a slightly "autobiographical" text, sent to us by low entropy
"Adrenaline Junkie" is a track that was produced and released on vinyl in 1998 - on the "Biophilia Allstars" 2xLP along music by other artists such as Christoph de Babalon or Society Suckers.
It was a "hit" back in the day, and seems to still enjoy quite a bit of popularity - a YouTube upload of the track went above 30.000 views recently.
So, let us take a look back at the creation and story of this track.
1. Prelude
I was a "teenage hardcore head". Got into Techno, Trance, Rave, all that jazz at age 13, and quickly developed a craving for harder stuff - hardcore, gabber, and the precursors of the speedcore genre.
Time passed, and the whole hardcore underground went more extreme, more dirty, and - faster. 180 bpm used to be fast - now there were tracks around, clocking at 200, 240, maybe even 260 bpm.
my hardcore heart loved this! but still... i felt let down by these producers. i thought they were holding back.
yeah, a 240 bpm noizecore gabber tune certainly must be shocking for someone who used to shuffle his feet to 140 bpm mellow techno.
but... shouldn't it be possible to go even faster & harder? there must be a world beyond 400 bpm and surely one could go there, if one wanted to!
indeed, there were tracks around that went beyond the speed barrier. but these were "speed up" tracks, that started very slow, and only reached the heights of bpm towards their ending (or in the middle part). there were also tracks that went "friggin fast" for a few moments, then got back to a normal tempo.
there were a few tracks that pushed this quite far, actually. but even these were a mix of slower and fast parts in the end.
i was thinking "give me speed - through and through, from start to finish".
in 1996, at age 15, i finally decided to get into producing music myself. the first projects were weird mixtures between chiptunes, amiga music, and hardcore techno (of course).
often quite short and "unfinished".
feedback by friends was good though, so i got going at producing "real", full lengths track.
the vision of "bpm beyond limits" was still in the back of my head, so i tried to break the speed barrier for once.
i created a track that was close to 400 bpm - towards the end it got quite noizy, which inspired me to create a complete noizecore techno track at this speed - it later went onto my first full-length vinyl release, the "anti-sedative EP" on blut records (the track was called "flatlined" - inspire by a term out of the neuromancer video game that i loved to play).
400 bpm seemed like a veritable speed to me. i did not think about getting faster. i had read that above ~500 bpm, the drums would "merge into a single tone", becoming unlistenable and purposeless.
so i tackled another 400 bpm track. just like my first track got more extreme by the end, i added a similar section to this one too, where the drum ran at 800 bpm.
now, when i listened to that segment, i felt like my head was blown from my shoulders.
because it actually *worked*. 800 bpm hardcore did not sound like meaningless chaos to me. it was a real possibility of creating meaningful music. the doors to the planets of highest bpms had suddenly swung open...
i knew what i had to do now.
create a hardcore techno track that clocks at 800 bpm from start to finish.
2. creating "adrenaline junkie"
for the track, i took a drum that i used elsewhere already, and tried to distort it further, add more bass, and make it as nasty as possible.
there is a short "intro" sequence with single drum hits, but then it's straight 800 bpm in your face, you f**khead!
as my producer background was "experimental hardcore" and experimental music in general, there are no rave stabs or gabber hoovers, neither happy hardcore chanting or thrash metal guitars (i.e. the stuff that was commonplace in gabber productions at that time).
another friend described the sounds as "high speed laser battle in space" instead. yes, maybe.
as the track was much faster than anything else i knew, i thought the track structure itself must be faster as well. so there are lots of changes and sudden twists, new sounds or movements can come in at any second.
there is a slight "breakcore" breakdown in the middle, and towards the end the track actually goes into 1600 bpm. wee!
that's it. let the basses keep on rolling.
btw: the "daw" I used was called Impulse Tracker, running in MS-DOS on a desktop computer.
3. the release
does anyone know what a mailing list is / was?
before the rise of social media and messengers, these were among the most popular forms of internet communication and communities.
essentially, you sent an email to the list, and all other members of the community received it, and then a discussion could start by others joining in and replying etc.
i was part of the "biophilia" mailing list. set up by multipara, who did a lot of groundwork for the hardcore (and other) scenes on the internet, for example by running a discography site for labels such as fischkopf, force inc, mono tone... long before "discogs" came around.
if i recall correctly, he was actually a professor of linguistics at the university of berlin "in real life".
the biophilia mailing list was for hardcore and techno aficionados, usually of the more experimental kind.
there were a lot of producers in that scene who were on this list, sonic subjunkies, paul snowden, somatic responses, the speed freak...
and because of this, the "communal idea" arose to create a compilation with tracks by "us".
plenty of producers sent in their tracks, and i was wondering what kind of stuff i could submit. i had something more mellow, maybe even techno-y, in mind.
but multipara wanted to get "adrenaline junkie" on it!
i did not say no. so the track went on there.
i borrowed a polaroid camera, took a self portrait, sent everything to berlin, and it was included with the pictures of the other artists.
the vinyl arrived here, i felt proud - my first track on vinyl at age 17!
and when listening to the other tracks of the LP... wow, there were quite some "bangers" on there.
