In a warehouse-cum-venue on Paris’ Canal Saint-Martin, a woman in a flame-embroidered trucker hat and a man in pre-millennium sneakers are doing a dance somewhere in between clogging and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” But the music that’s playing is neither '80s pop nor Irish jig: it’s techno. (Specifically, a jacked-up remix of the Cranberries’ “Zombie”.) “It’s like folk dancing. It has a weird gypsy or lower-class vibe,” Miami artist Johnny Laderer would later explain about the Dutch dance style called Hakken (ha-ken). “It’s bouncing, marching fun,” I also hear, and, “like a cat dance.” All of which is accurate.
Hakken is associated with the '90s hardcore techno genre Gabber, which this month was the focus of a two-week long festival at Paris’ Point Éphémère. The name of the festival––which included club nights, an art exhibit, and a pop-up store––was Une culture à 180bpm!, or a culture at 180 BPM. Electronic music fans will know that 180 beats per minute, is very, very fast: the hallmark speed of Gabber back in its heyday. “It’s an extreme music scene that became really popular,” says Paul Orzoni, the event’s young founder whom I’ve met over beer at Le Point Éphémère.
According to Orzoni, the time is ripe for a Gabber renaissance. “In Paris, we have a massive return of raves. People are so ready for the sound again,” he said. At the expo’s shop, I find second-, third-, and probably fourth-hand sportswear of a certain look––track pants, polos, jerseys, and windbreakers that wouldn’t look out of place at a Nasir Mazhar show.
The expo’s walls are hung with rave posters. One flyer, for a party called "The Final Exam" that happened in 1992, advertises a 12,500 square meter "Jump Area" (that’s a mosh pit, we guess), a 250,000-watt computer-controlled sound system, “Food/Chill Out,” and something called “Flying Lights.” About 13,000 people showed up, who, according to photos at the expo, were devotees of a particular style subculture: facial piercings, half-shaved heads, nylon jackets, and those sneakers. Elsewhere in the exhibit is a single tablet of Ecstasy still in its baggy, like evidence.
Gabber started in the early-'90s when DJs in Rotterdam started playing techno faster, adding drum machines, kicking up the bass, and distorting it with synthesizers. The subculture’s name came out of an interview between DJ KC the Funkaholic and a journalist. Asked what he thought of these kids and their hard-house raves, the musician responded almost dismissively, saying, “They’re just a bunch of gabbers having fun.” Gabber was old Dutch slang—a thieves’ cant spoken by crooks, drifters, and traveling salesmen—used for a “buddy” or “pal.” “[Gabbers] were outcasts and poor people from the countryside, you know?” said Orzoni. “You can still see that dynamic and what participation was about.”
Eventually, “In the Netherlands, Gabber [became] mainstream. It was everywhere—on the charts, [and] on TV,” Orzoni explained. From there, Gabber spread to Belgium, Germany, and Italy, where it had big scenes. “In France I think it was really confidential,” Orzo
↧
Vintage Hardcore Techno Comes To The City of Love
↧