First Match by TNT

I've been really caught up for several months in club/rave music.  I've been a fan of acid and some trance—especially hard trance—for quite some time now, and have even posted a few links to some tracks of those genres here and there.  From there, although it took me a little while, it's not really a difficult jump to get into hardstyle, and... well, I've been really into hardstyle lately.  Hardstyle has since "sold out" if you will, but for the better part of a decade and a half or so—from right before the turn of the century until just a few years ago, there's a ton of good material.

Like much club music, only some of it is really memorable.  It's meant to serve a purpose, and that's to be really pumped up party music.  It isn't meant to be catchy, or musically very deep, necessarily.  And for the most part, it isn't.  There are a few exceptions, but they are really, truly exceptions.

Another thing that's kinda interesting is the geographic limitations of the style.  I can hardly hear tell of anyone who's anyone in the hardstyle scene who isn't either Dutch or north Italian.  It's like there's those two loci are the sum total of hardstyle, and almost everything comes from one of those two areas.  The DJs seem to be friends with each other too, based on how much collaboration, remixing, and whatnot that you see in the field.

Anyway, two of the biggest names in the field seem to be Technoboy (Christiano Giusberti) and Tuneboy (Antonio Donà) who have also had a long-running collaboration called TNT (literally, Technoboy 'N Tuneboy) and they've put out some of the best tracks in the genre.  They've also collaborated before, under different names (Tuneboy as K-Traxx, releasing tracks remixed by Technoboy, for instance).

Here's one, originally from 2002.  When it was first released, it came in two versions—the Technoboy version and the Tuneboy version, but it's since been re-released more than once, and it was even the subject of a remix competition, so it's been remixed a ton by a ton of artists (many of whom are only semi-pro at best.)  I've actually picked one of those remixes, but if you can get your hands on the original Tuneboy and Technoboy versions, they're pretty awesome in their simplicity.  The Geck-o remix is another of my favorites, that actually got a full release, in part because it mixes in part of the synthline of Animotion's "Obsession" to great effect, although in doing so, it somehow manages to mute the track's most iconic element, that weird electrified bass-line.  Here, the bass-line is cut and chopped a bit to give it more variation, but it still is the "star" of the track, certainly.