Watch: Iberia “Glide”

18 Feb 2014 — Lukas Dubro

"Everyday" by Swedish pop duo Iberia was one of my favourite music videos of last year, with its used footage-driven rave atmosphere. We see some skinhead hardcore fans hanging out at a rave event, taking group pictures, smoking, talking, walking or putting lipstick on. People who know hardcore will be missing one thing: the dance moves. As a concession, we get a lesson in hardcore fashion style, since the camera is paying a lot of attention to their outfits: You get close ups from their futurstically coloured Nike Airmax sneakers, their camouflage pants, the tags on their jackets and sweaters and other small accesoires. So at the end, everyone will be abled to recognize a hardcore kid in a club.

The clip is one further example of the appropriation of the sound and style of the 90s rave culture in contemproray music. The music of Canadian counter culture icon Grimes is only the most well-known instance. Even magazine Electronic Beats – famous for its conversations with grandfathers of pop and rock – put German mainstream rave legend H.P. Baxxter on the cover. And even the Berlin underground has started to adapt, re-discovering the sweat pants and bomber jackets so signifying for early Dutch hardcore. Just go to any Janus or Creamcake party at expat stronghold Chesters and you'll understand. In a recent interview with Berlin's "The One-Hit Parade", Chesters regular M.E.S.H. bluntly admitted that he's not only listening to and DJing 90s Dutch dance underground tracks, but that the music's samples also serve as his own work's basis. His reappropriation goes as far as using similar software synthesizers for his productions.

It's still not very clear where and when this whole rave revival started. But it certainly grew over the past two years. One of the first artists referencing 90s rave was of course UK producer Zomby with his 2008 EP Where Were You in 92?. Zooming out to get a bigger picture, one cannot deny that the 90s are back on a grand scale. Further examples include vaporwave, the revival of R'n'B (and even Usher!), or the latest album by sound visionist Oneohtrix Point Never. So maybe the hardcore's resurrection is just one further aspect within a larger development.

Even though the latest video for Iberia's new song "Glide" doesn't picture skinheads, we still get to see sweatpants and some branded gloves. We're also confronted with an inverted colour effect, a visual technique that was as well popular some 20 years ago and that's furthermore quite reminiscent of the ghostly 3D animations that Oneohtrix Point Never employed on his tour last fall. The typo used for the Gothenburg/Berlin duo's name tag, blinking up several times in the video, may be viewed as a reference to the vaporwave movement. Once again unearthing that certain decade by means of their visuals, Iberia re-emphasise how serious they are – and we all should be? – when it comes to bringing back the ghosts of our childhood and youth. Watch the video for "Glide" below.

Iberia's self-titled debut full-length is out on Hybris in March.