A Hole in the Market

Seven days into the year 2009. The Middle East is at war again. Harsh wintry weather joins a worldwide financial crisis in its endeavour to cripple the Western world and its economy. Except upside-down Australia, where there’s high temperatures and money to burn.

Still, a fleeting sense of excitement crosses the globe as the harder styles of dance music are on the rise. After somehow seeping from the Netherlands to Australia, it is now infecting more and more souls worldwide with the joy of deep basslines, face-melting kicks, euphoric melodies and eardrum-tearing distortion.

However, these new harder styles adepts all face a huge problem: where to find decent information? They have, through friends or the internet, come into contact with a style they like – but how do they expand their taste when 95% of the related information is in Dutch? Some, mostly by dumb luck, manage to find one of the few English-language forums and go on from there. But as we all know, in order to actually pry loose anything useful from the impenetrable cage of rabies-infected monkeys that is an internet forum, you need to be able to speak decent English. And a lot of apprentices to the harder styles world unfortunately do not.

Besides this issue, our beloved Internet is in serious lack of… something. There is Partyflock for party news, various forums and 0-day blogs for downloading, web- and vinylshops for actually buying music. There are some generic hardstyle and hardcore news sites. Yet to our knowledge there is not a single site on the web that offers decent reviews of vinyl, CD and web releases alike.

This is why, on the seventh day of January 2009, we start this international harder styles website. Included is a cleverly photoshopped picture of the hole we plan to fit in – ‘we’ being two young dogs from Sweden and the Netherlands, backed up by a generous webmaster from Australia. We plan on reviewing multiple new releases every week, and an occasional gem from before the time this site existed. We’ll also bring you the latest party news and post interesting new tracks as soon as they’re out there. And all of this in English.

For now, we will be on this blog until a Danish friend of ours codes us our own custom site. It will have tons of features like a release database which pulls data from Discogs and links it to our reviews, forums, party agenda, et cetera. We are also working on getting our own domain, this tv subdomain is just a temporary one. But first up are a big look into 2009′s parties and festivals, our first reviews and some more info about ourselves.

We’ll keep you posted, outside world.