It also sounds like these kids are trying to recreate the 90s because of their teachers and maybe even their parents telling them “how good it was” back then, and to be fair if I were a parent or teacher in one of these North European countries I’d prefer them to be making this music than constantly playing violent computer games, bullying people online or getting into writing malware for scams…

@HKO2006 561333 wrote:

Where did you get the piece of info from?

In 2002, Norwegian student Thomas S. Nilse (aka DJ TNT) and Steffen Ojala Søderholm (aka DJ SOS), both were born in 1986 in north of Norway,[1] started off the first track for a school project.[1][2][3][5][6] After being told by the teacher they will score 4+ for one song, they eventually made their first CD Energized which consisted of 13 tracks using the software Dance eJay 3 and they scored 6 for the project.[6]

Thomas S. Nilse and Steffen Ojala Søderholm used the duo name Nightcore, “Nightcore means that we are the core of the night, so you’ll dance all night long”.[5] After their first CD released in 2002, Nightcore using more advanced software, released four more albums[5] including Summer Edition 2002 (top left), L’hiver (top right), Caliente (bottom left) and Sensaciòn (bottom right). The CDs were given to local DJs and whoever interested.[3]

Nightcore | Know Your Meme

Many fansites also mention the names of the two Norwegian lads (who would by now be nearly 30s) but not the high school project (perhaps they though it “uncool?”); I have wrongly made a non-PC assumption about the gender of the teacher, who could equally have been female.

I was a teenager once (though it was a long time ago!) in 1988/1989 when I was 16/17 (and also going through some bad mental health issues due to exam pressure), a young woman who was then the music teacher in my high school actively encouraged me to experiment with tape loops and some ancient analogue synthesiser to make acid house type sounds in free periods at sixth form (and I was not even studying music as A level subjects). They did not have computer based sequencers, those were not affordable to a high school music department in England.

She was trying to convince my parents to let me go on the then new sound engineering courses, but I would not have been able to get an education grant for them and they were in London 40km away and not many employers would give you a job, and my late father (who was a Malaysian Chinese) did not think there was any long term career future in arts/music compared to sciences.

Also In some ways I was trying to do stuff which “hadn’t yet properly been invented!”

In the end I still ended up having to go to University in London to study computers and electronic engineering (without any creative/multimedia element) and dropped out after two years. Were it not for the rave scene especially the more euphoric genres like happy hardcore I doubt I would have survived the 1990s.

I notice you are from Hong Kong, maybe Asian parents are marginally less strict and pushy nowadays but I don’t think they have changed all that much…

I also grew up during the first heyday of “Europop” and when the pop music and dance scenes first crossed over and have heard far worse “cheese” than that, and used to DJ happy hardcore. If I thought it was a particularly bad idea, I wouldn’t have linked the Dutch lads youtube to here.

I was genuinely curious about how this particular genre originated but I think I have worked it out now, there’s nothing bad about it, its simply a lot of younger people worldwide making the best of what resources they can get.

there is a common factor that the producers are in countries where young people are of high intelligence, have easy access to computers and a certain amount of tolerance from parents to “playing computer games with noisy soundtracks” but less for “going to nightclubs and taking drugs” – as parents would be about my age and might not want their kids to repeat “mistakes” they made in their youth 😉

BTW if you have access to Soundcloud and also like hardcore and faster trance you might like this dudes music

https://soundcloud.com/skyflightmusic