#Kind of a low grade opinion haver post but it goes here.

[noisytenant]

breakcore has always been a really open-ended genre that can be fused to a lot of different sounds. this can make it hard to concretely characterize.

relevant image:

when you go through the artists (some i would debate listing, some i haven't heard, but i've listened to most) different influences push and pull the same "genre" in many directions--IDM, gabber, oldschool rave, ragga, jungle, jazz, speedcore, juke, metal... and so on.

in a way, breakcore is characterized by its diversity in sampling, genre blends, and production styles. but on the whole, it prioritizes atypical, dynamic percussive programming (featuring, of course, drum breaks) over melodic components.

additionally, i think it's loosely characterized by a transgressive nature--it's edgy! which thankfully doesn't just mean offensive. it means challenging genre conventions, expectations of song structures and priorities, expectations around samples and their associations, and the general sense of "listenability".

at times i worry that i have no right to "gatekeep" the breakcore label from nubreak producers when it's always been really flexible. but i feel that the atmospheric dnb inspired sound returns the percussion to the background, simplifying programming and sanding off the edges of its older, weirder inspiration.

breakcore can be many things, but above all, i think it should be weird, interesting, and a little hard to categorize. there's no way to recapture the exact historical moment of the original 90's-00's scene, but for as long as the word keeps being used, i hope we can carry forward the things that made it special.