4. the legacy
even though it felt like a personal feat, I underestimated the release.
after all, electronic (and hardcore) vinyl was poured out en masse in the 90s. i did not assume that too many people would pay attention to my track.
this impression changed quite quickly, though. i literally got feedback from all over the world. for example, a friend in the USA mentioned that an acquaintance walked up to him and told him that "he discovered an insanely fast track on an obscure compilation" which he must play to him - and when he put the needle down, it was actually "adrenaline junkie". he did neither know who "low entropy" was, nor that my friend actually knew me and my music.
the sight (and sound) of a pure 800 bpm track really shook (and shocked) a lot of people in the global underground - in 1998 and onwards.
when i started doing gigs myself, adrenaline junkie was always the "crowd pleaser" that pushed everyone over the limits.
people requested it before gigs, others asked "what the hell was that track?" after a performance.
oh yeah, and when i was finally booked for tresor in berlin - i knew i had to drop this track, too.
5. the extended legacy
how far reaching was its influence on other producers?
i got some direct feedback by a few producers on this. it's also likely it influenced others beyond that.
eventually, more "ultra-fast" tracks were produced and released. and even the "1600 bpm" has been topped in speed by now.
yet, when i put the track on the internet a few years ago, the response was very good, and obviously, it's being shared around again.
seems that people are still in for a little bit of an adrenaline rush!
6. high speed fade out
so, to get back to a claim at the beginning:
was it *really* "the world's first 800 bpm" track?
well, as i said, there were tracks that had high speed segments, and i love these tracks, but in the end, the high speed parts were just segments.
maybe some producers had some stuff that they did live which was really fast.
but adrenaline junkie was a full-length, "from start to finish" 800 bpm track that got released on vinyl - in 1998. and i guess that really was a first, in many ways.
of course, it's up to definition if you want to include the above mentioned "speed up" track, or other tracks, in the list of fast music, too.
in this case, let's just put it this way:
"Adrenaline Junkie" was one of the very few speedcore tracks with an insanely high BPM that existed in 1998.
amen.
and now:
high speed drums in your face, you f**khead!
https://www.discogs.com/release/47142-Various-Biophilia-Allstars
https://lowentropy.bandcamp.com/track/adrenaline-junkie
"Adrenaline Junkie" is a track that was produced and released on vinyl in 1998 - on the "Biophilia Allstars" 2xLP along music by other artists such as Christoph de Babalon or Society Suckers.
It was a "hit" back in the day, and seems to still enjoy quite a bit of popularity - a YouTube upload of the track went above 30.000 views recently.
So, let us take a look back at the creation and story of this track.
1. Prelude
I was a "teenage hardcore head". Got into Techno, Trance, Rave, all that jazz at age 13, and quickly developed a craving for harder stuff - hardcore, gabber, and the precursors of the speedcore genre.
Time passed, and the whole hardcore underground went more extreme, more dirty, and - faster. 180 bpm used to be fast - now there were tracks around, clocking at 200, 240, maybe even 260 bpm.
my hardcore heart loved this! but still... i felt let down by these producers. i thought they were holding back.
yeah, a 240 bpm noizecore gabber tune certainly must be shocking for someone who used to shuffle his feet to 140 bpm mellow techno.
but... shouldn't it be possible to go even faster & harder? there must be a world beyond 400 bpm and surely one could go there, if one wanted to!
indeed, there were tracks around that went beyond the speed barrier. but these were "speed up" tracks, that started very slow, and only reached the heights of bpm towards their ending (or in the middle part). there were also tracks that went "friggin fast" for a few moments, then got back to a normal tempo.
there were a few tracks that pushed this quite far, actually. but even these were a mix of slower and fast parts in the end.
in 1996, at age 15, i finally decided to get into producing music myself. the first projects were weird mixtures between chiptunes, amiga music, and hardcore techno (of course).
often quite short and "unfinished".
feedback by friends was good though, so i got going at producing "real", full lengths track.
the vision of "bpm beyond limits" was still in the back of my head, so i tried to break the speed barrier for once.
i created a track that was close to 400 bpm - towards the end it got quite noizy, which inspired me to create a complete noizecore techno track at this speed - it later went onto my first full-length vinyl release, the "anti-sedative EP" on blut records (the track was called "flatlined" - inspire by a term out of the neuromancer video game that i loved to play).
