Hard House: Search and Destroy

e past few months have spun nothing but hard house, I sugge s

t :

Lisa Lashes - Unbeli e va b le

Andy Farley & BK - Beef Jerky (very beefy s ound i ng)

Warp Brothers - We W ill Su r vive

Vinyl Groover - Rok Da House

I've found hard house to be.. well, you enjoy it a lot more if you're a DJ. I don't really see how someone who is no t a DJ or int ense electronica fan can just sit and listen to it, outside of a club environment. It's one of the most repetitive forms of dance music... which isn't a bad thing if you're into it, but it's a huge turn-off to non dance music fans. I've had enough exposure to it, I appreciate it now, but I certainly hated it when I first started hearing it.

Actually.. someone once made a great statement regarding hard house.. "It's really just happy hardcore for the masses".. which is pretty much exactly right.

Destroy: 3AM Til I Come

A good game to play is to listen to the first five seconds of every track on a Fergie CD and try and tell the tracks apart.

Basically I'd go along with what Greg said - hard house is servicable and occasionally enjoyable, but it fails to achieve its own apparent goals - it's neither hard nor housey, but rather occupies a relatively uninteresting depression between the two terms.

Every so often I meet people who are really into hard house and it gets me wondering whether it's all shit or not? It's not something we talk about on ILX that's for sure.

you need to figure out if they are talking about Lisa Lashes or Underground Goodies. If they mean the former, then its a fair barometer that you can stop the conversation right there. If its the latter then, as they say north of the border, ''Taps Aff''
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUbSa0XoIhk

Revive! From the Dance Music Nobody Talks About S & D thread:

I feel like we're on the cusp of a hard house revival. I'm noticing DJs dropping tracks in Boiler Rooms and Essential Mixes which were considered naff even the first time around for being bouncy and over 140bpm. I'm into it, to be honest.
― boxedjoy, Thursday, March 17, 2022 10:03 PM

Yeah hard house and trance are defo back
― Urbandn hope all ye who enter here (dog latin), Friday, March 18, 2022 8:49 AM

My DJ mate who's heavily into early 90s rave revivalism told me recently that hard house and trance were just around the corner, and that we should think about putting something on that spanned this spectrum. Meanwhile, I went to Trade's delayed 30th birthday event at Egg last month, and danced to hard house for the best part of 12 hours, something I've not done in over 20 years. Damn, that felt good.
― mike t-diva, Friday, March 18, 2022 9:59 AM

[...] hard house, as a seperate thing, seems to be making a rehabilitation in a way I've never really picked up on before. Even someone like Ben UFO is in Instagram videos playing Tony De Vit singles, which I couldn't have forseen a few years ago.
― boxedjoy, Friday, March 18, 2022 12:04 PM

This mix, recently posted by Carl Nicholson, is particularly fantastic IMO. He was booked to play the final three-hour set in the hard house room at Trade's 30th in February, but was obliged to play two one-hour sets instead, to make way for a latecomer. This was the set he'd originally planned. Loads of my favourites are on there.

https://soundcloud.com/nicholsonofficial/carl-nicholson-trading-places

I've been giving this music a hard swerve for the past 20 years, but now I find myself warming towards it once again. That said, most of my favourite tracks date from before the term "hard house" was coined. For a while, circa 1994-1995 it was known as Nu-NRG, but I don't remember anyone calling it hard house before early 1998. We just called it Trade music...

"Nu-NRG" is such a great name for it, it makes me think of all those camp hi-NRG screamers and how this stuff comes from the same stable of shameless fun.

Maybe it's just because I was too young for this stuff (in early 1998 I was turning 10) but in Scotland, it's always been more about trance, donk and happy hardcore than the purist Trade sound, so a lot of the tracks on these "classics" mixes and compilations feel comparatively unfamiliar to my ears. I had a skim through that mix and I only recognised a handful of tracks.

In the early 00s we had under-age discos in Glasgow and the one place that played all this stuff - Archaos - was where the all the "neds" went. I hate that word's classist connotations, but it was a very particuar type of crowd - people who caused trouble, people the same age as me who leaned into the worst aspects of the stereotypes. And you know what teenagers are like at the best of times, so as a podgy awkward flamboyant teenager I would never have been able to go there, and instead spent my Saturday nights at the mosher/emo venue wishing they would play actual dance music. So I always have this weird disconnect between how this music sounds and its roots - Trade as a gay night, the OTT decadence of the tunes themselves - and how it was consumed by the local audience, who seemed to consist of tough lads who would chase me if my hands were too floppy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89bDBaqqt-Q

I mean, try telling me that this doesn't sound like someone taking a hit of Liquid Gold

It was indeed strange how hard house, once the term had been coined and the tunes became more formulaic, crossed over from urban gays to provincial tough lads.