What's up with SEL and Breakcore?
A screenshot from Virtual Self's Boa Remix at Virtual Self Utopia in Brooklyn NYC, 2017
The connection between SEL and the breakcore community seems to one that is directly visible, yet deeply mysterious. Is Lain just an internet aesthetic adopted by some newbies "ruining" breakcore as the genre's purists put it? Or is there a deep connection between SEL and electronic music that makes this connection seem extremely natural, even fated to happen? This essay is an investigation into a possible sequence of events that led to the popular association of the show with Breakcore and electronica in general.
Disclaimer: I cannot add certain links/photos to the musical pieces I'm referencing as the page will get copystruck (which is what happened last time). So you'll have to look up the songs and some historical refrences by yourself to double check. Really regret the inconvenience, as the previous iteration of this article was really something else.
The 1960's counterculture movement
The 1960's were characterized by a huge wave of unseen revolutionary fervour, crystallizing as a force within the young masses in the Western world , especially in America and France. This was marked by the "hippie" movement, one that took its name from the African American word 'hip' or 'hippie', a word used to describe the "beatniks" or "beat generation" made most famous by Jack Kerouac (author of "On the Road") and Henry Miller, marked by a sense of nomadic wandering and restlessness. One of the most famous Beat generation poets Allen ginsberg wrote the poem "Howl", in whose second part he decries the system of American capitalism, personifying it as the Caananite god of child sacrifice, Moloch.
Influenced by various spiritual and literary gurus, the hippies would aim their culture against what they perceived to be the decadent values of the mainstream, a culture they termed pejoratively with labels such as "The Establishment", "The Man" or "Big Brother". The movement would center around altered states, New Age religious beliefs, publications such as the Whole Earth catalogue as well as festivals such as Burning Man (a concept that took some inspiration as a dadaist interpretation of Anarchist Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone) . Personalities such as Steve Jobs were notably huge Hippies in their youth.
Techno, Clubs and Rave Culture.
The Hippie movement became a catalyst for many cultural offshoots, a significant one being the establishment of Psychedelic music Nightclubs in the UK, the most famous being the "UFO club" responsible for hosting Pink floyd. These would later spark the underground British club scene that became a huge influence on later British musicians.
The underground club scene (dominated by disco) would then become a hotspot for many disenfranchised and excluded minorities in NYC, being made up of LBTQ+ individuals, people of colour and racial minorities such as Jews, Italians etc, since the club offered a newfound social freedom for these people. In Detroit, the short lived nature of the disco scene would inspire many in the Black community to take up mixing, the most notable of these being Cybotron member Juan Atkins. He, along with Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson would go on to form the Belleville three, and they would teach themselves the art of mixing and DJing. The three would then become Techno's trinity, receiving the titles of "Originator", "Innovator" and "Elevator" respectively. Their production techniques, inspired by Synth Legends such as Kraftwerk and Parliament, would then spurn a revolution with the TR-808 and drum machines,being a prime inspiration for the future development of Jungle and Drum-n-Bass as well as Afro-futurism.
Rave culture, born from the Soho beatnik sets in Westminister, London, would then be highly influenced by the new sounds and create a cornucopia of genres from then on, the most notable of these being Breakbeats, often used to accompany the dance moves of "breakers" in clubs.
CCRU, Jungle and Mille Plateaux
We can trace the beginnings of this cyberculture association all the way back to the shenanigans of the meth infested Warwick group, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, or CCRU for short. Nick Land was a huge fan of the music genre Jungle, making several references to it in his later work Fanged Noumena and often playing it at multiple Virtual Futures concerts, where he lay on the floor croaking. The Amen Break, a drum loop by mixed race Soul group The Winstons, would soon become a very popular choice in Drum N Bass and Jungle genres, and eventually the core sample of the Breakcore genre. We'd also see many CCRU members take a similar fondness to breakbeats, writing many articles on the genre, breakbeat itself being instrumental in the formation of Jungle music.
His friend who studied with him at Warwick, Hyperdub founder KODE9, was heavily influenced by Nick Land, and they even played a few sets together. He would make his first release with Mark Fisher, another CCRU member and the future author of Capitalist Realism, going on to produce a breakcore precursor titled KATAK [HEATSEEKER ] under the Katasonix record label.
