Week Two: Gabber

Gabber is both an electronic music genre and was also a significant cultural youth movement from the Netherlands (primarily Rotterdam) in the 1990’s through to the early 2000’s. 

I have found the cultural aspects on Gabber interesting in that as a cultural movement that is named because it is the Bargoens word for “friend or size”¹. However, the prevailing dress code for men was to shave their heads². This visual indicator of being part of the Gabber culture is also what I think that was responsible for the Daily Star article “Nazi Gabber Hell” written by Lee Harpin (1997)². It was also probably driven by the distorted timbre of the music and the track names, for example “Bald Terror” (1993)³, along with the use of darker imagery on display for track and rave posters.

Stylistically speaking, in terms of tempo, it sits between 170-200 beats per minute⁴. Using a four-on-the-floor beat, and a typically distorted kick drum. Use of sawtooth synths features heavily in tracks in the genre. When originally produced this would have been what we now term as a DAWless setup, meaning that no computers were used. A typical setup would include a Roland TR-909 for drums (and main sequencer) and a Juno Alpha (or similar) for synths. Of note the TR-909 was also the first Roland drum machine to include MIDI, hence its ability to be the core of any Gabber setup, controlling other instruments as needed. 

The main stylistic indicator is with the production on the 909 kick is the distortion is cranked up so far that the waveform clipped turning it into what is essentially a square wave. It was this that not only gave the kick its characteristic sound in terms of distortion, but it also made it somewhat melodic⁵.

1. Gabber – Immaterieel Erfgoed (2020) Available at: https://www.immaterieelerfgoed.nl/en/gabbercultuur(Accessed: 10 October 2022).  
2. Dicker H., (no year) A Brief History of Gabber – Available at: https://artsandculture.google.com/story/a-brief-history-of-gabber-the-netherlands-institute-for-sound-and-vision/ugXxcmEzFVvjKQ?hl=en(Accessed: 10 October 2022)
3. https://challenge-magazine.org/2020/07/08/if-da-kids-are-united-when-gabbers-took-a-stand-against-fascism-within-the-scene/
4. Bald Terror – Rotterdam (1993) Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=On_uwk1CH_c&t=6s(Accessed 10 October 2022)
5. Rietveld, H., Monroe, A. (2020) Gabber: Raising Hell in Technoculture – Available at:https://openresearch.lsbu.ac.uk/download/848ef23b655fe6a5ee37b75eb6a46ce5a65196ac88b05273d4946efeed57d0ee/284650/Gabber_Techno%20meets%20Metal-EDITS-6AUG2020-ACCEPTED.pdf (Accessed: 10 October 2022)
6. Hardcore History – Gabber (2009) Available at: http://corehistory.blogspot.com/2009/12/gabber.html?m=1 (Accessed: 10 October 2022)