As much fun as the new French disco-rawk has been–not least for the way it’s set off right-thinking purist-dance music cognoscenti–it’s hardly new. What it reminds us of, frankly, is synth-riffy early-’90s rave–the kind of music that set right-thinking purist-dance music cognoscenti of a decade and a half ago into a similar froth. DJ Seduction’s “Hardcore Heaven” is the archetype of this second-wave-of-rave sound: pummeling breakbeats, blipping keyboards, bombastic synth-strings misplaying a bar or so of a Wagner fanfare. DJ Krome & Mr. Time’s “The Slammer,” meanwhile, is that basic sound, simultaneously matured and turned utterly juvenile: the track is sonically and compositionally more sophisticated than Seduction’s, but it’s made from ingredients (sped-up vocals, gurgling keyboards) that scream kiddie-korn. If the new French sound goes this direction, we will be so happy it should be illegal.
DJ Seduction - Hardcore Heaven [MP3, link expired]
DJ Krome & Mr. Time - The Slammer [MP3, link expired]
N.A.S.A. rewind a few years ago jogged my memory and i bought a bunch of these cds - techno had gotten so stale Im glad the new sound is getting fun again.
Ok–say, hypothetically, I was the kind of person who mostly listened to Schoenberg and Webern and Einsturzende Neubauten in the early ’90s and missed out on this stuff. Where would I, hypothetically, start looking, especially if I not-very-hypothetically don’t have any money?
Did this kind of stuff really offend dance purists at that time? I swear you can hear shit like this in sets by the likes of Sasha and Carl Cox from around that era. I feel like the snobbishness about this style came a bit later in the game with the advent of ambient house, and with the speeding up of this kind of track into what people usually associate with “hardcore.”
And also with the co-option of a lot of the signature sounds and effects of this style into commercial, 2 Unlimited stuff.
@nonce: Looks like both of the tracks here were on one of a few compilations of stuff like this called ‘ardkore, You Know The Score. Which IIRC was one among lots of such early 2000s compilations of this kind of material, back when an easy profit could be made off of nostalgic ravers who still bought CDs.
The System…
Is Down.