breaks

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simon silverdollar

Guest
a lot of club nights iand raves i go to, and am going to go to, have 'Breaks' rooms or stages- this scene seems to be quite big at the moment and i know nothing about it. is it a revivalist thing of playing old breakbeat records, or is it mainly new stuff? how closely aligned is it with drum n bass? who's good in the breaks scene?

questions, so many questions...
 

hint

party record with a siren
as I understand it, it tends to be people like the freestylers and the stanton warriors who get classed as "breaks" in this kind of context nowadays... the remains of big beat / nu skool breaks all thrown in together. breezeblock style stuff (although the show covers much more than just "breaks"). not my kind of thing, but there's definitely a scene chugging along that fills that grey area between drum and bass and house for drunk youngsters.

certainly not ultimate breaks and beats territory.
 
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Badmarsh

Well-known member
Breaks is a funny one.

It's supported greatly on the rave scene by securing 2nd rooms at the big jungle dances. Raindance/Moondance etc etc.

It's got a thriving scene in Spain - especially the south where its huge! Alot of my mates who play out there say it amazes them how big it is....1000+capacity raves and thats being conservative.

It's definitely very dancefloor friendly as a music, you can't doubt that. It's also exceedingly monotonous and in some cases very unorignal - i aint mentioning names coz i'll get into trouble - but this whole bassline breaks scene really needs some originality injected into it.

My preference is the crossover of breaks into garage = breakstep etc - lots of new sounds and artists churning out beats in this niche.

Breaks is bigger everywhere but where it comes from, the UK.
 

Blackdown

nexKeysound
breaks is supposed to be massive in Australia too. 2000 people in the main room on a Saturday night, that kind of thing. the same proportions as house n trance is here in the UK.
 

ewmy

Genre Addict
I'd class myself as a fan of breakbeat/breaks/nu-skool breaks/whatever, especially once it moved properly onto the dancefloor in about 2000. I like the way it takes good bits from house, drum and bass, and garage and makes this supremely danceable whole. As party music it takes some beating - IMO especially when mixed up with house (James Zabiela is a bit good at that).

And most of it isn't that monotonous - there's a fair bit of complexity in the drum programming. In fact, T-Power (of Shy FX & "Shake Ur Body" fame) supposedly starting making breaks when he got got bored of the limited possibilties of 180bpm compared to 140. It's not even comparable to true monotony like hard house or happy hardcore. And the latter at least has got some love on dissensus!

Saying that, I've kind of stopped buying it in the past couple of years, because the proportion of wheat in the chaff is pretty low. Some subgenres are really poor (e.g. "progressive" breaks), and even my favourite producers (like the Plump DJs, Lee Coombs, Meat Katie, the Stanton Warriors) and labels (Finger Lickin', Functional, Botchit & Scarper) are inconsistent in the quality of their releases. But I still pick up most of what the Plumps release and I still love throwing some shapes to it.
 

boomnoise

♫
new albums this year from some big players - ills to name one - not that the album is where it's at for breaks but in terms of the appetite for this stuff then it's probably indicative of something. personally i would love to see a dubstep / breaks interpollination in the clubs.
 

ambrose

Well-known member
i think breaks is more monotonous than hard house or happy hardcore because it refuses to be "cheesey". all genres that have issues with being too "cheesey" eg idm, are totally sterile and moribund, a dead end route. that migh be overstating the case a bit too much.

anyway, breaks. look out for dj purdey..shes up and coming (vybe fm 99.5 satuirdays 12-2)

it was really exciting when i first saw botchit and scarper recorss in uptown in 2000 tho
 
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bassnation

the abyss
ambrose said:
i think breaks is more monotonous than hard house or happy hardcore because it refuses to be "cheesey". all genres that have issues with being too "cheesey" eg idm, are totally sterile and moribund, a dead end route. that migh be overstating the case a bit too much.

yeah, there just seems to be no grounding culturally it just seems so empty, like progressive / tech house. not mental enough to be exciting, all very tasteful and mundane. nu skool breaks when it started was plodding and stilted. its got better since then production wise, but theres still nothing of interest to grab on to.

ghettotech, electro, old skool, ukg whatever - thats all cool. but "breaks" as a concept? i mean where can it go, really?
 

zhao

there are no accidents
confusion

I think "breaks" might be a name that is even more vague and confusing than a lot of other names in electronic music. it can mean a LOT of different things and does to a lot of different people. when I think of breaks I think of futuristic electro, like 2 lone swordsmen or whatever (by the way, how can they be "lone" if there are 2 of them? but that's a topic for another discussion)
 
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simon silverdollar

Guest
these are the people playing in the 'breaks' room at seone on saturday [which i'm going to- and should too cuz raindance are going to be there];

HYPER

Headlining the breaks room is one of the scene's top players, Kilowatt records head man DJ Hyper! Since exploding onto the scene with the Distinctive Y3K and Bedrock Breaks compilations, Hyper has been helping pioneer the breaks sound over the past few years with a relentless tour of the globe. A few weeks in Hyper's DJ diary takes him from Europe to Asia to Australia, where he was chosen by Prodigy to warm up for their Two Tribes show. There's no doubt he'll be turning this room on it's head with his top-notch mixing and awesome selection. We are very excited to have such a world-class guest.



