#26: The Return of the Repressed
This week: horsegiirL, Happy Hardcore's revenge // What to read, see and do this week in the R&D ecosystem // Testing new-gen AI music makers, and more
Here we are again, issue #26 and closing in on the big 3-0.
You’ll notice a new icon for the newsletter, a not-at-all egotistical picture of … ME. I had some new professional photos done by an old friend and am now trying to get them across my very scattered digital real estate.
Anyways, onwards.
This week we’re talking music.
Regular readers will know i’m obsessed with examples of digital aesthetics - YouTube film, Anime, Sleep Sounds, Erosion Bird memes - that show an alternative to what we think is cutting-edge or avant-garde “art”. This week we’ll look at that in a WILD Berlin-based DJ who has helped make the musically indefensible the hottest thing in town.
Plus the usual reads and things to do, and a look at the new generation of AI music making tools which have been this month’s big story in tech.
Enjoy.
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Art! // horsegiirL, Happy Hardcore’s revenge
It’s pretty rare I am left open-mouthed shocked by something.
But Friday 22nd March, 12pm on BBC Radio 6, I had one of those WTF?? moments.
I was parking the car when DJ Mary Anne Hobbs, the DJ who broke Dubstep back in the early 2000s announced a lunchtime mix by a name totally new to me … horsegiirL.
Mary Anne takes brilliant liberties, throwing in Jungle or Dark Metal into her late morning shows. But I wasn’t expecting what came next, at all.
A helium voice, horsegiirL herself, said hi, then a kick-drum broke of a kind I hadn’t heard for DECADES. Super-quick, relentless, running at 160-180pm, the drum barely varied, a backdrop for sped-up vocals, piano trills and bursts of strings.
WHAT THE HELL?
Somehow, at least 20 years after I thought it was dead, Happy Hardcore, rave culture’s most indefensible, intolerable offspring was back.
And it sounded … amazing.
I sat in the car on the drive outside the house and just listened. It was 30 minutes of absurd highs, a pursuit of ecstacies which was more than just nostalgia. I hated this stuff when it was first around. But now it sounded … incredible.
Whilst it came as a shock to me, this couldn’t have just come from nowhere.
So who is horsegiirL? When and how did Happy Hardcore come back from the dead? And what does this tell us about the way digital culture transforms the most uncool of yesterday’s styles into today’s bleeding edge?
You might not know what Happy Hardcore is, but trust me, you know the memes of the people who loved and lived it.
Every gif of a gurning raver, their eyes wide, is silently being soundtracked by Happy Hardcore.
Rave morphed in the early 1990s in the UK, Chicago acid house and Detroit techno going European in a balearic haze or hard edged Belgian or German techno. Then it turned distinctly British as breakbeats and bad drugs birthed early Jungle. I’ve mentioned journalist Simon Reynolds before, and his book Energy Flash is a brilliant chronicle of this period.
Jungle was cool. Very very cool. A uniquely British invention, it blurred American dance music with Jamaican reggae and ragga, hip-hop, and sped up the drum loops whilst dropping half-speed basslines. It was melting pot music, a brilliant picture of its breeding points in London, Bristol, Coventry. Dark but hopeful.
I loved it then, and still do.
But some people didn’t.
They didn’t want the - sometimes very self-conscious -sophistication of Jungle, with its crazy-complex beats and deeply urban emotional reserve.
They wanted to rave. To bounce. To gurn with abandon and without shame.
And Happy Hardcore gave them what they wanted. A new genre birthed that was rave in its purest form - driven by the same crazed kick-drum I heard again with horsegiirL last month.
Happy hardcore was, honestly, horrible.
It felt like a very conservative, very “white” rejection of the pluralism of jungle and drum n’ bass and of its bringing different forms of black music into the rave tent.
And as Jungle spread, and then Garage followed, Happy Hardcore disappeared from London, taking root in regional towns, in Milton Keynes, and in Scotland.
And then seemingly, it disappeared for good.
Except, on the internet, nothing ever disappears. Nothing ever dies.
It just lies waiting, in forgotten pools of YouTube videos and in Reddit and Tumblr threads.
And then it comes back to life as something new and different.
Happy hardcore never totally disappeared. But it started to appear out of some very obscure and hidden corners in the late 2010s. Dazed caught that it was coming back in 2020, in an article from the week before the UK Covid lockdown started.
But that looks and feels like a direct continuum of 1990s happy hardcore - the same day glo T-shirts and face paint vibes. The same out of town white kids grown up really, just older. And maybe the same music.
It does not look or feel like horsegiirL who’s something very different, very new and very now.
Let’s meet her in this brilliant Boiler Room mix from Berlin in December 2022.
The horse-head is always on.
