1991. Scud wants to bring back "the

madness and intensity" of early hardcore, "but not its happy-happy,

hands-in-the-air vibe". Hence the dystopian aura and abstract  militancy of

Ambush's four releases to date.

Sidestepping DHR's full-frontal approach

(sloganeering harangues), harsh-step's anarcho-politics are more subtle

--articulated in  techno-theory zines like Break/Flow, Datacide and Scud's

own Fallout, hinted at in the paramilitary imagery of track titles and band

names, and most of all, incarnated in the music itself. At once savage and

sophisticated, harsh-step is the sound of insubordination--not just against

sonic stagnation but against cultural lockdown too: the urban politics of

gentrification and ghettoization, the insidious normalization of

surveillance. If gabba was techno-as-heavy-metal, harsh-step is new

millennium punk-funk.