PAUL ARNOLD


STEELO


PAUL LOUTH

ANDY HARKIN

are any of these worth checking out?
 

bassnation

the abyss
2stepfan said:
Plump DJ's Eargasm album is one of the ten CDs me and the wife have danced round the kitchen to most in the last year. The Gate is just fantastic.

I did a breaks mix (that even Bassnation likes!) a while back. It's at http://www.grievousangel.net/Big_Room_Breakbeat_Master_2.mp3 .

ah but this is the problem. i'd view that mix as prime big beat, back when it was fun. :)

breaks i'd see as more on the progressive tip, all that horrible arpeggio synth thing and wooshing fx which i'm sure you'd never subscribe to!
 

ThinKing

Well-known member
boomnoise said:
personally i would love to see a dubstep / breaks interpollination in the clubs.


This is definitely happening to some extent.

The 'bassline breaks' scene has grown a lot in the last couple of years - harder, more DnB styled stuff by peeps like Quest, Baobinga, Aquasky, Distortionz etc, although I don't see much crossover to the DnB scene itself - NuSkool Breaks doesn't get much of a look-in on DOA at any rate.

The people into harder breaks are looking to the broad dubstep scene now though, since there are already people that have been blurring the lines between the two scenes for a while - Darqwan, Zinc, Search & Destroy, Distance, Quest...Mark of the Beast by S&D was released on a breaks label, with a breaks tune on the flip, and seems to have gone down really well.
 

egg

Dumpy's Rusty Nut
confucius said:
like 2 lone swordsmen or whatever (by the way, how can they be "lone" if there are 2 of them? but that's a topic for another discussion)
they might not know each other
 
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captain easychord

Guest
at least here in toronto breaks is pretty much a barnacle clinging to the large drum and bass scene. there's always an empty second room at the big parties. i find it pretty dull for the most part.
 

mms

sometimes
Blackdown said:
breaks is supposed to be massive in Australia too. 2000 people in the main room on a Saturday night, that kind of thing. the same proportions as house n trance is here in the UK.

austrialia is weird.
they are big into d and b as well eh but that really nasty clean stuff.
my sisters husband is australian and he was trying to convince me ltj bukem was australian the other dy/
 

Pearsall

Prodigal Son
ThinKing said:
The 'bassline breaks' scene has grown a lot in the last couple of years - harder, more DnB styled stuff by peeps like Quest, Baobinga, Aquasky, Distortionz etc, although I don't see much crossover to the DnB scene itself - NuSkool Breaks doesn't get much of a look-in on DOA at any rate.

That stuff is pretty good.

Better than the more polite Adam Freeland stuff anyways. I liked the Deekline 'Hardcore Beats' mix cd.
 

notoriousJ.I.M

Well-known member
I think that Brighton, where I live is currently seen as the spiritual home of breaks, which began concurrently with the arse end of big beat. Krafty Cuts is apparently the biggest dj in Australia and used to run a record shop and label here called Happy Vibes Recordings (which was essentially a happy hardcore label as the name suggests), stocking jungle, hip hop and big beat. Adam Freeland also lives here and was influenced by 'ardkore, electro and the Florida breaks scene (which is the clubbier "progressive" cousin of Miami Bass championed by Icey, Keoki, Rabbit In the Moon etc.). I also know the guys from Evil Nine who live here and are signed to Freeland's Marine Parade label. Apparently Spain is where they get most their gigs so the earlier comment on the scene there is spot on. Although breaks nights are common here, I never hear much to distinguish the sound as anything unique. I've recently noticed a lot of the DJs mixing "electro house" (for want of a better term) into their sets, thus moving away from breaks back to four-four! There's also a trend in progressive breaks for massive breakdowns and drumroll crescendos in the build ups and recently a spate of bootlegs of techno tunes like Red 2 (Dave Clarke) and Mentasm (Beltram) in this style which i find unlistenable. I think it's really progressive house mark 2.
 
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