If we're friends, then sooner or later you have the pleasure of finding out about my unreasonable and undying love for breakcore. This usually leads to some questions:
I'm unsure if it should be considered the jazz, the dadaism, or the tourette syndrome of electronic music. As far as genres go, it's immature, hyperactive, often weird, ugly, grating, much too fast, and absolutely one of my favourite things ever.
Now that you have been appropriately warned, here is a top selection of tracks that give me pure joy. Consider this my version of a mixtape:
Here's one piece that isn't even a full song, but encompasses everything that makes breakcore/raggacore wonderful:
Cu-cumba (jungle raggacore remix)
You can even get the history of the amen break explained to you while listening to breakcore:
Very adorable documentary from 2006: Notes On Breakcore. (archive.org link)
Insomniac Magazine: How to Talk to Your Kids About Breakcore
Good new and old tracks often pop up on the breakcore subreddit. But don't go and ruin it, you and 5 friends could probably outvote the entire community.
I tried to keep the initial list balanced, but it's hard to refrain from recommending 60% of all of Venetian Snares and 80% of all that Ruby My Dear has ever created. Here are some of the most legendary full albums:
You should also find the album "Rossz Csillag Alatt Született" by Venetian Snares. It contains what's arguably the Stairway to Heaven of breakcore:
And some random bonus songs. Who knows if all of these count as breakcore, half the point of the genre is to be experimental after all. Categorize these as drum & bass, glitch, noise, who cares. Their main merit is to be creative and interesting as hell.
I could keep going. In fact, I will probably update this over time.
Breakcore drum patterns should be pretty impossible to do with acoustic instruments, but that doesn't keep some brave drummers from trying. Here are some of the more impressive attempts:
I'm glad you asked! I found two decent ones:
Introducing friends to breakcore
and
Despite being such a weird niche genre, there is still an absurd amount of musicians to check out. Don't give me grief for not including Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Enduser, Bong Ra, Sabrepulse, Dev/Null, Xanopticon, Goreshit, Nasenbluten, Hecate, Datach'i, cpxn, Stazma the Junglechrist, DJ Donna Summer, The Teknoist, Spongebob Squarewave, Rotator, Kettel, or anyone else you're super into.