It’s more than a character, it’s a big, brash, bold statement of her joyful identity. Told to Vogue the backstory goes:
My unique position is that I am actually half-horse, half-human. If you listen to my latest song, “Forbidden Love Story”, you will learn more about my parents. It’s the tale of two beings falling in love with each other and everyone being so against it because it’s so unheard of.
This is one of horsegiirL’s best tricks - pushing the joke so hard you don’t know if it’s just supposed to be funny, or if there’s something deeper lurking beneath - or what that would mean. It’s got her to Vogue and BRILLIANTLY into the pages of Horse and Hound magazine who note that she has,
already cultivated a colt following.
The sense of humour, and the possibility this might all be just a wild piss-take extends to the music and the choice of style. Her choice of genres - Happy Hardcore, and its intersections with other genres, Dutch Gabba, Belgian Heavy Hardcore - are on the same line.
These are such messy, ugly forms.
But she manages to pick them up from the dead and make them a natural soundtrack for a post-gendered, queered, post-racial, post-human world. In filtering the most lumpen of rave styles through a radically queered lens, horsegiirL turns it into utterly utopian music, a mix of wildly inclusive joy.
She’s cool as anything.
Spend some time with the Boiler Room set or this equally brilliant set for Mixmag last year.
There’s a joy in this in that’s beyond anything else happening at the moment. A joy and a brilliant open embrace of outright delirious weirdness that will scare off all the right people and open the minds of many more.
What I think horsegiirL shows us is the way the best digital culture can transmogrify the least likely, most uncool cultural sources into something radically new. The web’s dark lakes of forgotten culture are always ready to be remade for a different world.
If you want to make tomorrow’s coolest sh*t, go find yesterday’s most hopelessly uncool things, and reinvent them. Do it well, and you might be as awesome as the awesome horsegiirL, my favourite musical find of 2024.
Reader, I love her.
Stay horsey!
IDEAS! // What to watch, read and see in Creative R&D
Looking for the best in digital creativity this week? Check out what’s going on below:
The holiday hiatus meant I totally missed telling you all about another feature I wrote for The Art Newspaper. DOH. This time, I was lucky enough to be asked to write a piece on NFTs, to mark both the release of the two major books I mentioned in issue 21 and 10 years since the very first NFT was released. Get reading!
A reminder that it’s now only 6 weeks or so until MuseumNext returns to London after going online brilliantly during Covid. I’m speaking not once but twice. First with NIMI on NFTs and the future of museum philanthropy, and then a keynote on the rise of the Immersive Institution, six months on after my first article in The Art Newspaper. Get your ticket here. And YES, they need the new photos too..
Grumpy read of the week. A broader complaint about immersive and interactive art in the Spectator, formed from a review of Now Play This the festival of experimental gaming which was at Somerset House in London last month. I get the point, I do, but the immersive rabbit is far too out of the hat now to be put back in. Worth reading though for a sense of just how all pervasive immersion is becoming.
Loved this recreation of a Technics 1200 - the legendary DJ turntable - in Unreal Engine, with all the physics in place.
I’m not sure how I missed this as it came out of Mobile World Congress. After Humane.AI’s Pin and the AI Rabbit, comes Brain.AI’s generative AI smartphone. NO APPS, just a voice or text based interface that constructs responses in real-time. It will book you a flight, or buy a present for Grandma. I’ve talked before how I think this is the BIG threat to the incumbents of the app-verse, particularly Apple. What they do about it will be interesting. The game for the next generation of consumer devices is definitely afoot.
TECHNOLOGY! // Suni, Udio and the Gen AI music wave
Has the excitement already died down?
Everyone got very excited about the release of Suno and Udio, two new generative AI music makers a few weeks ago.
The first highly compelling real-time generators of music from text based prompts, they gave a scare to the licensed music industry of the same kind that both the publishing industry and the image licensing industry got as the first waves of Diffusion models and Chat-GPTs came out waaaay back a year ago.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time with both, and of the two, Udio seems the clear winner.
The qualities in art are always unique timbres and tones an artist doesn’t control but which represent their unique biology, their breath, their lungs. Udio’s by no means perfect, but its ability to make free jazz ballads that blend Tom Waits with the Art Ensemble of Chicago shows at least some taste in the training model.
And the imperfect, straining voices it creates shows someones been thinking not just about what makes someone a good technical singer, but an interesting singer at the same time.
Check them out.
That’s it for this week.
I have A LOT of work to dig into at the moment - brilliant projects, but HECTIC. So forgive a little brevity.
And in the meantime, PUR_LEASE upgrade to paid if you haven’t already.
See you next week.
1,000 people thats brilliant. Would you think about meet-ups? as an homage to the old school twitter meet ups? Seems like a great bunch of people..