the history of hardstyle?

[Col]

how long as this genre being around?

ive heard a very similar collection of tracks (in terms of arrangement, and general use of sounds) on a cd my mate brought back from europe about 4 years ago. at the time i just thought of it as hard trance, although now im not so sure infact a few of the tracks from that very cd had being played by mark eg, and m-zone.

[acid-project]

init old skool gabba being played @ the wrong speed ?
sounds like chosen few to me !

[Col]

init old skool gabba being played @ the wrong speed ?
sounds like chosen few to me !

yeah there does seem to be a massive gabba influence within the music.

its like gabba meets hard trance, for me anyway.

[mattshephard]

innit, check some of the early dance pollutions and red alerts from 98/99... some class early forms of hardstyle on there

[Voorheez]

Yeah it was sort of a gradual evolution, hard trance started to get harder and the gabba influences slowly came in. Q-Dance in Holland were (I beleive) the first to actually name it hardstyle, and it grew from there. They've always had different genre labels to us though, i'm surprised that it took off here - I went a few years back, at the height of the Scot Project era to Amsterdam, and all the hard trance was labeled hard house there. I guess they never had hard house there (lucky bastards).

Of course now that hardstyle has become quite tightly defined in it's own right, you can look back and pick out records that you might have called hardstyle if the defintion had been around then, but i'd personally say that that hardstyle as a defined genre has been around for about 2 years.