Is Ardkore Finally Dead?

Ardkore

WILL NEVER DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


er, no, you're probably right. not many flickers left, although the riff on "reload it' is quite rushy.

i thought 2step was the end of it at the time but there were still little encoded blisstastic bits, vocal woogly divastuff

the econo-cultural substructure is still intact but the aesthetic superstructure is almost completely overhauled -- as it should be, its THIRTEEN YEARS since '92!!!!!

mind you they still use the word 'rave' now and then though as in 'ravin' cru pon the dancefloor/if youwant more we'll give u more"

surely "forward" is the total essence of ardkore though? just total brock out stimulant overload. the first time i heard it (walking down the street) i felt like my heart was going to explode. (admittedly sentiments like "shoot them shoot them shoot them" might run counter to the vibe.) there's a lot of ruff sqwad tunes that still have "the feeling" for me.

i am struggling through my run the road review right now (1000 words...too much and never enough at the same time), and agree with blissblogger that the real continuity seems to now reside in the pirates/dubplates/raves structural stuff rather than the sonix.


errr...matt i think yr being too vague about what you mean by "ardkore" though.

Am I the only one that thinks if Fwd isn't actually a sample of Beyond the Dance, it might as well be, then?Not very ardkore.

Well ardkore is alive and, well, kicking in the Netherlands, if not in London. And even chucking up new permutations all the time eg Newstyle and Jumpstyle...

This doesn't make any sense at all for me.

As long as there is ragga, there is ardkore.

You really gotta get away from this linear projection thing Matt, it's all about cycles, the ardkore continuum won't "end", not for ages yet. It's like saying the 93 current will "end", or the 418 current, or the 23 current...

Backjob said:

Well ardkore is alive and, well, kicking in the Netherlands, if not in London. And even chucking up new permutations all the time eg Newstyle and Jumpstyle...

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what are newstyle and jumpstyle? i'm excitingly intrigued.

i think tim finney once said that ruff sqwad are like the acen of grime. i liked that.

some of wiley's recent productions seem quite rushy and mentalist- like dragon stout and ice cream man. those collapsing and jittery melodies.

I think lightning bolt have absorbed something from hardcore thus fusing it with its unrelated (except semantically) namesake but it might be my imagination

it does seem though that the business of sampling & cutting -up breakbeats from funk or funky rock drummers, now at least 25 years old, has finally reached its use-by date - wasn't that one of the distinguishing features of most of the music in the 'nuum?

minusone said:

I think lightning bolt have absorbed something from hardcore thus fusing it with its unrelated (except semantically) namesake but it might be my imagination

it does seem though that the business of sampling & cutting -up breakbeats from funk or funky rock drummers, now at least 25 years old, has finally reached its use-by date - wasn't that one of the distinguishing features of most of the music in the 'nuum?

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maybe, but its not exactly done dnb a power of good to get rid of that aspect, has it? just how dull and played out does jungle sound these days?

i guess if you guys are just looking at grime it would be easy to assume that theres not much 'ardkore left in that sound - probably why old timers like me have difficulty in getting our heads around it, its such a break from all that.

but if you look at other forms of dance music, be it wasteland (& most of breakcore, in a deferential pastiche kind of way, natch) or even totally unfashionable genres like hard house, its a sound thats never really gone away.

this probably sounds sad and pathetic but it will never be dead for me. theres no other music that i connect with so deeply and i couldn't give a toss if no-one else in the world shares that passion with me. 'ARDKORE WILL NEVER DIE (as someone once said)

BlissMan:
the econo-cultural substructure is still intact but the aesthetic superstructure is almost completely overhauled

I suspect this is exactly wrong. Part of the reason that 2step got used up and thrown away so fast, and why Grime means next to nothing outside of London, is because the economic systems that sustained the 'nuum have broken down. Specifically the record shops, venues, radio stations are either no longer in existence or in retreat. The culture is still there however -- but I think Matt is dead wrong to assert a London-centricity to ardkore. You should meet Twist sometime! Ardkore seems to have successfully fulfilled the criteria of a virus and has taken root at the margins all over.

In contrast the aesthesis exhibits a high degree of continutity. I was listening to a Plasticman mix last night -- it was very similar to jungle or bleep and bass. Completely different in many ways but identifiably in the same current.

charltonlido said:

you could posit the argument that hardcore is the anomaly in the continuum, and might not actually belong there? take hardcore out, and stop looking for the sonic signifiers, and the continuum survives intact?

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jungle wouldn't exist without hardcore and then the whole thing unravels.

charltonlido said:

you could posit the argument that hardcore is the anomaly in the continuum, and might not actually belong there? take hardcore out, and stop looking for the sonic signifiers, and the continuum survives intact?

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You could say you have no fucking idea what you're talking about, but that might sound more confrontational than one would want .

We're talking about the ardkore continuum, which is a well-attested and identifiable phenomenon, and you're saying that ardkore itself doesn't fit into that continuum? It sounds like maybe you should posit a different continuum instead of, um, hijacking this one and cutting the heart out of it .

Yeah, that virus broke down a long time ago then. Look at the US. You can regularly find '91 and early '92 stuff on sale on Ebay from US sellers but you won't find hardly anything from the era where the breaks are beginning to get chopped up.

I do not really know anything about grime but from reading you guys I get the feeling that it is a lot like hip hop in its outlook. It's all grim, alpha male crap. "I am the roughest, don't fuck with me, I'll go around your house and shoot you and then bang your sister". It seems so humorless (aside from put downs of your rivals), the emotions you are allowed to show are very limited. Compare this to ardkore which seemed very open and happy, smiling, "unity etc.". All those cheesy bits....just overflowing with different emotions. The darkside too. I think that side is gone and probably been gone since '95 right around the time when they finally stopped samping divas (the stabs and random TV samples where long gone by then too).

