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020: Lost in Music

I think I’ve only ever talked to one person about my love, no, liking of music here on tilde. I am, like a lot of people, a music liker. In particular, I am a liker of certain styles of electronic dance music, most notably including Hardcore and Speedcore.

If I were to sum up /why/ I take a liking to that, especially when the latter often borders on ‘meaningless noise’, I would probably give the standard answer, that I am blown away by the extreme levels these genres can push. I’m not talking specifically about volume levels or a BPM count, but the experience I can have, feeling like my brains are being blown out by the repetitive and memorable patterns in the music. Tickling that one itch in my brain and just escaping, even if just for a few minutes at a time.

I have not come to you to talk about this, though. Recently, with which I want to say, over the course of the last years, I have discovered a new world of electronic music I didn’t spend much thought about before.

In 2019, a friend recommended to me a band called “Pendulum”, specifically the track “Hold Your Colour” from the eponymous album. I didn’t know what to do with it at first, but, just as I acquired a taste for the absurdity of Speedcore, I grew custom to the band’s style, to a point where I can get a lot more enjoyment out of it than just two years ago.

Unlike what you’re probably expecting now, Pendulum was not my entry into Drum & Bass. There has not been such an entry. I just did not and still don’t have an interest in joining a ‘scene’, I was content with downloading mixes from YouTube and having a few Pendulum albums on my disk.

But Pendulum did introduce me to other music. Not directly, not indirectly either; they catalysed my acceptance of Breakcore.

I’m pretty sure the Breakcore connoisseurs and the Drum & Bass connoisseurs have mutually agreed to burn me on the stake by now, and I sadly have nothing to say to that, other than that this is just how I experienced it.

Breakcore was a genre I discovered about the time I discovered Speedcore. Labels like SKRD didn’t solely release Speedcore, so I was exposed to other branches as well.

The two parallels I see between Drum & Bass and Breakcore, two very different genres, is that they both have some level of focus on the drum breaks, which is a portion of music I had grown to love listening to Pendulum. And even if it is just the Amen Break that both of these styles share, it was enough to create a connection between them and let me discover a new style of wonderful music.

Of course there are many styles of Breakcore, not all of which I can get along with well. I particularly like Breakcore the likes of which Sewerslvt or Equinox7 produce. The way that the reverb is combined with the drum breaks and the synthesised whatever–it–is goes into my head-- it shuts my brain off; it lets me lay in bed and forget about existing for an hour.

And that is really beautiful. This kind of music is really beautiful.

tags: music

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