Since Breakcore as a genre seems to be at the verge of “acceptance”, it’s worth looking back and evaluating some of the history.
A whole new audience has emerged in the last couple of years, that in many cases seems to know very little about the history, ideas and culture. This situation is not helped by the fact that a number of careerist impresarios and label managers are trying to present their version of Breakcore as the “next big thing” in a desperate bid to make it in the spectacle. What events, currents and breaks led us to this point?
Praxis Newsletter 18: Breakcore?
Essential.
i sometimes wish someone would do a history of the origins of the term idm cos i can’t think of a time anyone in those ‘scenes’ has ever said anything anti-hardcore anti-rave, isolationist intelligent apart from maybe warp for a while cos they didn’t like breakbeats – i think the whole thing ws a misinterpretation of warps artificial intelligence series in a sense and people like the was idm message board thing that charted and discussed post aphex techno, misinterpreting or taking as creed some of the interviews with certain artists rather than it being a genre or movement.
Although i do to an extent agree with what he says about ragga jungle 2005 altho it has somewhat shifted, and also cock rock disco etc as it’s not part of breakcores continnum although musically it’s fresher than alot of breakcore stuff.
anyway – is christoph ever going to do datacide again – sorely missed as are praxis releases
I think the whole notion of “intelligent” or “listening” techno as a category was seen as an assault on more “low brow” stuff (which was merely for people to dance to) at the time.
Yeah I really miss Datacide but I think it just came down to the money in the end. If you look at the datacide forum on c8 there is a bit of a discussion about the need for subscriptions, adverts etc and nobody really came through with the goods (well, I did!) so it’s not been possible to print any more.
But on a more positive note it looks like there are some more Praxis and Sub/Version releases coming out soon…
i do think there is a strand of breakcore related music that is tongue in cheek , ironic and shrug shouldered and rather about silly performance art and dumbness than anything oppositional, or foward facing
kind of reminds me of the character in chris morris last telly show
what a load of pompous wind-core
there’s lots of good discussions to be had about novelty core music and wotnot, and ragga sampling, but this whole pronouncement does seem a tad overstated.
To be something of a materialist; there is something very oppositional in some of the novelty stuff. I wouldn’t neccesarily agree with the documents statements about the use of pop samples in breakcore. On one hand it could be construed as gesture towards mainstream acceptance, but on another one could look at it as a form of self valourisation – taking cultural fragments from the dominant cultural industry, usually pirating them via peer to peer networks and recontextualising them to give them new meaning for a new audience.