Oldschool Renegades: Chapter 13

I think it’s Hardcore
OSR | Maurice Steenbergen, 2013

Chapter from ‘Oldschool Renegades’, about the rise of Hardcore. Featuring ‘Mescalinum United - We Have Arrived’, and ‘Rotterdam Termination Source - Poing’. As told by Lenny Dee, Paul Elstak and Danny Scholte.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: I THINK IT’S HARDCORE

LENNY DEE
Marc Acardipane, the guys and I were hangin’. He said: ’listen, do you want to come and hear my music?’’. I was like: ‘yeah, totally, if you could do two or more of those tracks, I’d love to do it’. I said: ‘I’m starting this label, and I think I’m gonna call it ‘Industrial Strength’, and I want to feature this. This is what I’ve been looking for. I’ve been playing records faster and mashing things together. Making this sound, but without these records.’’

LENNY DEE
‘Mayday 2’, I’m standing there and I’m in an amazement with what i’m seeing. I looked at Marc, he looked at me, looked at Mike, and I said: ‘here we go’.

LENNY DEE
If you were in that room when that record came on, I did not see one hand down, not one. I don’t think anyone did not scream when that record came on. The amount of energy that it created for the four and a half minutes that I played it, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced that. It was like adrenaline beyond. Renaat (Vandepapeliere) comes to me, he goes: ‘I knew you were gonna do that, I just had no idea it was gonna be like that.’’ He goes: ‘What the hell was that? It’s f*cking Hardcore’.‘I think it is Hardcore, huh?’ If anything is gonna be named that, or whatever we were talking about that brief thing, it was Hardcore. Thanks Renaat, you really coined it there too. You’re a genius.

PAUL ELSTAK
He hadn’t even heard it himself. Marc (Acardipane) came to Holland to buy stacks of this particular record. He loved that track, and he had a record store in Frankfurt. He hadn’t even heard that it was his own record that I sampled. You can’t really compare the two, they were quite different. ‘Mescalinum United’ was not really a Gabber track. It didn’t have the same type of kicks. It was a different production, it was more of a hard Techno track. But it was quite hard. When I just started ‘Rotterdam Records’, the style was not yet defined. I just releases what I liked. I also released tracks by ‘Meng Syndicate’ (Jeroen Verheij), and then I got to you guys. You were number four weren’t you?

It’s a nice story to tell, it started with Lars (Tindal). He worked with me in the record store called ‘Mid-town’. ‘Mid-town’ has been very important in my career, in terms of meeting people, know-how, knowing what the crowd likes. I could see which records sold well. “Lars” played me a tape from a guy hew knew, that was you. It was pretty much an instrumental track with a bouncing sound at the end. So I said: ’this is nice, tell the guys to use the bouncing sound more’, right?

DANNY SCHOLTE
‘Poing’ came to mind when House music started to sound harder. And because music became harder, people started to jump instead of dance. That’s when I thought: ‘what if we made a record with the sound of a bouncing ball?’

LIAM HOWLETT
That was quite irritating that song, you made it didn’t you?

PAUL ELSTAK
That became a massive hit, it was insane. I believe it sold more than 100.000 singles. The media were all over it, and because of ‘Poing’, Gabber became internationally known. It grew really big.