Italy goes hard

01The Number

So many Italian hardcore stories lead back to the same building: the Number One, in Corte Franca, in the province of Brescia, a short ride from Bergamo. Alberto Guerrini, who grew up nearby and later became Gabber Eleganza, remembers the tape that brought it home: “My cousin gave me a tape from a club close to us, Number One Disco, which was one of these huge old Italian discotheques.”

It was not a local secret for long. “The Number was where you found people from all over Italy,” says Cristian of Art of Fighters, who grew up on that floor. His bandmate Luca calls it the place “where we could see the best DJs of the moment, and for us it was a sanctuary” (both translated from Italian, from an interview with Zero). Guerrini remembers the floor itself: “The moshpits at Number One were like something from the punk era, but the fashion was very nineties with lots of fluoro.”

The DJ Unexist, born near Milan, discovered hardcore at the Number One in 1994 and, according to his own biography, was a resident there from 1996 to 1999. The same biography credits him with the record for the most DJ sets by an Italian artist at Thunderdome.

02Three clubs and a scooter

The Number was the cathedral, but the Brescia area had a whole parish. “We grew up in the trio of Dylan, Number and Florida. We basically spent our youth there,” says Cristian. The Dylan was where he and Luca were “born”: they hitchhiked there and walked home with school backpacks full of records. The Florida, he says, was the place for the best selection, thanks to their DJs and teachers Nico and Tetta.

Getting there was half the ritual. “We used to go there on our scooters, about 25 of us in tracksuits and no helmets,” says Guerrini. In the mid 90s there was no internet to explain anything. Cristian found it on mix CDs by the Italian DJ Molella, where there were always one or two tracks he liked more than all the rest, and it took him a while to find out that music had a name and a whole scene around it.

The countryside had its own channel too. Guerrini’s very first contact with hardcore came at a travelling funfair near Bergamo, on a sound system he describes as a wall of sound. That is Italian hardcore in one picture: a luna park, a patron saint’s day, and a kick drum at 180 BPM.

03Thunderdome comes south

The Dutch noticed. On 7 September 1997 the biggest name in hardcore came to Franciacorta: Thunderdome in Italy, at the Number One. For a club in the Franciacorta countryside, that was a coronation.

The Dutch photographer Boris Postma, who documented gabber scenes in Italy and Japan for his series Planet Core, found the Italian crowd different from the one at home. “What surprised me most was how passionate and romantic they were,” he told Boiler Room. “Plenty of couples wanted to be photographed kissing.” He also remembers the Italians as more polished than the Dutch, with coordinated outfits and athletic builds. Same music, different swagger.

04A phone call from Rotterdam

Italy had the crowd. What it did not have yet was a label that released nothing but hardcore. The Stunned Guys, Maxx and Giangy, started with an Atari ST computer and an Akai S1000 sampler. As they tell it, the break came with a phone call from Paul Elstak of Rotterdam Records, and a few days later they were mixing their first record, the Nidra EP, released in 1994 on the label that had started it all in Rotterdam.

In the mid 90s they founded Traxtorm Records, the first Italian label dedicated only to hardcore. It became home to a generation: DJ Mad Dog, Art of Fighters, Tommyknocker, Amnesys, AniMe, Unexist, Nico and Tetta and more. Mad Dog, born Filippo Calcagni in Rome, signed to Traxtorm at the start of the 2000s after leaving his first project, Hardcore Terrorists, later moved to the Netherlands, runs his own label, Dogfight Records, and has played Thunderdome, Qlimax, Dominator and EDC Las Vegas.

Art of Fighters started in Brescia in 1997, three friends with a tracker program and a pile of rejected demos. With the help of the Stunned Guys their first record, The Beat Can’t Change, came out in 2000, when they were 18. The hockey masks started as a joke: DJ Tetta suggested they all dress the same so nobody could tell them apart.

05When Holland went quiet, Italy got loud

Around the year 2000 the story flipped. In the Netherlands hardcore hit its low point and many producers moved to hardstyle. In Italy, says Cristian, the opposite happened: the genre exploded. This was the millennium hardcore era, and Italy lived it at full volume. “Many clubs, even commercial ones, closed their nights with one or two hours of hardcore,” he says. The scene in Rome was strong too. The south, he admits, never caught fire in the same way.

In 2001 Hardcore Nation brought the scene into the Forum arena outside Milan. “For the first time hardcore was seen not just as a club phenomenon but as a genre worthy of a venue like the Forum,” says Cristian. For Luca it was the first big stage of their lives, and the night he understood what he wanted to do when he grew up.

06Italy today

The Italians never left the main stages. Art of Fighters have written anthems for Dominator, Thunderdome and Q-Base, Mad Dog plays the biggest stages on both sides of the Atlantic, Unexist holds his Thunderdome record, and Traxtorm carried on under Maxx after Giangy left the Stunned Guys in 2009.

Meanwhile Bergamo’s own Alberto Guerrini turned the culture into art with Gabber Eleganza and The Hakke Show, which brought hakke dancers to the stage of C2C in Turin. “In Italy, there was a huge scene for this sort of music,” he says. He said was. Every kid in the north who still hakken in a bedroom, a car park or a club is busy changing the tense.