Not so with gabber. With beats pounding up to bpm — and an even more insane offshoot, speedcore, going beyond bpm — gabber feels permanently at the verge of cardiac arrest. A devilish blend of rave, techno, hard house and industrial music packed with super-charged rhythms and Belgian style rave stabs, gabber spread rapidly throughout continental Europe, where it still flourishes today, along with its bastard offshoot hardstyle.
Curiously, though, for such an uncompromising sound, it has also leaked into the mainstream. Christian Dior incorporated the hakken — a dance associated with the cheesier side of gabber — into their Winter campaign, while the web archive turned production outfit Gabber Eleganza offer a distinctly avant-garde twist on the sound.
Irregular holiday camp events like Bangface dip into the sound, drawing on its nihilistic nuttiness with occasional bookings of European acts like Rotterdam Terror Corps. Beneath this though is an underground of soundsystems, labels venues and individuals who remain committed to the gabber cause. Read Story. In the UK, gabber never found its way onto the traditional club circuit. Rather, it was often heard in derelict warehouses, or sweaty illegal raves. The exterior of the Crossbones squat on Beachy Road, east London.
Nekro remembers a Crossbones squat rave. No one else was playing this stuff on Energy at the time. Straight away they gave me a full-time show, every Saturday night at midnight… this became my regular show for three years. Almost all the DJs relied on the aptly titled Simon Underground, the main distributor of gabber music.
The fact that even the sellers despised it is testament to the sort of reception gabber has faced in the UK. It brought a very negative attitude towards the music. Frankfurt producer Marc Trauner, aka The Mover. Perhaps gabber was just a bit too aggressive, a bit too dissolute, at a time when British clubland was looking for more mature or sophisticated sounds.
In their second room they were really pushing hardcore — complete with moshpits that were more like moshpits at punk shows. The type of hardcore I like is ultimately balanced between these two contrasting elements. I bought my first tape from the food market that came to town every Wednesday, where I used to hang out with my grandmother throughout the summer. One of the stalls was selling bootleg hardcore tapes and Iron Maiden t-shirts for the metalheads.
In the same moment, you could have metalheads, hardcore warriors and young kids all interacting because, for us, it was like our local record store. It was somewhere for us to hang out. It was helpful, too, because CDs were expensive and bootlegs were all on tape at that point — I was only allowed to buy the bootlegs because they were much more affordable. It was this sort of network, in a classic underground sort of way, that introduced me to hardcore.
Everything was very new and it mostly attracted young people, especially men, often from working class backgrounds and culturally deprived places. This kind of cultural deprivation and a desire for escapism was remedied by hardcore for a lot of people. Ultimately, it was music from people to people — we can say that it was promoting a community in this way. At this point in time, we have to remember, hardcore was still an enigma and a taboo genre for the media, because they continually tried to relate it to drugs, gangs, proto-fascism and anti-social behaviour.
All over the world, hardcore attracted similar people, because similar people have similar needs. In that moment it was definitely a tribe. If you were part of that, you had this feeling of brotherhood and sisterhood. You were an outsider. Of course! In Holland, it's part of popular culture now, while in Germany, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland and the UK, there are huge scenes around this kind of music. The discussion around hardcore music in general, not just gabber — which is more of a lifestyle, a subculture and a fashion style — has been changing over the last year or so.
The topic has shifted from pre-conceived ideas about what the subculture is doing in terms of behaviour, and now people have started to realise after 25 years that there is something more there.
It is one of the the last subcultures before the internet with a graphic and visual heritage. There is a vast musical heritage and there are roots for a lot of other things that are happening now. Kids nowadays, especially after 30 years of rave culture, are somewhat turned off by the idea that they would go out and see someone who is the same age as your mother.
I remember when I first started going to raves, someone who was 25 years old seemed so much older. Later, the music arrived. Musically, there will never be one specific evolution because hardcore music is just an approach, they call it hardcore because they want to separate it from techno.
Somewhere, someone will always want to wear the clothes like a proper Gabber. It's the classic story that we all know. In terms of evolution, the musical side is certainly the most interesting to me. Recently, even Lady Gaga did a remix EP full of these sort of sounds. As long as people want to show their frustration with the world through music, hardcore will never die. When I first got into hardcore and gabber, it was during the second wave of gabber in the late nineties, which was influenced by UK skinhead aesthetics, which centred around Fred Perry, Lonsdale etc.
I started digging more, looking at VHS tapes of mids raves in Holland and Switzerland, and could see people wearing Australian brand tracksuits — an Italian tennis brand - which was particularly important. They were very graphic, with a lot of texture and crazy colours, and they were notably super expensive. At this point in time, they wanted to show that they could wear expensive clothes without sacrificing their aesthetic, it was almost like the importance of clothing and jewellery in hip-hop music.
And of course, shoes were always incredibly important. Hardcore music needed to be danced to in a specific way that was fast and hard.
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