4 - Major
Hardcore
Breakbeat Hardcore, Jungle
Amenpunk, Chipbreak, Footcore, Happy Breakcore, Lolicore, Kusoikore, Mashcore, Raggacore
Digital Hardcore, Skullstep
Of all the genres to spawn from the twisted flaming wreckage that is the Hardcore tree, breakcore might be the most widely misunderstood. Years of wonky exposure in music journalist and hobbyist circles have bred a strange, off-angle concept of the genre that frames it as an IDM derivative that encompasses all music with complex drums. Listen up, cuz Professor Sillick is about to set the record straight and tell you the real story of breakcore.
Breakcore comes to us from Germany, one of the most fertile sources of hardcore developments in the mid 90s. Specifically, it comes to us from Alec Empire, architect of the Digital Hardcore empire and without a doubt one of the single most influential figures in German hardcore. Already a veteran of the German rave scene by 1994, he began putting together his own spin on the jungle and breakbeat hardcore of the time, creating something that was darker, harder, and noisier. In his wake, an entire scene of weirdos throwing together distorted breaks and whatever random samples they felt like popped up. Breakcore was noisy, it was hectic, and it was almost never serious. With relatively few exceptions (Christoph de Babalon's atmospheric breakcore being the most prominent), your average breakcore track was repetitive and could only marginally be called "produced" - even with roots in a genre like jungle, it was by and large not a very deep or complex genre.
The genre quickly spread out of Germany, developing scenes in Japan, where it became a core part of the nascent Nerdcore scene, and North America, where it was discovered, revolutionized, and permanently disfigured by young, pissed off Canadian named Aaron Funk. Even as far back as the early 2000s, Funk was just as influenced by the juvenile noise of breakcore and speedcore as he was by the cerebral complexity of IDM and especially drill and bass. At times crafting complex jungle grooves, at other times bludgeoning you with bursts of hardcore hyperviolence, and other times still crafting mindmelting IDM freakouts, Venetian Snares quickly became the face of breakcore, garnering acclaim not just from those involved with the underground hardcore and IDM scenes but actual music jouranlists and hobbyists, drawn to the complexity of Songs About My Cats, the creativity of The Chocolate Wheelchair Album, and emotional weight of Rossz Csillag Alatt Szuletett.
In hindsight, this had mixed results.
On one hand, breakcore became a genre with a fanbase outside of the kind of people who were into listening to random audio clips distorted to all hell and slopped onto a mess of scrambled amens. It became more diverse, more complex, more substantial. On the other hand, it now had this weird false reputation as a genre that was basically "what if IDM was even crazier", a reputation enforced by dorks on the internet who didn't really know much about hardcore or IDM to begin with beyond whatever Pitchfork told them (flashcore would suffer a similar fate, being gentrified into an extreme IDM subgenre by people who never understood its hardcore roots). The scrappy, punky, never-too-serious side of breakcore never went away - the torch was picked up by guys like Doormouse and Shitmat who went on making music that was sometimes more complex and polished but never any less silly - and the music was pretty great all around, but the popular image of breakcore was forever shifted.
The rise of sites like YouTube and online rhythm game communities did a lot of good for the more hardcore-associated side of the genre, providing an environment where being stupid and noisy and making amateur collages of well-known audio and diarrhea amens was celebrated. This is where a lot of its subgenres come from, various incarnations of "what if we took this recognizeable sound and vomited breaks all over it" - chiptune, anime, popular music, etc - all finding a niche. The early days of the genre are long forgotten, doomed to obscurity as modern fans rarely seem to go back past the early 2000s, but the genre remains a fixture of underground electronic. Just remember, the next time someone tries to tell you breakcore is some IDM offshoot or that it was invented by Vsnares or whatever other ridiculous claim self-proclaimed internet experts have come up with, show em what's up and tell em Digital Hardcore Recordings sent ya.
Alec Empire - "Pleasure Is Our Business" from Digital Hardcore EP (1994).
Venetian Snares - "Make Ronnie Rocket" from Higgin Ultra Low Track Glue Funk Hits 1972-2006 (2002).
Rotator - "Shock Fist Fight" from Curses On Your Ghettoblaster (2008).
Squarepusher - "Illegal Dustbin" from Numbers Lucent (2009).
Passenger of Shit - "Bury Motherfuckers" from Evil Shit 2 (2019).