Other labels would soon follow suit, the most famous of these being Warp Records. The Sheffield based label would emerge from the UK nightclub rave scene and the genre of Bleep techno, which combined Breakbeat style techno drum patterns with the syncopation of a Jungle Precursor. It soon signed multiple famous IDM artists such as Aphex twin and Autechre in its huge breakthrough compilation Artificial intelligence in 1992. Following the tail of this trend, we see the German label Mille Plateaux emerge, taking its name from the second part of philosophers Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia project.
Considered by many to be the first 'Glitch' label, whose sound would go on to influence scores of electronic musicians, the MP label signed legendary intermedia artists such as Ryoji Ikeda and Yasunao Tone, while also being the mother label of the erstwhile emerging artist Alec Empire. Alec Empire's The Destroyer is considered to be the first breakcore album, and his later group Atari Teenage Riot!! would be hugely influential in the Digital Hardcore genre with their album of the same name.
The connections would not stop there. Ovid, a group under MP, would resample Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 2 and then release it, but not before sending a copy to the now old and frail Gilles Deleuze. While Deleuze said he could not contribute, he gave them their blessing and said he really liked the Systemich album, which was coincidentally also a favourite of Aphex Twin's.
Bleep Techno would soon give rise to Breakbeat Hardcore and by extension the "Happy Hardcore" music genre.
Sampling, J-CORE and the beginnings of a ceratin "nsfw"core.
***This is the part which could have gotten possibly reported, so I'll have to censor the you-know-what bits
The beginnings of the 1990's would see the emergence of sampling culture, as America and Japan shared in cultural exchange during their battle for global conquest. DJ Shadow (known as Nujabes today and the producer of Samurai Champloo's OST) and DJ Sharpnel would, by lifting elements from the digital hardcore and Happy Hardcore scenes would go on to begin the development of J-core. This would be characterized by heavy sampling and resampling of anime audio clips into hard guttural glitch-scapes pioneered by Yasunao Tone . Alongside J-core, we'd also begin to see the rise of Nightcore in the early 2000's, characterized by anime music with high pitched voices and sped up track speeds, which paralleled the development of the culture of Anime Music Videos (AMV)
In the midst of all this a quiet movement was forming in the sewers of 4chan. "Rori"core, also known as l***core, would be pioneered as a joke genre by artists such as Goreshit (who has posted his remix of the SEL opening from way, way back in the early 2010's) and Rory in the early 20's. These two artists, along with the digital hardcore inspired Machine Girl would kick-start the beginnings of a new wave of breakcore.
The Show and its Fandom
The show itself has reason to appeal to internet-dwelling electronic musicians. While on hand the show has strong tracks like "Loneliness" that are a testament to a strong understanding of the power of music to communicate, people on the production team such as Wasei JJ Chikada (the sound of the DJ on the show) were also artists themselves, JJ being a real DJ till this date. We also see multiple in-show outlines of the many elements of Rave culture , as well as the huge influence the book "Cyberia" by Roushkoff had on it.
On top of that, it seems that the archives of the community's old internet presence can bear testament to good taste in music. The Wired sounds for Wired people project is the most famous fanwork in the community today, but the Lainchan/ArisuChan song listings also list some great picks in electronic music, some including tracks by early Aphex twin era , and is still up at the Lainzine website. [More things along these lines can be found in my BONUS section.]
So we have reason to believe that the show itself, being so heavy on topics such as the role technology plays in our lives, as well as having a good foundation in the music via its own ground as well as its community, would be well positioned to attract internet musicians like a moth to a flame.
SewerSl*t, TokyoPill and the TikTok+boa revival
Owing to the history outlined above, artists suchas ARCA and Virtual Self would explicitly cite Lain as an influence on their own artistic practices, while other artists such as Sewerslvt and TokyoPill would make these connections very explicit in their own words. As the cultural flux of breakcore would lead to the Ethereal evolution of the genre on the internet, SEL as a show would be revived by the Nightcore-esque speedups of Boa's Duvet on tiktok in the early 2020's, the app itself contributing to the breakcore genre's revival. So we can see now that SEL then casts an ever stronger shadow on a new wave of emerging breakcore artists.
Present Day, Present Time.
The show is now seeing a revival in even deeper corners of the internet, with JJ from the show holding regular raves in the deep rat holes of VRchat. Lain, omnipresent as always, seems to cast her shadow on the emerging genre of spatial music, as she continues to live on in the echoing electronic refrains of cyberspace :)
Guess who this is :) Rhymes with "Rick Band"