EVERY GENRE PROJECT - August 26 - Speedcore
Genre of the Day - Speedcore
Album of the Day - Kill Out Slash by Coakira (2021)
Patience is perhaps the bitterest pill to swallow. In difficult times, quick and fleeting fixes to fill voids seem more ideal routes than the drawn-out agony of patience, but its necessity is something I’ve been reminded of recently. It’s also hard to accept the tenet of patience when faced with stress as I speed into a new semester, as reading over syllabi shook me by the shoulders to grasp the sheer frenzy of going into another brisk academic season. Perhaps impatience is ingrained in me: for efficiency’s sake, I’m often known to press 2x speed on a YouTube video. It may be that I’m just compensating for a great tragedy that occurred the day I was born: that fateful Friday, the superspeed passenger airline Concorde made its final zoom through the sky. It’s appropriate then that I get a genre today that pushes the boundaries of speed and time to mind-splitting extremity.
As dance music exploded globally in the ‘90s, a variety of producers were interested in quite literally blowing up its sound, as observed in the intensity of hardcore, gabber, and Frenchcore. They mutated the very idea of dance music, bridging it to the darker sounds of doom and horror metal with the electronic production values of a mad scientist off of stimulants yet unheard of. Speedcore began to emerge as producers turned the dial into the high 200s of BPM.
Is there any conceivable stopping point for how fast and wild a song can be? As speedcore has developed, the takeaway would be no, as some extreme forms of the genre take us into the realm of four digits at over 1,000 BPM—in speedcore’s early days, Moby was actually a pioneer of reaching those fabled heights with the song “Thousand.” As in any extreme experimental genre such as black MIDI, speedcore is an art form that’s meticulously crafted even while relying on the brazen execution of a concept that registers as totally alien, listenability-wise. Speedcore often features the four-on-the-floor for some semblance of dance familiarity, pounding away like machinery gone haywire as frantic, brief vocal samples flash through. At its most extreme known as extratone, it can simply build a wall of sound so fast and dense that any nuances are imperceptible. It has no time to wait—time is of the essence in the speedcore universe.
Japan’s love for technologically extreme sounds manifests in today’s set by Coakira, a style-spanning entry into speedcore’s world that’s filled with its fair share of mayhem balanced with variety to bring a tepid listener into a faster land. The drum’n’bass explosion of “Pandroid” paired with a synth bass akin to ‘90s hyper-techno distorts the throwback dance style with wild abandon. “Fuel Injected Homicide Machine” introduces the four-on-the-floor gabber-esque explosion more readily identified with speedcore. Between its crushing guitars and battlefield chaos, “Jungle of Death” erupts like sonic magma as one of the most brutal soundscapes befitting the intensity of the genre. “Endmill” prophesies the end of all things with the speediest of speedcore detoning with the weight of the sun. Though we may not be able to book a Concorde flight, these speedcore lightning strikes can electrify us with the glory of maximized paces.