400 bpm seemed like a veritable speed to me. i did not think about getting faster. i had read that above ~500 bpm, the drums would "merge into a single tone", becoming unlistenable and purposeless.
so i tackled another 400 bpm track. just like my first track got more extreme by the end, i added a similar section to this one too, where the drum ran at 800 bpm.
now, when i listened to that segment, i felt like my head was blown from my shoulders.
because it actually *worked*. 800 bpm hardcore did not sound like meaningless chaos to me. it was a real possibility of creating meaningful music. the doors to the planets of highest bpms had suddenly swung open...
create a hardcore techno track that clocks at 800 bpm from start to finish.
2. creating "adrenaline junkie"
for the track, i took a drum that i used elsewhere already, and tried to distort it further, add more bass, and make it as nasty as possible.
there is a short "intro" sequence with single drum hits, but then it's straight 800 bpm in your face, you f**khead!
as my producer background was "experimental hardcore" and experimental music in general, there are no rave stabs or gabber hoovers, neither happy hardcore chanting or thrash metal guitars (i.e. the stuff that was commonplace in gabber productions at that time).
another friend described the sounds as "high speed laser battle in space" instead. yes, maybe.
as the track was much faster than anything else i knew, i thought the track structure itself must be faster as well. so there are lots of changes and sudden twists, new sounds or movements can come in at any second.
there is a slight "breakcore" breakdown in the middle, and towards the end the track actually goes into 1600 bpm. wee!
that's it. let the basses keep on rolling.
btw: the "daw" I used was called Impulse Tracker, running in MS-DOS on a desktop computer.
3. the release
before the rise of social media and messengers, these were among the most popular forms of internet communication and communities.
essentially, you sent an email to the list, and all other members of the community received it, and then a discussion could start by others joining in and replying etc.
i was part of the "biophilia" mailing list. set up by multipara, who did a lot of groundwork for the hardcore (and other) scenes on the internet, for example by running a discography site for labels such as fischkopf, force inc, mono tone... long before "discogs" came around.
if i recall correctly, he was actually a professor of linguistics at the university of berlin "in real life".
the biophilia mailing list was for hardcore and techno aficionados, usually of the more experimental kind.
there were a lot of producers in that scene who were on this list, sonic subjunkies, paul snowden, somatic responses, the speed freak...
and because of this, the "communal idea" arose to create a compilation with tracks by "us".
plenty of producers sent in their tracks, and i was wondering what kind of stuff i could submit. i had something more mellow, maybe even techno-y, in mind.
but multipara wanted to get "adrenaline junkie" on it!
i did not say no. so the track went on there.
i borrowed a polaroid camera, took a self portrait, sent everything to berlin, and it was included with the pictures of the other artists.
the vinyl arrived here, i felt proud - my first track on vinyl at age 17!
and when listening to the other tracks of the LP... wow, there were quite some "bangers" on there.
even though it felt like a personal feat, I underestimated the release.
after all, electronic (and hardcore) vinyl was poured out en masse in the 90s. i did not assume that too many people would pay attention to my track.
this impression changed quite quickly, though. i literally got feedback from all over the world. for example, a friend in the USA mentioned that an acquaintance walked up to him and told him that "he discovered an insanely fast track on an obscure compilation" which he must play to him - and when he put the needle down, it was actually "adrenaline junkie". he did neither know who "low entropy" was, nor that my friend actually knew me and my music.
the sight (and sound) of a pure 800 bpm track really shook (and shocked) a lot of people in the global underground - in 1998 and onwards.
when i started doing gigs myself, adrenaline junkie was always the "crowd pleaser" that pushed everyone over the limits.
people requested it before gigs, others asked "what the hell was that track?" after a performance.
oh yeah, and when i was finally booked for tresor in berlin - i knew i had to drop this track, too.
5. the extended legacy
how far reaching was its influence on other producers?
i got some direct feedback by a few producers on this. it's also likely it influenced others beyond that.
eventually, more "ultra-fast" tracks were produced and released. and even the "1600 bpm" has been topped in speed by now.
seems that people are still in for a little bit of an adrenaline rush!
6. high speed fade out
so, to get back to a claim at the beginning:
was it *really* "the world's first 800 bpm" track?
well, as i said, there were tracks that had high speed segments, and i love these tracks, but in the end, the high speed parts were just segments.
maybe some producers had some stuff that they did live which was really fast.
but adrenaline junkie was a full-length, "from start to finish" 800 bpm track that got released on vinyl - in 1998. and i guess that really was a first, in many ways.
of course, it's up to definition if you want to include the above mentioned "speed up" track, or other tracks, in the list of fast music, too.
in this case, let's just put it this way:
"Adrenaline Junkie" was one of the very few speedcore tracks with an insanely high BPM that existed in 1998.
amen.
and now:
high speed drums in your face, you f**khead!
https://www.discogs.com/release/47142-Various-Biophilia-Allstars
https://lowentropy.bandcamp.com/track/adrenaline-junkie
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