INTERVIEW: XXHARDBIT3S

UNITED JUMP FRONT RAVE WARRIOR

XXHARDBIT3S is one of the more exciting names to emerge from the post-pandemic, post-whatever rave circuit. For one thing, there is the artist’s United Jump Front crew, who are attempting to revive the lost art of jumpstyle, a European subculture based around cartoonish hard dance fusions and almost folkish footwork moves. Then there’s the XXHARDBIT3S tracks. They range from rap-inflected breakcore to washy jungle to Jersey club to something like “KEEP MY HEART OPEN!,” a song that blew my whole dome last fall when I saw XXHARDBIT3S play it at a Helltekk rave in a forest somewhere on the outskirts of New York City. 

I recently met up with the New York-based, Jersey-reared DJ and producer at Caffeine Underground in Bushwick, a remarkable coffee shop with a funky punky kind of vibe. I felt like I was in a ‘90s sit-com set in the East Village. It turns out that XXHARDBIT3S throws parties at Caffeine Underground, too, monthly on Sunday afternoons. I’ve heard reports of ravers playing Jenga. We got some coffee (on the house) and sat down for a nice chat. 

I want to know more about United Jump Front.

Yeah, United Jump Front is crazy, crazy stuff. My friends Kate Slauter and Jess XO were two of the only people I really knew when I started coming out here. From the moment I met Jess we were very locked into, like, let’s do music stuff. One day Jess was like, Yo, you gotta hear this shit called jumpstyle, and I was instantly like, Oh this is the best shit I've ever heard. There's a weird phenomenon I've noticed with jumpstyle and hard house where people will hear it and they'll say, you know, when I got into gabber and hardcore, I was really looking for something that sounded like this. Not what I actually ended up getting into. And that was exactly what happened to me the first time I heard it. 

How would you describe jumpstyle?

Jumpstyle is a genre inspired by hard house from the early 2000s that focuses on slower, bouncier sounds than what is typically expressed in hardcore music. It’s also a form of dancing with a lot of jumping and kicking moves. So me and Jess would talk about it. It was our own little thing. Then one weekend I was playing some random show and I was like, Nah, I'm going to do a jumpstyle set. I was kind of treating it like it would be funny, but I did it, and it hit stupid hard. 

And then suddenly Jess is introducing me to all these DJs, like, Oh this is Jules, Speed Limit, she fucks with jumpstyle, too. And suddenly we're all dawgs just on that alone. This is April of 2023. Then I threw a jumpstyle night, and I think nobody's going to come, so I picked a small venue, Bar Freda in Ridgewood, it caps out at like 70 people, and the room fee is $100. It's me, Jess, Speed Limit and Justin, Fortified Structures, from Helltekk. And the whole time I'm opening I'm like, Oh nobody's going to be here. There’s, like, five people. By the end of my set from the front to the back the room is filled with kids. I played like four remixes of “I’m Blue” by Eiffel 65. 

Amazing.

Six-ish months later, Jess sent me a demo of a jumpstyle song she had been working on, and it was just insanely good. It made me want to try making it, so then I hit back with one I was working on. And then we were like, Yo we should make a jumpstyle tape. Namely, we made “My Jumps,” which is a jumpstyle flip of “My Humps,” which was such a fun moment to me because when that song came out every DJ we knew was playing it. After that song, I was like, we have to release this tape. At first I was calling it some bullshit like X2 Jump Crew or something. And Jess said, you know, a huge part of jumpstyle is that the main label that pushed it was called Jumping Is Not a Crime, because jumpstyle shows used to happen outside at parks, just some guys with a speaker. They'd plop that shit in the middle of a circle of people and they would start doing dance battles. 

Right. 

And police would come and shut them down because there would be a hundred people in the park. So we took influence from that, but instead of protesting, we act like it’s a weapon, like we’re this militant force of jumpstylers. We call it the jump offensive and all of our shows are called strikes because we're making an attack on wherever we're at. Being from Jersey, the dance culture has to be an accessory to what we're doing. Jumpstyle is about the dancing, knowing the dances, being able to do all your combos, that's a whole part of the culture and the music and I refused to do a label or a crew where we weren't giving a shit about that.

I spent every day up until the release of the first tape learning how to do jumpstyle and every week I still practice jumpstyle dances because I'm not going to run this label and not know how to do these dances. And that was when I started finding people who had been coming to New York raves for years who had never talked about how in 2015 they were pro hard jumpers—they would send me their YouTube channels. Suddenly, all these kids were learning how to do jumpstyle. Now, the venue shows do well, which is crazy.  

And then you’re also doing Sunday afternoon parties at this place. This spot really reminds me of the kind of coffee shop you might’ve seen in the ‘90s or maybe still in the Midwest. What time do you start your Sunday events here?

We start at 12. Yeah, 12 to 3. 

And ravers are straight up playing Jenga? 

