DO YOU REMEMBER “HARDCORE”? As a style of dance music, it’s become a historical footnote, the sound of rave’s innocence: primitive, immature music for immature people. Supposedly we’ve all grown beyond that – haven’t we? Only gurners and E-monsters listen to hardcore, these days – apparently. England’s dance music press would have you believe that this original strain of rave died a twitching, ugly death, long ago annihilated by the sophistication and glamour of drum ‘n’ bass (and, now, UK Garage). But in Tokyo, hardcore – and its kill-crazy variant, “gabber” – is beginning to challenge that city’s high-fibre diet of trance and techno.
Ryuta Nakagami is a driving force behind the coup. He’s a promoter for the gabberdisco crew, an MC and DJ (both as “Jage”) and a producer (“Jea”) for the Sharpnel label. For Sharpnel’s recent Rave Spector and Neon Genesis gabberngelion releases, he was the main composer, producer and sound engineer. He also generated the striking cover art.
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Neon Genesis is a remarkable CD. Sure, it employs gabber’s trademark jackhammer beats. But there’s also warped, labyrinth melodical sensibilities, cute diva vocals sampled from manga and computer games, and sound effects from similar sources. While superficially similar to English and Dutch hardcore, conceptually it’s from a galaxy far, far away.
When I heard it, everything clicked: Neon Genesis gabberngelion represents the bleeps and whirrs of a nation obsessed with gadgets and the transformative power of technology. If you’re ever in Tokyo, look around you. The play of light – artificial and natural – and the hordes of style tribes – artificial and natural – mesh with the manic energy of the city’s street life to provide the perfect visual complement.
Hardcore has been kicking around in Japan since 1994, at least: that’s when Ryuta went to his first rave, charmingly titled “Ebola of gabber”. What struck him about the style?
“Hardcore is the spirit of music,” he enthuses. “And gabber, as a style of hardcore: heavy kick drums; dark, funny, tricky sounds. gabber is the most powerful of all dance music.”
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Does he draw inspiration from the accelerated nature of Japanese life?
“Yes! In Japan, we have too many games, anime and comics released every day. Our culture is high BPM! Mainly, I’m influenced by high BPMs from games, movies, television. Funny samples are the basic style of my sound: hard and heavy ‘new style’ gabber. Also, I’m influenced by the Thunderdome artists.”
Thunderdome is a Dutch crew, responsible for some of Holland’s biggest and best gabber parties. How does Ryuta see the Japanese scene in comparison?
“It is very different in Holland. When I visited, I could get hardcore vinyl and CDs everywhere. It is very important to make a big scene. In Tokyo, there is only one hardcore shop [Guhroovy] and the scene has only about 1000 people.”
Ryuta is a “gabberngelist”. His stated mission is to “make hardcore more popular to Japanese people”. To do this, he “samples from famous and maniac anime and Hentai game voices, because Japanese won’t listen to sounds they don’t know. I like anime and games very much! So I collect them, listen to the voices and make good sounds.”
gabber-wise, the man never stops. After working long shifts as a computer game programmer, then producing tracks in his home studio, he still finds the time to practice what he preaches: building a big scene by promoting quality events.
“I have two styles of parties I put on in Tokyo. ‘gabberdisco’ are hardcore rave music parties, featuring gabber. They usually get 500 people or more. It is the largest-scale hardcore party in Japan. Then there’s ‘TokyoStyleSpeedCore’: only speedcore music. These are very experimental parties: too much speed and way too much dark!”
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There’s yet another side to Ryuta: when he’s not producing, promoting or DJing, he’s an MC to other Tokyo DJs. What’s his style?
“I MC in English, because Japanese language is not for dance music. But I talk to ravers in Japanese, from stage to floor.”
As such dialogue with the crowd emphasises, hardcore has always been pretty accessible, with none of the pretensions associated with supposedly more “intelligent” dance music. This extends to its production. In the same way that artists from Australia’s Bloody Fist label use ancient Amiga computers to construct their hardcore tracks, Ryuta keeps his studio austere.
“It’s just my PC and JP8000,” he elaborates. “And a mod plug tracker, with many VST plug-ins, as my only sequencer. It is a very low-cost system. I also use a lot of software synthesizers: Reason, Rebirth and so on.”
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That’s a refreshing message for anyone who thinks they need thousands of dollars worth of the latest kit, plus lashings of “musicianship”, to be able to make top-class dance music.
According to author Simon Reynolds, British pop music is the product of art school backgrounds, while hardcore and gabber is made by and for working class equivalents. Let’s give Reynolds his head, and accept the veracity of this statement. Can we apply it to Japan?
“Hardcore listeners are people like me,” says Ryuta, “programmers who work for software houses: Sega, Namco, Capcom and so on.”
That would be a “no”, then. Sorry, Simon…Indeed, Japan has a history of “Japanising” outside innovations, totally transforming them into a parallel reality: recognisable in only a peripheral, subliminal fashion. Thus, pinball became “pachinko” (vertical pinball); Chinese noodles became “ramen”. And now, gabber becomes Tokyo-Style Speed Core.
So don’t fight it. The future is the past. Or something like that.
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