Week 4 [22.04 - 28.04] Hard dance music

There is a certain genre in electronic dance music that is very different from others. That group has a characteristic heavy beats and tempo in 4/4 time (sometimes called Four on the floor). Without surprise this genre is known widely as “Hard Dance Music”.

Everything started in the early nineties when house music from the USA came to dominate dancefloors in Western Europe. Later on, that kind of music started to evolve in every country in their own way. For example in the UK, house was transformed into UK garage and jungle. In Germany house was mixed with trance. That new subgenre was called Acid Trance. Also they are pioneers in hard trance genre.

Figure 1. Bonzai Records. One of the first Belgium hard dance music label.

In the meantime, musical influences have arrived to the neighboring country - Holland. Finally tempo has been increased from 150 to 190 beats per minute. Music producers started to add some shifted and distorted pitch and that’s how gabber has been born (nowadays we call it early-hardcore). In that country this type of music became so popular that listeners created their own subculture called gabber. They are known for their unique outfit style. Gabbers spend their time in crowded clubs so they wear thin clothes. That’s why they usually wear tracksuit trousers, particularly one brand called Australian. Because of the fast tempo a normal dance would be really tiring, gabber listeners created new form of dancing called Hakken. In those times organizations with hardcore music events started to work such as Thunderdome or Mysteryland.

Figure 2. Mysteryland 2017 Q-dance stage.

As time goes by music producers start to use new technology in their productions to create something new. For example lots of gabber tracks were made with Roland Tr 909 drum machine.
A new age of hardcore was called mainstream and producers started to embrace a slower style characterized by a deeper, harder bass drum that typically had a longer duration. Tracks started to become more melodic. At the same time one of the well known gabber music producers called The Prophet combined hardcore and trance music. He took a simple bass line and started to play it in the reverse. That technic created a new genre called hardstyle.
Hard music has a lot of subgenres. In this article I ommited a lot of concepts and facts to not to complicate this topic too much. As you see hard dance music is very extensive definition, particularly Hardcore.

Questions:
1. What do you think of electronic dance music? Do you have friends that are into it?
2. Have you ever been on any music festival? How was your experience? Have you been there alone or with friends? If not, are you going to take part in any in the near future?
3. Do you think fanbase of hard dance music will grow or it will decrease?

Sources:
1. https://www.hardnews.nl/en/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardstyle
3. http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/