“Hardcore Soul 2.0” consists of a 20-minute-long mixtape collage of classic rave-traps, happy hardcore landscape, piano synths and saccharin outros; built up without the rhythm parts and manipulated as a sonic limbo filled by music that never quite starts and doesn’t ever drop. Nine videos, screened on old school Hantarex MGG television sets show footage of people queuing in front of a club on an endless loop, forever waiting to join the communal ritual of the rave. Based on this suspended state, Gabber Eleganza (aka Alberto Guerrini)’s comissioned audiovisual installation “Hardcore Soul 2.0” investigates these sound worlds in the liminal space of Großer Wasserspeicher. As a producer and active part of the community, the artist takes the audience back to the lifestyle, social codes, and behaviours as a pursuit of digital happiness in the pre-internet era. 

By presenting a historically subversive, energetic and progressive style through the nostalgic lens of the archive, Guerrini highlights moments of transition and new beginnings. We are each slowly emerging from our own personal purgatory after lockdown, but this return is marred with uncertainty and sentimental turmoil. People are in need of human contact but also very sensitive to the masses. “Hardcore Soul 2.0” expresses this physical and mental dissonance, while highlighting its fragility. That feeling between anxiety and frenzy that is created only in this moment of pandemic, is an emotion that ravers know well. “Hardcore Soul 2.0” attempts to recreate that tension between fear and euphoria that keeps a person in a state of limbo.