Foosic Reviews: Breakcore

When you see the suffix core in anything musical it produces the assumption that it’s going to be some pretty aurally challenging stuff. Breakcore is no exception to this rule, it’s a fast and furious style of music characterised by frenetic breakbeats. It harks from jungle music, which is a style of dance music that ranges from about 150 to 170 beats per minute and is identifiable through a looped breakbeat that comes from a track called “Amen, Brother” by the 1960s funk and soul band named The Winstons. This roughly eight second loop was sampled and has been looped in many styles of music from hip-hop (see for example “Straight Outta Compton” by NWA) to techno and, of course, jungle. Jungle originally took this break, sped it up and cut it up, this can be heard in many tunes such as “Not 4 U” by Remarc (and many other Remarc classics besides) and the 1991 classic “We are I.E” by Lennie De Ice. Later on digital hardcore creator Alex Empire got hold of this Amen sound and made the move towards the frenzied end of the spectrum when he released “Bass Terror” in 1993 (you might remember this from an earlier post). The idea is roughly the same as jungle, it takes this breakbeat and cuts it up, but it starts getting taken to ever more extreme lengths. The pace gets faster and the cutting gets more complex.

It’s worth mentioning that, as with all genres, what I’ve mentioned above is a tendency but not a rule or a law. Breakcore is often characterised by broken Amen breaks, but really it can use any broken up beat that’s been sliced up beyond any kind of degree considered humane by listeners of the less challenging and more mainstream (or, to use a more apt adjective, boring) music. Breakcore started being known as a genre in the late nineties, but much earlier jungle was getting so cut up that had it been faster it would have been almost the same thing. I believe genres can almost always be better understood as spectra than as solid definitions, so looking retrospectively much faster jungle and digital hardcore could be seen somewhere on the breakcore spectrum. Towards the late nineties people like Nasenbluten (Bloody Fist Records) and DJ Scud (Ambush records) started releasing records that were to jungle what hardcore techno and gabber were to “normal” techno. Of Ambush records it says on discogs.com, “it stands as a hopeful flash point in the micro-conservative landscape of electronic dance music”, so essentially it seems to have been an underground reaction to the world of super DJs and commercialisation. This was a continuation of the constant tension in the dance music scene between the DIY culture found at free parties and the financial gain ethic followed by creators of the rave scene in England and later just about everyone who wanted some cash from the massively popular dance music culture of the nineties. One of the positive outcomes of this popularism and commercialisation was the encouragement of a strong and vibrant underground scene as a reaction to it. So came creative music trying to be ever more ground breaking, not just for the sake of creativity, but also as a cultural and political project.

So, breakcore was staunchly hardcore and stood as a reaction to the commercialisation of the entire dance music scene, it was some pretty serious and ground breaking stuff. Creative seriousness also came from better known producers from the intelligent dance music scene (IDM), most people who have had any interest in modern dance music will have heard of Aphex Twin and Rephlex Records. “Come To Daddy”, with its highly disturbing video, is perhaps not quite breakcore, but again it’s certainly on the same spectrum, it has an experimental edge and is characterised by frenetic breaks. Around this time Squarepusher was also releasing material like “Come On My Selector”, another frenzied attack of cut up breaks. The scene continued to churn out material, and I first got interested in it through the London squat party scene and the underground parties of a sound system called Headfuk. Headfuk were a collective of artists and musicians who were interested in pushing the boundaries of non-commercial dance and had their own record label (Headfuk records). They mainly released breakcore and hardcore techno, notably artists such as Ronin and Ely Muff. A lot of their music was more on the hardcore techno side of things, but there’s definitely a strong thread of breakcore madness there, and they are firmly and even ideologically rooted in DIY culture, the music flowed from a creative ethic rather than a financial one. Ely Muff is interesting because although he is largely known as a hardcore techno producer his music is characterised by cutting up of beats, something very familiar from breakcore and hardcore techno (and, earlier, digital hardcore). Later on other sound systems and collectives followed similar ethics, like Pitchless industries and Ill Fm.

So, there was a large creative movement existent on the underground scene, still vibrant and alive in the 21^st century. Many artists are at least affected by breakcore-see Broken Note, Badsekta, Phuq, etc, etc, etc. There’s also the less serious side of breakcore, which is very rooted in the mash up style of production, mixing and blending things like metal, familiar reggae and ragga tracks and jungle. It is of no less creative value, but certainly has a different mood. There are artists like Arron Spectre and DJ Scotch Egg (the latter being known for throwing his snack name sake into the audience), there music is sometimes less cut up and less experimental, but is very danceable and often very well produced. There are many modern permutations of the style, following the same creative ethic. Artists such as Counterstrike and Panacea have injected the breakcore ethic into straight up drum and bass, creating a style known as tear out, an extremely frenzied version of drum and bass/jungle, but that is produced in such a way that it mixes well with drum and bass DJ sets. There are also many tracks that are more danceable but follow a similar ethic, such record labels as Big Kat and Aural Carnage are great proponents of this. Injected back into the dubstep style we see the formulation of such things as drumstep, less frenetic but continuing to create and distort existing paradigms, giving nerdy genre describers like me new challenges. Breakcore has moved on to continue to sow the seeds of its ethic in the fields of many different genres, giving many interesting new and ground breaking forms of dance music. Though many of the artists I've mentioned might not be classically considered to be breakcore, I believe the scene is characterised by a scene and a wish to cut up breaks to create a fresh experimental sound, and I believe all of these artists comfortably sit on this wide spectrum somewhere.

There are of course too many artists and tracks for me to name, but here’s a few more of my old favourites, who are not necessarily breakcore per se, but exist on that spectrum: Bong-Ra-“Ragganaut”, Hanin Elias-“Nizza”, Christoph de Babylon, Nasenbluten-“No Sex”, Ely Muff-“We're The Musicians”, Bazooka-“Bassdrum Korrekt”, and possibly more later when I have some more time!