Belgian hardcore techno (also referred to as Belgian techno or rave techno[citation needed]) is an early style of hardcore techno that emerged from new beat as EBM and techno influences became more prevalent in this genre.[2] This particular style has been described as an "apocalyptic, almost Wagnerian, bombastic techno",[3] due to its use of dramatic orchestral stabs and menacing synth tones that set it apart from earlier forms of electronic dance music. It flourished in Belgium and influenced the sound of early hardcore from Netherlands, Germany, Italy, UK and North America during the early-1990s, as a part of the rave movement during that period.[4]
Quick Facts Stylistic origins, Cultural origins ...
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| Cultural origins | Early 1990s, Belgium |
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Belgian hardcore is related to both European techno and hardcore techno, being generally considered an early form of the latter.[4] The genre is referred to by several other names, such as "Belgian rave"[5] and "bretter tekkno".
The immediate predecessors of Belgian hardcore were two short-lived new beat subgenres[6] called "hard beat"[7][8] and "skizzo".[9]
Originally a slow form of electronic dance music, Belgian new beat evolved into a native form of hardcore techno during the early 1990s with the introduction of techno records played at their intended speeds or slightly accelerated.[10] This brutal new hardcore style spread throughout Europe's rave circuit and reached the pop charts.[11] The Belgian hardcore sound also influenced part of the UK and US rave scenes.[12]
The genre was spearheaded by Belgian producers from the new beat scene, like Frank de Wulf, Olivier Abbeloos, Maurice Engelen, Oliver Adams and Nikki Van Lierop. This style of music was also pioneered by Dutch projects like Human Resource, L.A. Style and Holy Noise. Outside mainland Europe, a small group of producers adopted the style in the UK. The main labels that developed this style in the UK were Kickin’ Records, Vinyl Solution, Rabbit City, Edge and Rising High. Producer Caspar Pound of Rising High Records, known by its stage name "The Hypnotist", was a vocal supporter of this style of hardcore techno.[13]
The most notable achievement of this style of hardcore in the pop charts is L.A. Style's single "James Brown Is Dead" reaching the Billboard's Hot 100 Airplay chart.[14] Notable acts like The Immortals, 2 Unlimited, 2 Fabiola and AB Logic achieved relative success blending the style with dance-pop.[15] After a brief period of expansion during the mid 90s,[16] the style lost popularity,[17] while modern hardcore techno (gabber), trance, happy hardcore and jungle music took place as the leading genres within the rave circuit.[18]
Being rooted in the sounds of new beat, EBM and techno, Belgian hardcore has been characterized as a "distinctively Belgian brand of industrial-tinged techno where melody was displaced by noise".[4] In fact, R&S label owner Renaat Vandepapeliere considered that the Belgian sound was result of the mixture of industrial music, new beat, techno and acid house.[19]
It is a mainly a four on the floor style of dance music,[20] harder and faster than its new beat and techno predecessors, but slower (between 120 and 140 BPM) than gabber and modern hardcore techno. In comparison to these styles, it also lacks the highly distorted drum kick. It also differs from breakbeat hardcore in that it does not focus on the breakbeat drum pattern or lacks it altogether.[21] Many of the songs in this style take cue from the KLF's 1988 instrumental anthem "What Time Is Love?", with similar fanfares,[18] blended with rock-like patterns similar to Rhythm Device's 1989 hard beat song "Acid Rock".[22] The heavy use of synth "stabs" (short, one-hit samples of orchestra hits or synth chords), is considered one of the main characteristics of this style, a feature that was pioneered by Belgian producers and set this style apart from previous styles of house and techno, paving the way for the emergence of breakbeat hardcore and gabber.[5]
Music journalist Simon Reynolds has written detailed accounts on Belgian hardcore techno, covering bands like Second Phase, T99, L.A. Style and Human Resource. Many iconic synth sounds or "stabs" of the early rave scene were popularized by these and other producers during the early 1990s, like the "mentasm" or "hoover"[23] and the "Anasthasia" stabs.[24] Brooklyn's DJ-producer Joey Beltram musical contribution to the Belgian label R&S Records[25] was a cornerstone of the iconic Belgian rave sounds and anthems that emerged in this period.[26][27][28] These synth sounds and other sound-effects like alarms, sirens and church bells were widely used in the genre, creating a sense of emergency and insurgency through music.[29]
Many of the iconic rave sounds that emerged initially within Belgian hardcore, would later be adopted by genres like breakbeat hardcore,[30][31] jungle,[32] darkcore,[33] techstep,[34] gabber,[35] hard house, hard NRG, happy hardcore, hardstyle[18] and fidget house.[36]
- R&S Records
- Byte Records
- Hithouse
- Big Time International
- Who's That Beat?
