- "It's a pure form of love." The hardcore artist talks about collecting ephemera from rave zines, working in high fashion and his love for the gabber community.
- Alberto Guerrini, AKA Gabber Eleganza, has made a name for himself as a hardcore and gabber DJ, as well as being a fervid documenter of the culture that surrounds those sounds. Growing up in Italy, he started going to raves at a club called Number One Hardcore, before eventually travelling to the Netherlands with his parents' blessing and starting to DJ himself.
Guerrini's love of hardcore spilled over into a Tumblr blog he started in 2011, a project that aggregated the rave zines, photos and stories he collected from spending time in the gabber community. The goal of the project, he says in this interview, was to build up anthropological dialogues on the "sonic landscape and aesthetic of the hardcore continuum." The online compendium contains amazing pieces of hardcore ephemera: clippings of Soviet-era rave zines, letters ex-ravers sent to the hardcore community from jail and Guerrini's own appendices providing context around the global subculture.
Much of this archival work made its way into Hardcore Soul, a photography book Guerrini published with artists Ewen Spencer and Mark Leckey, which traces the similarities and relationships between hardcore and the UK's Northern soul movement. He discusses this and more—including his label Never Sleep and his work within fashion and art—in this conversation with Chloe Lula. Listen to the episode in full.