Foosic Reviews: Bonkers Music of the Week

This week's music is an old favourite of mine. I got in to this music before I got into any other dance music, but it is really derived from a dance music and punk background. The music in question is known as digital hardcore and was invented mainly by Alec Empire and other members of a band called Atari Teenage Riot from Berlin. It's often characterised by an extremely fast jungle break (a kind of looped drum and bass sounding beat that is usually at between 150 and 170 bpm, although I've got digital hardcore where it happily pounds along at 240 bpm-that's 4 beats per second!), crunchy production done on basic bits of software and hardware and sometimes screaming rebellious vocals. I believe the name Atari Teenage Riot comes from their use of Atari computers to sequence their music.

Some digital hardcore has been highly influential for the development of breakcore and speedcore, I am particularly thinking of the 1993 release Bass Terror by Alec Empire and several later releases. No digital hardcore is what you could call chilled out, but it is quite varied. There are groups like Ec8or who produce generally 4/4 (with an unbroken beat-like house, although the unbroken beat is where the similarity ends) beat backed by furious breaks. Then there is Shizuo from the UK, this stuff is much slower and heavier, Sweat is a particular favourite of mine. There are some just down right hilarious groups too, like Lolita Storm who basically just scream incredibly lewd lyrics over scrunched up amen breaks (I'll be talking about amen breaks at some time in the future...). The reason I like this music so much is the inventiveness and DIY nature of it. People got a bunch of computers and hardware and invented a new form of music whilst holding true to a DIY punk ethos. If you want to hear a good selection of it have a listen to Harder than the Rest or Riot Zone, compilations put together on Digital Hardcore Recordings (DHR).