- Music Man Records
- Antler-Subway
- Rave 55
- USA Import Music
- Go Bang! Records
- Beat Box International
- DiKi Records
- Kaos Dance Records
- Complete Kaos
- Dance Device
- Mid-Town Records
- ESP Records
- Buzz
- Freaky Records
- Decadance Records
- Mackenzie Records
- New beat - The Belgian late 1980s genre and scene from which Belgian hardcore came from.
- Breakbeat hardcore - A closely related genre from the UK rave scene of the same period.
- Hardcore techno - The broader music genre that includes Belgian hardcore.
- The Sound of Belgium - a documentary that covers the Belgian perspective on subjects including EBM, new beat and hardcore techno.
- Energy Flash - a book by English music journalist Simon Reynolds. Chapter four has a detailed account of this genre, its sound, history and impact.
- Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash: a Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture, Soft Skull Press 2012(ISBN 978-1-59376-407-4)
- Caspar Melville, It’s a London thing. How rare groove, acid house and jungle remapped the city, Manchester University Press 2020(ISBN 978-1-5261-3123-2)
- Dan Sicko, Techno Rebels. The Renegades of Electronic Funk, Wayne State University Press 2010(ISBN 978-0-8143-3438-6)
- Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music - "Rave" timeline
- VICE - "The Untold Story of Joey Beltram, the Techno Titan Behind the 90s' Most Iconic Rave Anthems"
Reynolds, Simon (2012). Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. Picador. ISBN 978-1-59376-407-4. Belgian and German hardcore was heavily influenced by the late eighties school of Euro Body Music (EBM), with its stiff, regimented rhythms and aerobic triumphalism.
Simon Reynolds: Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture. Soft Skull Press 2012, ISBN 978-1-59376-407-4, p. 110. Melville, Caspar (2020). It's a London thing. How rare groove, acid house and jungle remapped the city. Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-1-5261-3123-2. The popularity of raves stimulated the production of new forms of 'rave' music, initially from the UK, and then from other northern European countries, including Germany, the Netherlands and most significantly Belgium, where the R&S label was based, which distilled the parameters of rave music down to the base elements of abrasive, punishing machine rhythms (dubbed 'Belgian hardbeat') (...).
Nikki van Lierop: Hard Beat 1st Compilation., 1989.
"Hard Beat is the perfect link between Electronic Body Music and New Beat."
Maurice Engelen: Skizzo - A New Method Of Dance., 1990.
Reynolds, Simon (2012). Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. Picador. ISBN 978-1-59376-407-4. New Beat began when DJs started to spin gay Hi-NRG records at 33 r.p.m. rather than the correct 45 r.p.m., creating an eerie, viscous, trance-dance groove. At the height of the craze, Renaat recalled, the Ghent club Boccaccio 'was like a temple. Everyone was dressed in black and white, dancing this weird, robotic dance.' [...] As the nineties progressed, the b.p.m. returned to normal, then accelerated, as DJs started playing techno with their turntables set to +8. A native hardcore was born, with labels like Hithouse, Big Time International, Who's That Beat, Beat Box and Music Man, and groups like Set Up System, Cubic 22, T99, 80 Aum, Incubus, Holy Noise and Meng Syndicate.
