EVERY GENRE PROJECT - May 29 - Flashcore
Genre of the Day - Flashcore
Album of the Day - ᐔ ᐌ ᐂ ᐍ ᐚ by qebrµs (2016)
May 29, 2024
In contrast to much of vaporwave, which uses titles in Japanese simply for some misplaced idea of mystique and online-Japonisme, I have to give flashcore some props for taking a different aesthetic route. Rather than swiping the actual language of real people, many flashcore artists like qebrµs name their songs in a modern dingbat-assisted hieroglyphic scribble that’s as abstract and impossible to communicate as the music it represents.
That doesn’t preclude other nerd behaviors (nothing wrong with that! Like, what am I writing right now?), though. To understand flashcore, we have to travel back to the early ‘90s, a time when Jerry Seinfeld had some semblance of humor and in the dance music world a scene dubbed intelligent dance music arose as a genre. Acts like Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada began to dabble in dance music that wasn’t explicitly for dancing. If it sounds pretentious, many people might agree with you. Just as I touched on minimalism evolving from traditional methods of composing classical music in yesterday’s article, in many genres there’s inevitably music theoryheads who get more analytical and abstract about the design of the music, and in dance music it evolved as the clumsily-named IDM. IDM’s reputation has been a bit marred by the moniker intelligent, as it became confined to a notion of white nerdy elitism (one does feel that if they didn’t want this reputation, they would’ve pushed for their music to be classified under a different name, so if the shoe fits). Nonetheless, its influence reverberated across many styles of dance music since.
IDM’s mechanical, soundscape-over-sound-impact approach carried over to fast, visceral, and intense dance peers like speedcore and Frenchcore, a genre I covered all the way back in January. The French label Hangars Liquides was founded in 1998 and began to cultivate this vision, which culminated in flashcore, a mix of high-intensity bursts with unusual, glitchy soundscapes that followed very little if any conventions of rhythm, melody, or what one might traditionally expect to constitute music, harkening back to the raw, experimental ideas of musique concrète a few decades earlier. French people confound me nearly every day: no wonder Björk thought of them first of all nations to lump them in with a list of strange creatures. The compilation record below gives some context to the emerging sound of flashcore, though as digital audio creation advanced, producers got infinitely trickier and more sophisticated with these musical fissures and mechanical detonations.
qebrµs, who unfortunately passed away in 2018 but won the approval of Aphex Twin prior to his untimely death, extends the vagueness of recognizably human sense present in flashcore and the abstract, primal instincts it triggers with unpronounceable titles composed of symbols. It ensures only those seeking it out will find it, unless you would like to describe about a dozen symbols to a DJ and hope for the best. It forces you to dive into this flashcore set with no expectations of what it means or how it will sound. Opener “⊶⊚⊖⬚⊟⊑∷༜⊚༜∷⊒⊞⬚⊖⊚⊷” introduces us to a slithering, boiling journey of the sounds a computer might emit after being melted into a puddle of pure metal and burnt plastic. Sections drop in or out without warning; he masterfully elicits even harder impacts from the digital carnage through the tension of ambient, droning pauses and breakneck shifts. While “ᗛ ꕢ ꔮ ᕳ≒ᐍ ꔆ ᐂ≓ᕲ ꔮ ꕢ ᗘ” and “┌ ∴༶༜࿀⊖࿀༜༶∴ ┐” gesture towards rhythms that might be considered more danceable, it retains the no holds barred sensibilities that govern this chaos. Though one might recoil at this even being called music, I actually think this music might strike a chord—even though it may not—from a sound possibility standpoint with musicians who never got the chance to experience the boundary-probing capabilities computer music has given us.