Britcore

What it is

Music of Life and Kold Sweat were pressing British rap records in 1989 that nobody in New York would have recognised. The tempo was wrong first of all: 112 to 124 rather than 90, because the DJs who played them had come off the back of a house set and could not drop to half speed. The breaks were stacked two and three deep until the snares blurred, the sirens were borrowed off dub sound systems, and the subject matter was the poll tax and the police. Gunshot, Hijack, Silver Bullet and Killa Instinct made a hip-hop you could not nod to. Within three years most of the people making it, and nearly all the people buying it, had gone over to rave. That is why the chopped break, the air horn and the siren turn up in breakbeat hardcore already finished, with nobody having to invent them.

What it sounds like

Dense and mid-heavy, with the low end missing entirely. Two or three breaks layered so their snares stack into one long crack, a twelve-bit sampler running out of headroom, and a scratch cutting across the top of it. Sirens, an air horn on the sixteen, and a vocal delivered at a shout rather than a drawl. The bass is a sampled upright or a synth with no sub in it, so the weight sits around 150Hz instead of 50. Reverb is short, bright and metallic. It should sound like a record slightly too fast for the person rapping on it, because it usually was.

Key elements

• Breaks stacked, not loopedTwo breaks running at once, usually the Amen under something drier like the Funky Drummer. The second one is there for its hats and its room, and it makes the snare read as one enormous hit rather than two.
• The sirenLifted from reggae sound system culture, where it signalled a rewind. Here it runs for four bars at a time under the verse, which nobody in New York was doing.
• Twelve-bit headroomAn S950 or an SP-1200 with no gain staging. Overloading the input on the way in gave the break a grainy edge that producers stopped treating as a fault by about 1990.
• Scratching as punctuationA cut on the last beat of every fourth bar rather than a solo section. It is a structural device here, marking the phrase, and it is the part a step grid cannot show you.
• Delivery at 120Sixteenth-note flows because there is no room for anything slower. Hijack and Gunshot both rap in tight bursts with the breath at the barline, which is a rhythm decision as much as a vocal one.

How to get them

• Set the tempo before you pick the breakStart at 118 and repitch the break up to it rather than time-stretching. A break pushed a whole tone sharp gets thinner and brighter, and that thinness is the whole texture of this music.
• Layer and gate the second breakRun the second loop through a gate keyed off the first, with a 5ms attack and a 90ms hold. You get the extra snare weight without two sets of room tone smearing into each other.
• Build the sirenThree detuned saws through a low-pass with the resonance up, and an LFO at about 0.4Hz on the cutoff and the pitch together. Send it to a spring reverb, then high-pass the return at 400Hz so it sits over the drums instead of under them.
• Bass without subSample an upright bass note, high-pass at 70Hz and let the fundamental sit around 100 to 160Hz. If you put a modern sub under this the drums stop sounding urgent and start sounding polite.
• Cut on the phrase, not on the beatPut your scratch or your siren stab on the last sixteenth of bars four, eight and sixteen. There is no chorus and no drop, so that cut is what tells a dancer the section has changed.
• Mix into the mids and leave itBus everything through one compressor at a 4:1 ratio with a slow attack, roll off below 60Hz, and stop. These records fight in the 200Hz to 3kHz band on purpose, and cleaning that up removes the genre.

Reference points

Gunshot, Hijack, Silver Bullet, Killa Instinct, Katch 22, and the Music of Life and Kold Sweat labels. Shut Up And Dance sit on the hinge between this and rave. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.