Reynolds, Simon (2012). Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. Picador. ISBN 978-1-59376-407-4. As Belgian Techno swamped Europe, dominating the underground rave circuit and penetrating the pop charts, the techno cognoscenti blanched in horror at the new style's brutalism.
"The Story of New Beat (Interview with Eric Beysens & Geert Sermon)". Red Bull Music Academy. Geert Sermon: "Frankie Bones is a die-hard fan of the Belgian sound and you've got all those kinds of people that started the Storm Raves in New York – it was all based on that Belgian sound. They added a breakbeat to those sounds, then the UK took those two elements and made some genius from it".
Reynolds, Simon (2012). Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. Picador. ISBN 978-1-59376-407-4. 'Hard as fuck! It's the rock of the future,' enthused Caspar Pound, twenty-one-year-old boss of Rising High.(...) Alongside labels like Kickin', Vinyl Solution, Rabbit City and Edge, Rising High took their cue from the Belgians and created a British Brutalist sound. Like the sixties architectural style of the same name, it was all grim slabs of grey noise, harsh angularity, and a doom-laden, dystopian vibe.
"Was raving born in Belgium?". The Guardian. 4 October 2013. Sadly, it couldn't last. New beat's commercial success led to a loosening of quality control, this later wave of techno-pop hitting the UK's charts and making Belgian music synonymous with inane Eurodance.
"Belgian House: The Unsung Hero of European Rave Culture". St Andrews Radio. 7 June 2019. Although hugely significant for the origins of European rave culture, Belgian house's commercial success had been its own undoing. It became tainted with the unflattering label of generic Eurodance and faded into relative obscurity.
Matos, Michaelangelo (2015). The Underground is Massive. How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America. Dey Street Books. ISBN 9780062271792. Nevertheless, the station's remit was to present the pop-friendly side of underground dance music: Eon's "Spice," Moby's "Go," and—most newsworthy at the time—Dutch techno group L.A. Style's "James Brown Is Dead", a Belgian stomper that essentially scolded dance producers for using breakbeats instead of a hard four-to-the-floor.
Stuart Borthwick & Ron Moy: Popular Music Genres: An Introduction. Edinburgh University Press 2004, ISBN 978-0748617456, p. 197-220. Reynolds, Simon (2012). Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. Picador. ISBN 978-1-59376-407-4. Indeed, the first real Euro-hardcore track, Rhythm Device's 'Acid Rock', saw producer Frank De Wulf independently hit upon the same techno-as-heavy-metal idea as Beltram.
Haworth, C. (2015). "Sound Synthesis Procedures as Texts: An Ontological Politics in Electroacoustic and Computer Music". Computer Music Journal. 39 (1): 41–58. doi:10.1162/COMJ_a_00284. JSTOR 24265497. S2CID 30581891. Retrieved 2022-02-21. Persing is the inventor of the factory patches that shipped with the 1985 Roland Alpha Juno synthesizer, one of which, entitled "What The?," quickly became iconic in late 80s dance music under the colloquial name of "the Hoover sound." This gesture of recognizing an anonymous inventor conceals a strong and provocative suggestion: that his sound was instrumental in the birth of hardcore, the subgenre of rave music that made use of this sound. Alongside Joey Beltram, whose Mentasm track popularized the sound, Evol challenge us to see Persing as one of as one of hardcore's authors, a gesture that is symptomatic of the ontological politics over technical agency and labor in underground electronic music.
Reynolds, Simon (2012). Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. Picador. ISBN 978-1-59376-407-4. On T99's 'Anasthasia', the 'Mentasm' stab mutated into what some called the 'Belgian hoover' effect: bombastic blasts of ungodly dissonance that sounded like Carmina Burana sung by a choir of satan-worshipping cyborgs.
