I don’t mind hardstyle but today it has a more narrow following of mostly younger people aged 16-25 in Northern Europe. it is near enough mainstream pop music in some parts of NL, SLAM FM is a big radio station that plays a lot of it.

the difficulty with scheduling stuff on PVR is that our recorded programme content is long mixed sets and not as easy to schedule on auto DJ due to technical limitations of the software used (a similar problem affects VFR which is why the selecrtion is random) and it takes a fair bit of time and effort to look after all the streams, basically we are running almost the same output as Hilversum media centre in NL but with volunteer staff spread across the whole world.

And same as the hilversum stations we do not have totally unlimited resources so they get allocated to what is most popular worldwide.

The EBU (European Broadcasters Union) sends me a magazine every quarter addressed to Party Vibe Radio as their boffins are genuinely interested in what we are doing here and how we do it as along with the rise of mobile telephone use and 3G data its changing European and global broadcasting.

@p0lski 548289 wrote:

cheese

especially since learning Dutch I’m intrigued as to why it has such an “underground” image in UK as its really not any more underground than UK urban or pop dance genres. I don’t think its bad music but they basically socially engineered the gabba scene (more closer to our freeparty culture) to commercialise it and remove its rougher edges.

When it first surfaced its head in the UK around 1998 I thought it was brilliant. Bought a load of Tracid Traxx stuff but my interest in it waned in about a year after it was clear it was all very samey. Then Uberdruck put the nail in the coffin.

All just my opinion though. Nothing against it really, just not my bag.

I think what Ishskur has to say about it is pretty accurate.

“As what usually happens in the creation of new genres, you take one specific thing that makes another genre cool, and revolve your new genre entirely around it. So this is what happens when artists go “hey, that thunderous beat and bassline and squelching synthline sounds really cool”. Whamo, there you go: new genre (or nu, I should say)”

To be fair, I don’t really now what modern hardstyle sounds like, and the stuff I used to call hardstyle is probably now lumped together with Hard Trance.

i’m involved with an awesome hard tekno scene here in edinburgh that consists of mainly hardcore and frenchcore but has lots of very hard tekno thrown in (not always acid though booo) but they is awesome and is the only hard stuff i will listen to as i find this other stuff quite cheezy and somewhat commercial

Here’s a wee example of one of the DJ’s who produces his own stuff in ETC edinburgh Tekno Cartel
https://soundcloud.com/alias23/alias23-intowinterdeathkore

Haha but the natural oils in your hair are there to keep your hair clean maaan! You’re washing them away by using chemicals..
No no no, that was once said about dogs too but it isn’t even true for them, so go wash yer hair and give ya smelly dog a bath too!

@BioTech 548401 wrote:

Hmmm, must have been 1999 not 98 as this was the first tune I bought.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuEP0PtMB3Q

EDIT: Ha, just noticed one of the comments on above vid… “Hardstyle before Hardstyle was Hardstyle — I thank you, sir”

This is a fucking tune – to me this is hardstyle, but proper hardstyle.

@The Psyentist 548470 wrote:

Nice track but that never qualified as hardstyle in my books. As I said that would be hard trance to me

that is well and truly trance to me , not hardstyle

I used to be mega into it back when it was kinda fresh, but it does get very old very quick same as hard trance.

it would be played early on at slammin vinyl in the techno rooms before the speedcore and gabba would kick in

I used to like this tune.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFNltaamoTs