Nightcore and the Virtues of Virtuality

In her writings on the early punk scene, Helen Reddington coins the concept of a 'micro-

subculture', a small music scene within a broader subculture which is valuable because it

allows for the close study of musicians who might otherwise be erased from canonical

discourse. By examining the small-scale, in the form of bands and artists who might seem

insignificant, Reddington sheds light upon the treatment of women in both punk and the

wider music industry.1 Reddington's concept of the micro-subculture focuses upon

geographically local music scenes; however, George E. Marcus proposes that, beginning in

the twilight years of the twentieth century, ethnographic research (that is, the research of

people, their customs, and cultures) moves dramatically away from the single to the multi-

sited locale, which presumably becomes still more pronounced in the wake of the internet.2 In

this article I will explore 'nightcore', a previously academically unexamined music scene,

which exists entirely online and which operates as a multi-sited micro-subculture within the

broader context of internet-based electronic music. Nightcore is as remarkable for its DIY

attitude to deskilling electronic production, as for its virtual-centric, yet profoundly social

approach to track dissemination and community; by presenting it here, I hope to prompt

further research and discussion around both the genre itself, and, more broadly, online

musical communities and the work created within them.

Nightcore is a contested term, and the history of the scene and genre is multi-faceted.

The first use of the name seems to be in 2002 by Norwegian teenagers Thomas Nilsen and

1
Reddington, Helen. 2003. "‘Lady’ Punks in Bands: A Subculturette?" In The Post-Subcultures Reader,

by David Muggleton, 231-251. Oxford: Berg Publishers Reddington (2003): pp. 246-248.

2
Marcus, George E. 1995. "Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited

Ethnography." pp. 95-117. Annual Review of Anthropology (Annual Reviews) 24: pp. 96-101.

1
Steffen Soderholm, who released five albums of sped-up (and correspondingly pitched-up)

electronic trance under the band name Nightcore. With the exception of a few songs, Nilsen

and Soderholm’s work vanished almost without trace when their website was removed from

the internet in 2003.3 4 These extant songs began to appear on YouTube and now-defunct

peer-to-peer file-sharing client LimeWire, often soundtracking edits of footage from Japanese

animated cartoons.5 In around 2008 (the earliest uploader I have been able to locate is

'Maikel', who lists Nilsen and Soderholm as his sole musical influences on his Facebook

page), speed edits of other trance and Eurodance songs tagged as 'nightcore' began to appear

on YouTube, frequently still paired with images from Japanese animation.6 Nightcore speed

edits of trance songs continue to thrive as a genre, particularly on YouTube, but the term has

also since become significantly broader in its scope.

In 2011 a 'nightcore'-tagged, sped-up edit of a song by rock band Evanescence was

uploaded to YouTube, representing the first step of the genre into its stylistically omnivorous

present-day form.7 Although several early uploaders, including Maikel, consider non-trance

remixes of this kind to be 'fake nightcore', media platform Nest HQ (one of only a few

publications to have covered the scene) suggests that the broadening of the term was also a

crucial catalyst in attracting fans to the genre.8 Today, nightcore refers most broadly to the

3
Berry, Jonah. 2015. "Nest HQ's Guide to Nightcore." Nest HQ. Edited by Jonah Berry. August 7.

Accessed July 21, 2016. http://nesthq.com/nightcore.

4
Kirby. 2011. "What is Nightcore?" Nightcore Universe. August 8. Accessed July 25, 2016.

http://www.nightcoreuniverse.net/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=930.

5
Berry. 2015.

6
Maikel. 2016. "Maikel631: Amazing Nightcore and Trance." YouTube. July 25. Accessed July 25,

2016. https://www.youtube.com/user/Maikel6311.

7
Berry. 2015.

8
Ibid.

2
production of hyper-fast dance-pop music with pitched-up vocals which, crucially, is based

around tracks lifted wholesale from mainstream pop, rock, and electronic dance music or

EDM, timestretched and pitch-shifted upwards, often, but not always, with additional original

production.9 When I refer to nightcore throughout this article, then, I do so in this stylistically

broader sense; a living, breathing musical scene of several thousand individuals worldwide,

nightcore enthusiastically plunders and reworks contemporary popular music, blurs the

boundaries between its artists and its fans to the point of nonexistence, disseminates its

musical commodities almost exclusively online, and both relies upon and reflects back in its

sonic content the flow of information afforded by the internet.

Style, speed and society

'Nightcore was completely inevitable,' proposes Simon Whybray, DJ and host of monthly

internet broadcast Radio Jack, which specialises in nightcore and what Whybray refers to as

'hyper-pop', essentially an umbrella term for fast-paced, frenetic pop music. 'All human

beings have ever wanted to do is go faster'.10 Reflecting Reddington’s suggestion that a

micro-subculture can inform a researcher about broader musical and cultural trends, so

Whybray implies that nightcore, for all its niche appeal, is a product of a core societal trait.

Speed is central, even genre-defining, to nightcore; Los Angeles-based DJ, Ducky (one of

only two artists, along with DJ Fan Fiction, I was able to locate who regularly play nightcore

in offline locations) describes the genre in an interview with Dummy Magazine simply as

9
Harshman, Heath. 2015. "Why We Welcome Nightcore As The Next Breakout Genre." Dance Music

Northwest. July 25. Accessed July 25, 2016. http://dancemusicnw.com/why-we-welcome-nightcore-as-

the-next-breakout-genre/.

10
Whybray, in Berry. 2015.

3
'other people's songs that have been sped up...some people add additional production, extra

percussion, etc. but that’s the foundation'.11 She also suggests, however, that 'it’s going to

become a broader term and we’ll start seeing [...] original productions inspired by the sound

of nightcore in its current form.'12 The form to which Ducky refers is fast – usually upwards

of 160 beats per minute – with pitched-up vocals, and lead synths which are often delicate

and very high-pitched, counterbalancing the pumping bass and kick drum common to most

electronic dance music. The opening of EasyFun's 'EasyMix' is an excellent example, adding

fragile, hard-panned xylophone samples to Ariana Grande's 'Break Free' in its introduction

before being joined by more conventionally trance-like rhythmic supersaw synths (a tone

made up of several detuned sawtooth sound waves stacked together, frequently heard in

classic trance music).13 For all that nightcore borrows from EDM, then, with its fat kick-drum

tones and synthesiser stabs, there is often a sense of fragility and thinness particularly to the

genre’s lead melodic elements; Babeisland's 'all i need', Fan Fiction's 'f4k3', and Henrik The

Artist's 'Just Peachy' (an early example of the 'original nightcore' Ducky mentions) exemplify

this tendency.14 15 16 The overall effect falls somewhere between trance and pop, with an
11
Neiman, in Barker, Kristy. 2016. "Ducky: “Nightcore is the nicest scene I’ve ever participated in.”."

Dummy. March 23. Accessed July 25, 2016. http://www.dummymag.com/features/ducky-nightcore-

interview.

12
Ibid.

13
EasyFun. 2015. "easyFun - easyMix." SoundCloud. PC Music. June 30. Accessed July 25, 2016.

https://soundcloud.com/easyfun/easymix.

14
Babeisland. 2015. "all i need." SoundCloud. June 30. Accessed July 25, 2016.

https://soundcloud.com/babeisland/all-i-need.

15
Fan Fiction. 2016. "f4k3." SoundCloud. June 28. Accessed July 25, 2016.

https://soundcloud.com/fanfiction/f4k3.

16
Henrik The Artist. 2015. "Just Peachy." SoundCloud. November 14. Accessed July 25, 2016.

https://soundcloud.com/henrik-the-artist/just-peachy.

4
emphasis on high, bright treble frequencies which is presumably originally a product of

pitching up existing songs, but has become a feature of the genre in its own right, giving a

'sped-up' feel even to original elements of tracks added by the artist in question.

The centricity of speed to nightcore is multi-stranded, and understanding it within this

particular micro-subculture may shed light upon others for both their similarities and their

differences. Grafton Tanner writes at length in his book Babbling Corpse about the cultural

significance of the ‘vaporwave’ micro-subculture which, in a curious proto-reflection of

nightcore, is marked by the deconstruction of songs by slowing and pitching them down,

often using 1980s soft rock or easy-listening works as its source material rather than

mainstream contemporary pop, which gives a feel reminiscent of ‘muzak’, the bland

background music often heard in commercial and retail contexts. Vaporwave's purpose,

suggests Tanner, is 'to reframe muzak... to remind listeners of its omnipresence and,

therefore, to wake us up to the corporatist society in which we are trapped'.17 This rejection of

corporate ideology is also present in the independent, faceless, internet-based means by

which vaporwave is disseminated and shared.18 Tanner draws links between slowed-down

tracks and Derrida's concept of hauntology, the 'haunting' of the present by the past, which

vaporwave achieves by emphasising 'the eeriness of hauntological breakdown' through audio

glitches and altered sample rates.19 Nightcore is also marked by both of these latter

characteristics, but, because its source material is sped up rather than slowed down, it

possesses none of vaporwave's eeriness or muzak-like qualities. Where vaporwave evokes

unease and stasis, nightcore is frenetic, pulsing with forward motion, and often joyful,

17
Tanner, Grafton. 2016. Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts. London:

Zero Books: pp. 40-41.

18
Ibid.: p. 45.

19
Ibid.: pp. 10-12.

5
bearing a strong stylistic resemblance to the 1990s originals-based genre happy hardcore.20

What can vaporwave and nightcore’s approaches to speed editing tell us about their

relationship with broader society? Accelerationist philosophy holds that by speeding up and

saturating the uprooting and destructive processes of capitalist society, its systems will self-

destruct; by repurposing the tools of capitalism and embracing rapid technological change,

the status quo is turned upon itself. Vaporwave, in Tanner's words, 'mirror(s) the anticipation

and dread of the accelerating future', and positions late capitalism as 'a fantasy world where

life accelerates to the point of stasis';21 it is critical of the trappings of capitalism and the rapid

pace of their development. Nightcore seems almost uncritically accelerationist, both

temporally and ideologically, in comparison. Rejecting stasis entirely and emphasising

constant kinetic motion, broken up only by the soars and drops which philosopher Robin

James links to contemporary society’s valourisation of emotional and social resilience in

mainstream EDM-influenced pop, it recycles not long-forgotten adult contemporary and

advertorial music, but top 40 chart hits and viral underground dance tracks.22 YouTube

channel 'Pepsi Cola', which publicises music videos by emerging nightcore artists, outright

borrows its name, logo, and comments from its namesake's advertising campaigns, and does

so in an entirely straight-faced manner, without additional commentary or political overtones

(its comment history on both YouTube and SoundCloud is made up entirely of unedited Pepsi

slogans).23 If vaporwave dreads the accelerating advancement of late capitalism, on its

20
Berry. 2015 suggests that the two genres are often confused for one another.

21
Tanner. 2016: p. 48.

22
James, Robin. 2015. Resilience & Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism. London: Zero

Books: pp. 28-37.

23
'Pepsi Cola'. 2016. "Pepsi." SoundCloud. July 25. Accessed July 25, 2016.

https://soundcloud.com/not_pepsi; ‘Pepsi Cola’. 2016. "Pepsi Cola." YouTube. July 25. Accessed July

25, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxNBvCX1cy5f8whl07mRCIA.

6
surface nightcore seems to embrace it; as Whybray suggests, it is the musical outcome of the

human desire to 'go faster'.

Nightcore’s use of the corporate mainstream, as in accelerationist philosophy, can

also be read as strongly countercultural, and the genre's broader relationship with late

capitalism is more ambivalent than it may seem on the surface. Like vaporwave, nightcore is

distributed primarily through DIY online distribution platforms SoundCloud and Bandcamp,

almost always for free or otherwise pay-what-you-can, with little to no profit being made.

Sarah Thornton describes ‘subcultural capital’, the accumulation of relevant knowledge and

commodities within a given subcultural group, as key to raising an individual’s status within

that subculture, and suggests that even the most niche forms of this capital can often be

pragmatically converted into 'a variety of occupations and incomes'. At the time of writing,

however, it seems to be the case that few, if any, nightcore producers are receiving

occupational or financial benefits from their participation in the subculture, perhaps in part

because of the copyrighting implications that come from lifting source material wholesale

from existing tracks.24 It is worth noting also that nightcore's recontextualisation of its source

material is intended to be recognised as plagiaristic; a popular sentiment amongst

commenters and producers is that their nightcored tracks simply sound 'better sped up',

suggesting a breakdown between expert and amateur producer.25 Even the aforementioned

'Pepsi Cola' channel uses the corporation's words, imagery and name on its YouTube, but

does not place even third-party adverts, common to most YouTube videos, on the videos it

24
Thornton, Sarah. 1995. Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity: p.

203.

25
See Berry. 2015, Neiman in Barker. 2016, and descriptions to DJ Clickbait. 2016. "n3v3r f0rg3t u."

SoundCloud. June 11. Accessed July 25, 2016. https://soundcloud.com/djclickbait/n3ver-f0rg3t-u;

Imran Khan. 2014. "Fall Out Boy-Centuries (Sped Up To Right Amount)." YouTube. November 11.

Accessed July 25, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qzWRnlY0do for examples.

7
posts, setting it apart from the world’s one hundred largest corporate brands, all of which

have run ads on YouTube during the last year.26 Nightcore performs the removal and

reappropriation of musical and aesthetic source material from the hands of large-scale record

labels and music industry leaders, in a complicated entanglement of admiration and

disrespect; by examining the micro-subculture’s attitude to the capitalist system in which it

originates, we can identify nightcore enacting a literal seizure of the means of production,

turning the trappings of corporate ideology into a distorted, caricature-like version of itself by

pushing it to its fast-paced extreme.

Placing speed at the very centre of the genre's aesthetic markers also allows a low

barrier for entry into the scene as a producer. Since, as Ducky says, in its most basic form a

nightcore production is simply a sped-up and correspondingly pitched-up song, it can allow

young and inexperienced producers to be encouraged, viewed and treated as practitioners by

their peers, including those within the micro-subculture who are making more elaborate and

original productions; based on the overwhelmingly positive feedback simple speed-edited

nightcore tracks receive on social media, subcultural capital and status do not seem to be tied

exclusively to the addition of original compositional elements. Mike Challis advocates a

similar 'back to front' approach in formalised teaching of electronic music to non-musicians,

beginning with straightforward manipulation of pre-existing material before even beginning

to add original elements, and considers DJing even in its most basic form to be an

empowering creative act.27 Speeding up a track wholesale also permits the use of more basic

digital audio workstation software, used for editing and mixing tracks, than does adding

26
Youtube. 2016. Statistics. October 31. Accessed October 31, 2016.

https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/en-GB/statistics.html.

27
Challis, Mike. 2009. "The DJ Factor: Teaching Performance and Composition from Back to Front." In

Music Education with Digital Technology, by Pamela Burnard John Finney, 65-75. London:

Bloomsbury: p. 65.

8
original elements; the forum 'Nightcore Universe' proposes Audacity as a first tool, which is

both simple and open-source, meaning it can be obtained legally for free, lowering the barrier

to entry for the subculture still further.28 29 One result of this is that virtually all nightcore

fans, at least on SoundCloud, also appear to be nightcore producers themselves, posting their

own mixes of tracks as well as reposting those they have enjoyed by others.

The increase in pitch which is the most obvious side-effect of speeding up a nightcore

track is particularly noticeable in the context of vocals, since the recognisable formants

(prominent frequencies allowing identification of vowel sounds) of the voice become

distorted. David Feinberg et al. have shown in perceptual studies of vocal pitch that higher-

pitched voices tend to be associated with femininity and attractiveness, so one key aspect of

nightcore is that its vocals are by definition feminised, regardless of the gender of the source

material's original singer.30 The idea of femininity as default flies in the face of society at

large; Deborah Tannen has written at length about the perception of masculinity and

maleness as unmarked defaults, while femininity is always marked, in whatever form it

takes.31 Nightcore's manipulation of vocals into something always and invariably feminised

questions this, positioning itself as a polar opposite to the wider social default of masculinity.

The feminine as default also seems to spill over into the visual aesthetics and perception of
28
Maikel. 2010. "How to Nightcore a song! (NIGHTCORE TUTORIAL)." Nightcore Universe. May 8.

Accessed July 25, 2016. http://www.nightcoreuniverse.net/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=142.

29
Crook, James, Richard Ash, Roger Dannenberg, Benjamin Drung, Vaughan Johnson, Paul Licameli,

Leland Lucius, and Martyn Shaw. 2016. "Audacity: A free multi-track audio editor and recorder."

Sourceforge. January 20. Accessed July 25, 2016. https://sourceforge.net/projects/audacity/.

30
Feinberg, David R, Lisa M DeBruine, Benedict C. Jones, and David I Perrett. 2008. "The role of

femininity and averageness in aesthetic judgments of women’s voices.", 615-623. Perception

(PubMed) 4 (37): pp. 619-621.

31
Tannen, Deborah. 1993. "Marked Women, Unmarked Men.", 1-4. The New York Times Magazine,

June 20: pp. 1-4.

9
nightcore, as the 'album artwork' accompanying tracks is overwhelmingly in pale pastel

colours, and comments referring to nightcore tracks as 'cute', 'kawaii' and 'adorable' are

commonplace.32

Susana Loza refers to vocal manipulation in electronic music as a kind of 'techno-

transvestism', which questions the status quo because, in the words of Marjorie Garber, it

'denaturalizes, destabilizes, and defamiliarizes sex and gender signs'.33 Loza, applying Donna

Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto to electronic dance's manipulation of bodily signals, highlights

the gendered ambiguity which that manipulation can offer to a feminine subject, but she

questions Haraway's optimism that 'the erasure of embodiment will magically unite us in

universal understanding', considering the human-robot hybrid of the cyborg as more of an

aesthetic starting point for feminism than an end goal.34 Nightcore's refusal to devalue the

feminine does, however, seem to have had practical, real-world effects on the demographic of

those who produce it; of those artists who choose to reveal their genders, a startling number

are women, non-binary, or gender non-conforming, and it is telling that Ducky, perhaps the

most media-visible member of the scene, is female.35 In Tara Rodgers' Pink Noises, artists

Pamela Z and Beth Coleman both discuss the role of intimidation in keeping women out of

32
See Fan Fiction. 2015. "1 w4nt U 2 Kn0w." April 9. Accessed July 25, 2016.

https://soundcloud.com/fanfiction/1-w4nt-u-2-kn0w; Fan Fiction. 2015. "b3g1n 4g41n." SoundCloud.

March 10. Accessed July 25, 2016. https://soundcloud.com/fanfiction/b3g1n-4g41n; Ribb0n. 2015.

"≧◡≦." SoundCloud. November 6. Accessed July 25, 2016. https://soundcloud.com/ribb0n/alive;

Underdog. 2015. "internetparty & underd0g - home." SoundCloud. October 15. Accessed July 25,

2016. https://soundcloud.com/underd0ge/home; internetparty. 2015. "Last Time." SoundCloud. June 5.

Accessed July 25, 2016. https://soundcloud.com/internetparty/last-time for examples in both artwork

and comments.

33
Loza, Susana. 2001. "Sampling (hetero)sexuality: diva-ness and discipline in electronic dance music.",

349-357. Popular Music (Cambridge University Press) 3 (20): pp.354-355.

34
Ibid.: pp. 355-356.

10
the electronic music scene;36 37 by setting the initial bar for entry low, but offering space for

artistic development, positioning itself as a world away from the mainstream music industry,

and not only defaulting to but defining itself by femininity, while openly acknowledging and

deconstructing its own flawed and utopian existence within the 'real world' of late capitalism,

perhaps nightcore offers an alternative for individuals who may feel excluded from the wider

world of electronic music-making.

Nightcore and internet micro-media

Staley Sharples of PressPlay labels nightcore 'the first music movement to be entirely formed

online';38 although vaporwave hit a flurry of activity around 2014, before the current era of

pop-influenced nightcore I am discussing here, the genre's roots, name, and basic speed-

editing production techniques do date back to the early 2000s, positioning it at the very least

amongst the earliest genres of internet-based music.39 40 Regardless of the finer details of the

accuracy of Sharples's statement, she nonetheless highlights something vital to understanding

35
Agzarian, Nina. 2016. "#WCW: Ducky." NLV Records. January 13. Accessed July 25, 2016.

http://www.nlvrecords.com/wcw-ducky/.

36
Rodgers, Tara. 2010. Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound. North Carolina: Duke

University Press: pp. 85-86.

37
Ibid.: p.199.

38
Sharples, Staley. 2016. "PressPlaylist: Surati's NXC Sounds." PressPlay. April 29. Accessed July 25,

2016. https://wearepressplay.com/2016/04/29/pressplaylist-suratis-nxc-sounds/.

39
Harper, Adam. 2014. "The online underground: A new kind of punk?" Resident Advisor . September

22. Accessed July 25, 2016. https://www.residentadvisor.net/features/2137.

40
Berry. 2015.

11
the nightcore micro-subculture, namely its simultaneous emphasis on community and its

relationship with the internet. Despite nightcore's fast pace and pounding rhythms rendering it

ideal music for dancing, according to Ducky there are very few DJs playing nightcore in

physical club locations, and, with few exceptions, the only place to hear nightcore is online.41

This is arguably unusual even in electronic genres with a strong online presence; Daniel

Allington, Byron Dueck and Anna Jordanous suggest that particular cities occupy positions of

significant privilege amongst SoundCloud producers at large, in part due to the influence of

live DJing.42 The nightcore scene is notable, in contrast, for the fact that live shows take place

almost exclusively via online radio, such as Simon Whybray's popular Radio Jack, and

community-run station Datafruits.43 44

I sat in on the Non Stop NXC show on Datafruits on 16th July 2016, showcasing seven

nightcore producers from around the world. While this was only a single event, and a great

deal of nightcore community activity takes place across less temporally immediate online

spaces, such as SoundCloud comments or the Nightcore Universe forums, I raise it here

because it encapsulated particularly well both nightcore’s reliance on internet

communication, and how the genre’s erasure of physical embodiment can, as Loza and

Haraway suggest, act as a jumping-off point for community inclusivity and, additionally,

break down the barrier between producer and consumer. The Non Stop NXC show was billed

for three hours, although in practice it overran by almost two hours (presumably permitted

41
Barker, Kristy. 2016. "Ducky: “Nightcore is the nicest scene I’ve ever participated in.”." Dummy.

March 23. Accessed July 25, 2016. http://www.dummymag.com/features/ducky-nightcore-interview.

42
Allington, Daniel, Byron Dueck, and Anna Jordanous. 2015. "Networks of value in electronic music:

SoundCloud, London, and the importance of place." 211-222. Cultural Trends 24 (3): pp. 218-220.

43
NTS Live. 2016. "Non Stop Pop." NTS Live. July 25. Accessed July 25, 2016.

http://www.nts.live/shows/jack.

44
Miller, Tony. 2016. Datafruits FM. July 25. Accessed July 25, 2016. http://datafruits.fm/.

12
partly because of the non-physical nature of the 'venue') and was advertised online in multiple

timezones, in acknowledgement of the fact that both listeners and DJs were scattered around

the globe.45 Despite the transparently non-local nature of the show and the website on which

it was hosted, the experience was a profoundly social one: Datafruits, though first and

foremost an internet radio station, uses only a thin bar at the top and bottom of its layout to

display, respectively, information about the station and current show; the entirety of the rest

of the window is a chatroom, which fills up on the right-hand side with nicknames of

attendees (peaking at around thirty during my visit) and with a continuous flow of reactions

appearing in the larger left-hand window. Throughout the stream, several attendees

mentioned the contexts and timezones in which they were listening; one was cycling back

from a clubnight at 7am in Taipei, another was listening at 7pm and had ordered pizza,

another had arrived home from college and was doing lab homework while listening; several

alluded to dancing in their homes.

The mood was consistently high, and every new track was received with effusive

compliments: 'THANK YOU FOR PLAYING THIS SONG', 'yesyesyesyes', 'this is wild!', as

users posted rhythmic animated gifs, mostly of people and cartoon characters dancing, in the

chat at regular intervals throughout the show. DJs tended to remain in the chat throughout

their sets, providing commentary, and linking to tracks they had remixed; a particularly

noteworthy quality of the event was that there was no sense of any division between

producers and fans. At one point a new user voiced nervousness about beginning to DJ

themselves, and was roundly encouraged by the other attendees of the chat. The virtual nature

of the medium, while clearly at odds with the largely domestic locations in which the music

was being received, also aided in entirely breaking down the barrier between artist and

listener, in a manner which would be impossible to replicate in a physical location and

https://twitter.com/nonstopnxc/status/754117039921385472.

13
perhaps requires the sense of disembodiment permitted by an online space. It is worth noting,

too, that the online location of the show allowed the DJs an enthusiastic audience which they

might have been unable to garner in a physical location, bringing together a physically

fragmented group of nightcore fans into a single virtual node.

Internet radio and online communities such as Datafruits, Soundcloud, and the

Nightcore Universe forum represent what Sarah Thornton refers to as 'micro-media', which

she defines as distinct from, and often resistant to, the mass media which is still relied upon

by the culture industry at large.46 Although Daniel Miller and Done Slater agree that internet

micro-media act as a counter to the mainstream to a certain extent, they also point out that

they are not apart from mainstream media, but rather a continuous extension of them; not in

polar opposition to offline cultures or subcultures, but in a state of entanglement with them.47

In this respect, disseminating nightcore through internet micro-media makes perfect sense on

a structural level, since both simultaneously position themselves as an alternative to the

mainstream culture industry, and rely upon it for their very existence, in nightcore's case

outright plundering it for source material. In an interview with Dummy Magazine,

mononymous producer Liz offers an insight as to the motivation behind this seeming

dichotomy; although she refers to vaporwave here, the sentiment is also wholly applicable to

nightcore:

The digital rebels. The ones who 'steal' others' music, just to manipulate it and chop it
up a bit. That is so fucking punk...It's like how punk bands only knew how to play power
chords. It's brilliant. Vaporwave isn't lazy, and neither is punk. I think that these two genres
of music are parallel.48

46
Thornton. 1995: pp. 158-160.

47
Miller, Daniel. Slater, Don. 2000. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg: pp. 5-6.

48
Thomas, Russell. 2013. "Next: New Generation." Dummy. November 15. Accessed July 21, 2016.

http://www.dummymag.com/features/next-saint-pepsi-and-new-generation.

14
 The idea of nightcore as an offshoot of punk or post-punk may sound farfetched, but

the scene's attitude to creativity recalls the community mentality of K Records, or late 1970s

band the Desperate Bicycles' rallying cry 'It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it'.49 50 The

virtual nature of nightcore's community is also reflected in the entirely digital technologies

used to make it; even when a producer moves beyond the simplicity of Audacity and on to

more complex tools, professional-standard audio editing software such as Ableton Lite is

available at a low price but, crucially, is also frequently pirated, a practice which Ableton's

CEO Gerhard Behles even acknowledges 'has benefits...it helps spread the program

tremendously'.51 52 A producer without disposable income may, then, be nonetheless able to

make electronic music, since hardware other than a laptop (which 93% of teenagers and

young people already have access to) or other computer is not required.53 Physical

instruments and formal training in production are unnecessary and not expected, and

numerous tutorials are available for novice producers to access online; a search for 'Ableton

tutorial' on YouTube brings up no fewer than four hundred thousand results.54 This is not only

applicable to the nightcore scene, and indeed a novice electronic producer in any genre may

49
See Spencer, Amy. 2005. DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture. London: Marion Boyars: pp. 232-235.

50
Reynolds, Simon. 2005. Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984. London: Penguin Random

House: pp. 30-31.

51
Ableton. 2016. "Products: Live Lite." Ableton Live. July 25. Accessed July 25, 2016.

https://www.ableton.com/en/products/live-lite/.

52
Cardiner, Brock. 2014. "Ableton CEO Gerhard Behles Talks Killing Your Darlings, Piracy and More."

High Snobiety. Edited by Jeff Carvalho. October 14. Accessed July 25, 2016.

http://www.highsnobiety.com/2014/10/14/ableton-ceo-gerhard-behles-interview/.

53
Madden, Mary, Amanda Lenhart, Maeve Duggan, Sandra Cortesi, and Urs Gasser. 2013. Teens and

Technology 2013. Report, The Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University,

Massachusetts: Pew Research Center: p. 2.

15
make use of these accessible virtual resources, but examining how they operate in this small

micro-subcultural context acts as a useful illustration which may, as Reddington suggests, be

extrapolated to future research. The centring of the virtual in the nightcore community not

only permits a broader global reach, allowing a small-scale micro-subculture a sense of

community, but reduces the capital, or resources, required to participate in a style of

production with an already low barrier to entry.

Conclusions and further research

This is only an initial investigation into a burgeoning micro-subculture which, despite its

decade-long history and roots as, perhaps, the first internet-born music scene, remains

completely untouched in academia. Much of the nightcore scene's ethos, embracing

amateurism and fiercely independent in its models of distribution and performance, borrows

from earlier DIY subcultures such as punk, but it is also wholly grounded in contemporary,

neoliberal late capitalism, where the physical and digital are blurred to the point of

invisibility across multiple sites of reception, and subcultural producers possess an

ambivalent relationship with the mainstream music industry which is at once reverent and

irreverent, reliant and resistant, born out of affection and enacted through outright cultural

theft. Nightcore exists as a musical manifestation of what James Bridle and Bruce Sterling

name the 'New Aesthetic', which, particularly in reference to visual art, concerns 'an eruption

of the digital into the physical', and focuses above all upon the penetration of the digital into

54
YouTube. 2016. Search: Ableton Tutorial. July 25. Accessed July 25, 2016.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ableton+tutorial.

16
the everyday.55 56 It is perhaps no coincidence that nightcore can be defined chiefly by its

speed and by its relationship with the world wide web; the internet has rendered the flow of

information we live with day-to-day fast-paced enough that geographical distance between

individuals is stripped of its importance. Nightcore is both reliant upon that rapid

informational flow for its source material and community growth, and mirrors it in the

frenetic pace of its sound.

Further research might adopt a more in-depth ethnographic approach to nightcore,

interviewing individuals about their involvement in the scene and perhaps creating music in

the genre as a participatory element of research, since the boundary between producers and

observers in nightcore seems to be almost non-existent. I have adopted an observation-based

approach here due mainly to a desire to gain as broad a view of the scene as possible before

future, deeper research is conducted, but suggest that a great deal could be gained from a

closer understanding of the lived experiences and insights of enthusiasts who are active

within the scene. Although I have touched on the matter here, I would suggest that more in-

depth examination of nightcore from an accelerationist perspective is also required; speed,

technology, and an ambivalent relationship with late capitalism are central both to nightcore's

aesthetic, and to accelerationist philosophy, and it would seem remiss not to explore the

former more deeply using the latter as a framework. Further consideration of the feminist,

queer, and otherwise politically resistant potential of nightcore is also a possible avenue for

further research; the scene is replete with producers whose identities are often marginalised in

mainstream music, but who are sufficiently influential to steer the scene. What nightcore can

teach us about contemporary micro-subcultures, amateur music production, and community

in the era of the New Aesthetic remains to be seen, but it nonetheless appears a fruitful site
55
Bridle, James. 2011. "The New Aesthetic: Waving at the Machines." Web Directions South. Sydney.

56
Sterling, Bruce. 2012. "An Essay on the New Aesthetic." Wired. April 2. Accessed July 25, 2016.

http://www.wired.com/2012/04/an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic/.

17
for further exploration. Nightcore appears to rejoice in its physically disparate producer-

consumers' ability to come together online at all hours of the day or night, to share what they

have made regardless of experience or skill, to develop their production in a positive and non-

judgmental environment, and to negotiate in a public space their complex relationships with

contemporary society, corporate industry, and popular music. Far from being hindered by the

absence of a geographical centre, the nightcore scene has made a virtue of its own virtuality.

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