Sicko, Dan (2010). Techno Rebels. The Renegades of Electronic Funk. Wayne State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8143-3438-6. The Belgian influence on techno was far less gradual, adopting and adapting the Detroit sound about as quickly as England in roughly the same time period. What gave it source material and continuity was the growing Ghent-based label R&S Records (named for owners Renaat Vandepapeliere and Sabine Maes), a steady source of energetic techno for the rest of Europe.
Burns, L.; Lacasse, S. (2018). The Pop Palimpsest. Intertextuality in Recorded Popular Music. University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-13067-2. The hoover sound was initially developed on the Roland Alpha Juno synthesizer by Eric Persing and seems to have been first used as a lead sound on a 1991 commercial recording, "Mentasm," by Second Phase, produced by Joey Beltram.
Reynolds, Simon (2012). Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. Picador. ISBN 978-1-59376-407-4. The seeds of the new sound, however, germinated somewhere between Belgium and Brooklyn, New York, where DJ–producers like Lenny Dee, Mundo Muzique and Joey Beltram were pushing rave music in a harder and faster direction.
Reynolds, Simon (2012). Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. Picador. ISBN 978-1-59376-407-4. Midway through 'Dominator', a startlingly realistic alarm-bell lets rip, cueing the Pavlovian response to flee. Hardcore was full of similar sound-effects – sirens, church bells – that created a sense of emergency and insurgency. This was the panic-rush, as celebrated in tracks like Praga Khan's 'Rave Alarm', HHFD's 'Start The Panic', John +Julie's 'Red Alert' and Force Mass Motion's 'Feel The Panic' (…).
James, Martin (2020). State of Bass. The Origins of Jungle / Drum & Bass. Velocity Press. ISBN 9781913231026. The breakbeat infused house sound found producers fusing sped up funk grooves with the clean lines of techno; the so-called 'hoover' sound from Belgium. As a result, tunes like Joey Beltram's Mentasm became moulded with breakbeat house to create a frenzied attack of sub-bass and searing melody.
Reynolds, Simon (2012). Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. Picador. ISBN 978-1-59376-407-4. On the mega-rave circuit, a pop hardcore sound gradually emerged, fusing the piano vamps and shrieking divas of 1989-era Italo house with Belgian hardcore's monster-riffs and Shut Up And Dance style breakbeats and rumblin' bass. In 1991, this sound stormed the UK charts.
Melville, Caspar (2020). It's a London thing. How rare groove, acid house and jungle remapped the city. Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-1-5261-3123-2. It is this musical recombination which leads MC Navigator (Raymond Crawford) to identify jungle as a mixture that could not have happened elsewhere: 'We've taken from reggae, rave, rare groove, hardcore, Belgian techno …so it's a UK sound, born here'.
Melville, Caspar (2020). It's a London thing. How rare groove, acid house and jungle remapped the city. Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-1-5261-3123-2. Recording for the Moving Shadow and Reinforced record labels as Metalheadz, Rufige Kru and one half of 2 Bad Mice, Goldie helped develop this dark sound on tracks like 'Terminator' and 'Killer Muffin', which were as hard, heavy and menacing as Belgian techno but drew on the polyrhythmic traditions of jazz, funk and hip hop.
Reynolds, Simon (2012). Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. Picador. ISBN 978-1-59376-407-4. The term (Techstep) was coined by DJ–producers Ed Rush and Trace, who shaped the sound in tandem with engineer Nico of the No U Turn label. The 'tech' stood not for Detroit techno, dreamy and elegant, but for the brutalist Belgian hardcore of the early nineties. Paying homage to R & S classics like 'Dominator' and 'Mentasm', to artists like T99 and Frank de Wulf (...).
, p. 357. Reynolds, Simon (2012). Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. Picador. ISBN 978-1-59376-407-4. The story of gabba begins in 1991–2, with Second Phase's 'Mentasm', the 'Belgian hoover' tracks by T99, Holy Noise and 80 Aum, and Mescalinum United's 'We Have Arrived'.
, p. 256.
