Gabber: Square wave bludgeoning

shakahislop

Well-known member
to develop this highly important thesis further, i reckon one aspect of the appeals of gabber (or the other more accurate genres that thirdform is talking about) is that there are a load of people who grow up without any way of dancing coz of these cultural changes, which is a natural human thing to want to do, an inbuilt drive, intrinsically good in and of itself, that gabber really works for, in that essentially you can do what you want because no-one can dance to that, and it repulses slinky good dancers with windy waists.

this is in addition to the more obvious macho thing, the intensity, that it just sounds good
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
1993 - still with a connection to UK and belgian rave.


Other mix especially sounds like mackenzie records on the gnarliest bad trip acid and speed.

 

thirdform

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of course they were well aware of the bad rap this music was getting from the outset. A lot of the tunes from this era also have breakbeats under the kicks, either subtle or pronounced. this one is a co production between paul elstak and Joey Beltram.

 

thirdform

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you can really feel the industrial hooliganism that the reviewer there was talking about in this one from Rotterdam records. As deranged as the best '93 UK jungle.

 

thirdform

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this Dutch stuff was definitely much less moody and skrewface/robocock than the (mostly German/midwestern) industrial hardcore/techno coming out at the time.

 

IdleRich

IdleRich
yeah right, I mean what i mean is just that it's gone completely, and the way people dance in england now has absolutely nothing to do with traditional english dancing. the american thing that you described sounds right.

i do think that england is a culture which is a bit deprived of dancing, overall. i mean there are outlets for it obviously. but i reckon the majority of people, even most young people, almost never dance. i don't think these two things are totally unrelated, obviously there's a lot more going on and i'd rather dance to d&b rather than become a morris dancer, although a combination of the two could be good as well.

singing is a bit like that in england as well, people basically don't let you do it unless you're 'good'
I remember going to Hungary with a girlfriend many years ago and, while we spent most of the time in Budapest, we also went to meet up with a friend of hers who was doing a phd in sociology which involved spending a lot of time in a gypsy settlement just outside the second city of Debrecen. So we went to this village and chatted a bit to some of the people she knew there and there was gonna be some kind of party - a dance in fact - there that night and I remember the gypsy kids talking about dancing and laughing about how Hungarians danced, or rather, couldn't dance. I dunno what I am trying to say here, probably something about how maybe part of that difference in skill was cos the gypsies had never chucked away their own dancing and started again from the beginning with an alien style from the other side of the world.

Again that's just a guess obviously.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
As the Scottish and Dutch scenes start to interact with each other you can start to see how things will start to go all wrong — for the orthodox gabber sound that is.


It's way too bouncy, way too pogo-stick, it's dirty but still cleaner than the stuff I posted above. It's not quite happy yet.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
another portence of bad things to come. This is still good enough, but you can feel that sooner or later the wannabe gothy trance melodies are going to swamp the scene.


Then you had stuff like this. absolutely diabolical, corny as all hell.


Much much worse than thee jump up of the era.
 

thirdform

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Ironically, for all the rotterdam/amsterdam rivalry, Mokem records was actually based in Amsterdam (with jewish producers/owners iirc) and could hold its own.

 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
On the topic of Amsterdam this is quite an outlier, like a cross between sven vath type hard trance and cheap hardcore, ironically prefiguring the later direction of British happy hardcore. Certainly enough gorgonzola to melt any hypermasculine racist thug from the Leeds Service Crew for 30 seconds, giving you enough time to give 'im the klump, but for me it is at least classily executed, and doesn't suffer from being too blatant like other tracks from 94.


Very proto-vapourwave, the production sounds quite outdated, even for '94.

Whilst a good tune, this is another nail in the coffin. But nothing could prepare a few lads from newcastle, Australia, for this.


'this is a journey into money, loads of money' that rotterdam diss is here.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
So those are the trials and tribulations of the Dutch side of gabber, at least. The Germans were on a much different, much more punishing level (imo) much darker, much more depersonalised.






 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
I think I said this before but when I was a trader there was this guy - actually one of the only nice people in the entire company - who used to love hard music. He wore cyberdog t-shirts and he had a record collection like none I'd ever seen before - it was totally unique in that it consisted of only one record. One time he asked me to take it to my house cos he felt that it deserved to be played at least one time (he had no record player of his own to play it on) and so I took it home to give it a kind of ceremonial play. My girlfriend was in the other room at the time and I said that one of the records I had just been playing did not belong to me but in fact to this friend - she could immediately tell which one it was cos it was the only one which could actually beat someone in a different room to a pulp - Walk On Base by C-Tank.
 
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