Chapter Eleven

Marching into Madness

8 records, in the order the book names them

• 001

  Mentasm

  Second Phase

  The story of gabba begins in 1991 – 2, with Second Phase’s ‘Mentasm’, the ‘Belgian hoover’ tracks by T99, Holy Noise and 80 Aum, and Mescalinum United’s ‘We Have Arrived’.

  Outer Rhythm/R&S
  track Open ↗ YouTube
• 002

  Iron Man

  Search & Destroy

  Gabba’s militaristic imagery – band names like Search and Destroy, Annihilator, Strontium 9000, track titles like ‘Iron Man’, ‘Dominator’, ‘The Endzone’, ‘Dark Knight’, compilations like Battlegrounds – recalls heavy metal’s super-speedy, sadomasochistic sub-genres such as thrash, death-metal and grindcore.

  Mokum
  track Open ↗ YouTube
• 003

  Dominator

  Human Resource

  Gabba’s militaristic imagery – band names like Search and Destroy, Annihilator, Strontium 9000, track titles like ‘Iron Man’, ‘Dominator’, ‘The Endzone’, ‘Dark Knight’, compilations like Battlegrounds – recalls heavy metal’s super-speedy, sadomasochistic sub-genres such as thrash, death-metal and grindcore.

  R&S/Order To Dance
  track Open ↗ YouTube
• 004

  No Woman Allowed

  Sperminator

  And like Nintendo, gabba is a mostly male subculture (an early classic of the genre was Sperminator’s ‘No Woman Allowed’!)

  Rotterdam
  track Open ↗ YouTube
• 005

  I Wanna Be A Hippy

  Technohead

  This is a reference to the poppy, sentimental strain of ‘happy gabba’ or ‘fun-core’ which has recently taken the Dutch charts by storm, and even scored a Top Ten smash in Britain with Technohead’s irresistibly zany pro-marijuana anthem ‘I Wanna Be A Hippy’.

  Mokum
  track Open ↗ YouTube
• 006

  Frankenscience

  Nasenbluten

  Operating as Signs Ov Chaos, Wells recorded the experimental gabba album Frankenscience for English metal label Earache, who also put out a compilation of hardest-core gabba from Lenny Dee’s Industrial Strength label.

  Earache
  album Open ↗ YouTube
• 007

  Frontal Sickness

  Mescalinum United

  PCP has been exploring such post-rave endzones for years, from The Mover’s ‘Frontal Sickness’/‘Final Sickness’ trilogy to the ‘gloomcore’ output of their sister label Cold Rush (a perfect phrase for the Ecstasy buzz when the empathetic warm glow has burned out).

  track Open ↗ YouTube
• 008

  Torsion

  Renegade Legion

  With their glacial, sorrowful synths, down-swooping drones and trudging, cavernously echoed beats, these tekno-dirges – Cypher’s ‘Marching Into Madness’ (on the ‘Doomed Bunkerloops’ EP), Rave Creator’s ‘Thru Eternal Fog’, Reign’s ‘Skeletons March’ (from ‘The Zombie-Leader Is Approaching’ EP), Renegade Legion’s ‘Torsion’ – conjure mind’s eye visions of barren craterscapes or vast ice catacombs carved beneath the Arctic surface.

  track Open ↗ YouTube