Listen to Drumcorps masterfully mix hardcore and breakbeat production

Breakcore pioneer Aaron Spectre ditches the Botch samples on “Better Days” to instead hyper-produce his own original hardcore songs to great effect.

It’s hard to make a great hardcore/electronic hybrid. Most producers have little experience playing around with aggressive guitar-oriented music — there’s lineages to different genres of electronic music that dictate where they go for samples — and those same lineages go hand-in-hand with making music that is usually pleasant or funky versus ugly or extreme. On the band side, how often is a rock musician going to have gone deep enough on samplers, drum machines or Logic to truly integrate technology in a meaningful way? You can probably count the punk bands that have done it one on hand. The Body’s use of electronics probably owes it’s success to drummer Lee Buford producing hip-hop records and afrobeat mixtapes going as far back as 2004.

So its pretty incredible that Aaron Spectre’s Drumcorp project has managed to make one of the best records of the year in “Better Days” despite the fact that this is the first time he has written full-on hardcore songs with vocals and augmented it with his production techniques (rather than chop it into pieces as on his 2015 LP Failing Forward).

The reason it works so well is that Spectre’s trajectory as an artist has always been the opposite of what I described above: he’s one of the few producers who was fucking with hardcore. His 2006 Grist LP name-checked some of the late ’90s metal-core he was chopping up like Botch and Converge and I recall a mix where he was playing with Slayer’s “South of Heaven” opening riff which was the play-this-between-songs-while-everyone-tunes song of choice for straight-edge bands of the 90’s Massachusetts hardcore scene that he came from. He’s been integrating urgent guitar music into jungle, drum & bass, and breakcore in a way that goes deeper than “that’s a dope riff” so he had a perspective on what to do with hardcore.

Drumcorps “Forgive and Forget” (from Grist, 2006) features samples from Converge and Cave-In.

Later he would start incorporating his own guitar and vocals (along with original contributions from other musicians) but maintain the breakcore ethos of high-speed collage. All of which leads to “Better Days” — a 5-song EP of of legit great hardcore. Spectre’s guitars have flourishes of Botch-style mathcore (though thankfully without the weird time signatures) and his scream is reminiscent of Deaduy/Kiss It Goodbye’s Tim Singer in it’s natural tone (there’s no affectation to screamo shrieks or death metal burps).

sThe production is brilliant keeping the record from rarely being one thing. For example “Human Nature” opens with an extended collaged beat and then enters into an unproccessed stop-start riff that leaves space for a live breakbeat. Each time the analog instruments repeat they get more and more fucked up and the gap between the processed and the live materials gets closer and closer. That kind of tension happens throughout the EP and makes for a record that offers more and more to unpack with repeated listens.