Soulwax bring New Beat back to life

Soulwax are resurrecting a now-defunct but highly influential dance music genre for a two-part compilation, reports Easy Branches. This Is Belgium sees the Belgian band’s offshoot, Radio Soulwax, present an audio/visual history of the country’s New Beat scene from the late 80s. The compilation charts the cultural and social history of a localised scene whose influence has since spread far and wide. A regional dance music curio similar in a way to Italy’s Cosmic disco scene, New Beat saw DJs take popular tracks of the time and slow them down, often playing 45rpm records at 33rpm, pitched up to +8 on the turntable. Like Cosmic, the wrong speed aspect gave New Beat an otherworldly edge: something is up with these records but it can be difficult to pinpoint what that is, if you don’t know they’re actually being played wrong. Kicks become thuds, claps become clanks, and every vocal seems wretched from the bowels of hell. Visually New Beat may be plastered in smiley faces, but musically it’s threatening – and a little bit scary. Slowing down acid and techno records made the sounds heavier and the atmosphere darker, and it also chimed with the emerging industrial/EBM scene of the time. This dark, powerful aesthetic would be seminal in defining the techno that came from northern Europe in the 1990s.