Happy hardcore retained some of the elements (the breaks were almost as choppy as a lot of jungle until about '95) but the track structure became too formulaic, not mental enough and they focused on that one aspect of it, forgetting the darkside.

All this is old stuff I guess. The memory lives on but the feeling is gone.

yep it was definitely not just a london thing - hardcore blossomed in outdoor raves all over the britain, clubs in the north as well as in london & the south, places like sterns way outside of metropolitan areas. It's that lack of spread & parochialism of current scenes that supports woebot's proposition if you look beyond just what the pirates are playing

hardcore/ardkore

depends how you define hardcore innit

if you think of hardcore as banging E-musik then there's pockets of it all around the world, gabba fans, those people doing irregular events in middlesborough and leicester with 'caution! nuts inside!' on the flyers, yes it has a certain half-life, or quarter-life

if you think of it as ardkore as this londcentric (if not london-limited) collision of hip hop and Ecstasy and ragga and techno and records from the Top 40 and samples from things in your elder brother's record collecitons (Maddy Prior! Wish You Were Here!), -- then there's faint echoes of it now and then in Grime

if you think in those Londoncentric terms, which i was when i said the substructure is there and the superstructure is overhauled -- well i'd disagree with meme and say the infrastructure IS still largely there -- pirates, people cutting dub plates at Music House etc, white labels sold straight to specialist stores, some of which are the same ones (for instance Big Apple, which was advertizing on pirates back in 92, has only just closed), shabby clubs, dodgy raves. there's been some turnover

i quite warm to breakcore and retro-rave but there is a sense in which it's a bit like saying ROCK'N'ROLL WILL NEVER DIE and then pointing to the Stray Cats/Shakin Stevens/Polecats as evidence of it as a living tradition (sorry, that reference that will be lost on younger readers)

minusone said:

I think lightning bolt have absorbed something from hardcore thus fusing it with its unrelated (except semantically) namesake but it might be my imagination

it does seem though that the business of sampling & cutting -up breakbeats from funk or funky rock drummers, now at least 25 years old, has finally reached its use-by date - wasn't that one of the distinguishing features of most of the music in the 'nuum?

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i've thought this, it's industrial techno rush isn't it?
tellingly a die hard raver mate who hates all guitars likes lb for the 'rave rush' - his words

actually

i agree with the chap who said there was ardkore survivals in the FWD/croydon/dubstep stuff maybe more than grime

there's a track on Grime 2, "CR7 Chamber" by digital mystikz, that is totally Sweet Exorcist/Unique 3, darkside bleep'n'bass

and sometimes the plastikmanny stuff plugs into the cold techno side of hardkore, things like Nebula II

a cold-rush/industrial-dub line runnning from Belgcore/early UR/early Plus 8 (FU2 etc)/darkcore/no u turn to dubstep/mark one type stuff

also direct homages -- samples from "bludclot artattack"

I think lightning bolt have absorbed something from hardcore thus fusing it with its unrelated (except semantically) namesake but it might be my imagination

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spot on...saw them last year at Brudenell Social Club in Leeds, absolutely rammed, ceiling dripping with sweat...described 'em to people as bass and drums basically making hard breaky techno. very interesting band.

charltonlido said:

you can look at it, that hardcore itself was the anomaly withiin the continuum, the only one hugely succesful outside london, the only one which was connected to europe/techno in anyway. which means, either, the continuum actually started AFTER hardcore, in 93, and its basically the closing down of it to being jus a london thing, OR, that the scene goes back much further than hardcore itself, and hardcore is an anomaly, and that looking for the sonic signifiers in 92 breakbeathardcore is actually missing the point of it

or, to put it another way, shades of rhythm are as integral to hardcore as reinforced

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An excellent riposte! Right I see where you're coming from now

When you say "that the scene goes back much further than hardcore itself, and hardcore is an anomaly", I quite agree with the first part. I think of the ardkore continuum in the same way as I think of the 93 current: it's a pattern in time, and from a linear view it has a start point, but from a musical / semiotic / gnostic view the ardkore current travels back in time from that starting point as much as it travels forward from it. From this point of view Hardcore wasn't an anomaly but simply one of the expressions of the current. So to me, the connections between grime and jungle are very apparent: the formal musical echoes of timbre, the mythological navigation of different interstices of desire, rebellion and release, the sociological similarity of the scenes that produced it. And to me the ardkore current is still absolutely vital and you can hear it in the Red Alert rhythm as much as it is in Plasticman. As with the 93 current, if it's in you, you see it everywhere, because it is everywhere.

I agree it's a "wide angle lens" point of view, but a valid one, I think.

charltonlido said:

that hardcore itself was the anomaly within the continuum, the only one hugely succeSsful outside london, the only one which was connected to europe/techno in anyway. which means, either, the continuum actually started AFTER hardcore, in 93, and it's basically the closing down of it to being jus a london thing, OR, that the scene goes back much further than hardcore itself, and hardcore is an anomaly, and that looking for the sonic signifiers in 92 breakbeathardcore is actually missing the point of it

or, to put it another way, shades of rhythm are as integral to hardcore as reinforced

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if the scene stretches back to a time before hardcore, what would the scene have been? that is, wasn't hardcore the result of diverse, nearly antagonistic music scenes coming together = JA soundsystem culture + UK hip hop scene + industrial music (& euro body music) + house/club music + rock 'n' roll . . . . so which of these many scenes would you select as parts of the continuum? and which would you exclude? . . . . also, i've heard people refer to 4hero's late 90s move to broken beat as a kind of return to late 80s uk soul/streetbeats culture -- of which i know practically nothing

as for shades of rhythm -- they're from manchester, correct?