Review: "Various Artists - Digital Hardcore!!! Videos" (DHR 36)

Philip Virus was a long time collaborator with Alec Empire / Atari Teenage Riot / Digital Hardcore Recordings and, from my understanding, he is responsible for most of the video productions on this.

Atari Teenage Riot  - Destroy 2000 Years Of Culture

I think most people assume it goes like this: there is a band, or a musician, and they have a record out. They desire airplay on MTV and other programs, for a bonus promotional effect. So they stitch together a video, and submit it to the stations. Or maybe their record label or distributor even pressures them into doing this.
So the video is kinda disconnected and disjunct in relationship to the song material.
(Yeah I know MTV might no longer be the "go-to place" for this. Yet they were, in the 90s).

Philipp Virus - The Report

But this is not the case here at all, not this time! There is a symbiosis between Virus' creativity, directing efforts, edits, and the raw audio source. These videos are *digital hardcore*, too. If you listened to them with closed ears, they would still look "DHR".
 

Alec Empire - Low On Ice

I saw these videos on TV in the 90s, and they truly stood out from the rest... maybe they were truly "Harder than the rest", like the name of another compilation...
Seeing the video to "Speed" turned me into the whole Hardcore thing - and enticed me to become a producer, DJ, and later author, too.
Other videos introduced me to the marvelous soundscapes of "Future of War", or Shizuo, or Flex Busterman...

Ec8or - C**aine Ducks

They were far ahead of time, even in their own days, and you can see many visual techniques in these videos that left their mark even on today's online video world. Glitch, video overload, speed cuts, color cycling, visual destruction...

Hanin Elias - In Flames

But these are *not* just hyperactive glitch videos. There is something beyond that, in the technique of Virus, and its connection to the audio, and the mental universe of the whole DHR thing. I can't describe what it is. But I can hear it, feel it, *see* it.

Something that is lurking just below the threshold, shimmering, glowing, growing... and maybe, one day, it will break through into the "real" world...

Discogs Link: https://www.discogs.com/master/45246-Various-Digital-Hardcore-Videos