Hardcore Gabber
What the hell is Gabber ?!?
There are a lot of definitions of this style of music.
For some it is only a mess of noise where every track sounds
the same. For others, expecially people who prefer the techno-music
that is voted into the charts, Gabber is much too hard for their
soft minds. But for a selected group of humans Gabber is the only
style of music. In fact it's a kind of polarizing; so if you are a
real Gabberhead you will hate every other sort of music, especially
songs that are classified as hardcore by some major record-companies.
To say it in another word, Gabber is a philosophy.
The history of Gabber
Gabber is a further development of a part of so-called hardcore-
techno music that started to be popular in the netherlands at the
beginning of the 90s. The real old-school hardcore tracks at this time
were dominated by a 909-bassdrum. The speed was around 180 bpm and most
of the tracks sounded kinda `dark`, cold and industrial. In fact this
music had a mechanical hardness, resulting from the minimalism of producing.
Most of the songs only had around 4 tracks and 2 - 5 different samples.
Without any question these trax were the hardest electronic music at
this time. But for some guys they weren`t hard enough.
The anatomy of Gabber
These dutch guys tried to produce a sound that is harder, faster and
funnier as the music that was made before.
So they took a 909 drum sample and distorted it like hell. After that they
used some samples like a chainsaw or a dentist-driller or a well known
popsong, put it together and pitched it up at over 200 bpm. Some funny voices
from movies or military-voice samples were included, too. Gabber was born.
The first track that was very popular and a `milestone` of this new ara of
electronic dance-music was a track by the Euromasters on Rotterdam Records.
For these times it was revolutionary hard but if you hear some of today's
excesses it was slow and `soft`.
After the release of this track a lot of producers and record labels were
Most of them with the only target to be harder than the others.
main battle that is still alive is the fight between Rotterdam, the capitol
of Gabber, and Amsterdam. Every city developed an own style and record labels.
If you hear some representing trax of each city you can hear the differences
between `Rotterdam Style` and e.g. `Mokum Style`.
At this time some guys from Germany started to make their own Gabber-music that
sounded a little bit more industrial and minimalized. The obvious development of
Gabber can be seen if you take a look at two of the big CD-series Thunderdome ©,
representing the dutch Gabber and Hardcore Style and Terrordrome, fighting for
the german Gabber-art. If you hear trax from No.1 of each compilations and compare
it with the latest issue, you can see how big the variety of Gabber really is.
More Gabber Info
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