Yo, hell yeah. It kind of feels like a book club. There are people who come to every single one, every once in a while there's new people that will come through who haven't been to it yet and it's really more of a word-of-mouth thing. I only post about it a little bit. It becomes more of a thing of just, like, these people are actually getting to know each other and not just all sitting there listening to the same music. 

Do they dance at all? 

Yeah, they dance a little bit. I mean, there's not that much space with the tables, but we make it work. There have been kids in here hakking and getting down real heavy at 12 in the afternoon. It’s not ticketed or anything, so all the normal people that come through are sitting kind of watching a bunch of us freaks be really into this shit at like 12 p.m. on a Sunday. 

Once you get enough caffeine in the ravers they're gonna dance a little bit. 

Exactly.

You were just in Atlanta last night?

Yeah I was. 

What was that like? 

It was cool. You know, I lived in the south for a bit. I lived in Florida and Atlanta, between both places, for a year or two. There's something about the south that's always just a little fried. Everybody's just a little crazy in a different way. I definitely felt that at the show. 

Is there a vital rave scene in most big cities now?

It's starting to feel that way. There is a scene for kids like us in most places at this point, which is interesting. Even two years ago it really wasn't like that. I think a lot of the more fashion-adjacent kids have picked up on it as something they're trying to add into their aesthetic encampment. There's all these different types of fashion kids. A lot of them are into SoundCloud rap. Fake punks, real punks, whatever. A lot of the newer fashion shit really uses rave stuff to the max. A lot of that Y2K-adjacent sentimentality seems to coincide with rave stuff. 

There's the real life component, which moves at a certain pace, and then there's the online component, where the music I assume moves a bit faster. 

Yeah, of course, and especially these days. I was one of those kids that was like, Oh I'm a nerd, I play video games, I do math. I don't listen to music, that's, like, art stuff. I do nerd stuff. But I found out about vaporwave and that changed my whole life. That very specific period of the internet, like 2013 through 2015. And so watching vaporwave evolve over time, it had so many different variations even between 2015 to 2020. And the way that space exists now is completely different. 

It seems like some people now use the term vaporwave as shorthand for any kind of ‘80s or ‘90s aesthetics.

Now, the word itself means too many different things, depending on who you ask, which is kind of what happened with the word rave. You see a lot of these fashion-adjacent kids, right. They'll be throwing, they'll call them raves, but for me and my friends in the underground rave sector, we just call them parties. And this is something that I spent a long time gaining an understanding of from talking about with Justin, Fortified Structures. True raves are a free party, a renegade out in the woods where people can come and go as they please. You just have to be about it and know how to find it. 

But shows that are happening in venues where kids got to pay 20, 25 bucks—those are parties. You have to market them. They have a whole set of things you have to do. You have to make a certain amount of money. You're in it for different things when you're throwing a venue show like that. We have our dickheads of rave that will be like, Nah, don't go to that show, that's some fake bullshit, you gotta pull up to this one, this is the right type of shit. Underground scenes kind of rely on that. Punks will always act like punks and be dicks about everything and make their statements about things, complain about certain shows.

Yeah, that can give these scenes some kind of meaning. 

People are looking for spaces to be themselves. In order to do that, you kind of need to make sure you don't tell the wrong dickhead that will show up and piss off a lot of those people. 

So you started making music as XXHARDBIT3S in 2021?

Yeah about 2021. I had been making music for a few years before that, doing ambient music that was like, baby's first synthesizer. I made shoegaze and stuff.

What drew you to rave? 

You know, I was into lo-fi house for a minute because it had co-opted a lot of the same aesthetics and sentimentalities of vaporwave. I was getting towards the end of being a goofy dipshit teenager and I was working two jobs and I was just tired. I needed digestible music. A year after that, I saw the Peshay Studio Set on the YouTube algorithm, which was like a late ‘90s jungle set. I didn't know that technically counted as drum and bass or whatever, so I didn't know what to look up to find more music like that, so I literally downloaded the tracklist from the Peshay Studio Set and a few other songs that were popping up while I was downloading those. And I basically only DJ’d those songs for four months in my room alone. Because I thought it was the coolest shit I had ever heard. 

And early music you made under your current name was inspired by that sort of late ‘90s jungle, but not just that? 

It’s like, alright, I find out that this stuff is called jungle, drum and bass, so naturally my blogwave music brain is like, Okay, we're gonna go look this up on Bandcamp. And then I'm finding breakcore, the newer stuff that was all Jet Set Radio adjacent. Stuff like Dazegxd, like yesterdayneverhappened, and then the more anime side of stuff, the atmospheric drum and bass stuff that was getting called breakcore at that time, right around when Covid started.

To me this is such a generational difference—that video game and anime influence, that's such a major entryway for people to find music. 

There’s something that kind of started in Tumblr, mainly, and eventually progressed to TikTok and Instagram—these aesthetic fandoms became a huge thing. And everybody had their aesthetics that they really rocked with. They wouldn't use any other word, they'd be like, This is my aesthetic, right?

The full package.

Yeah, where it's the music you listen to, the stuff you watch on TV, your favorite movies, the clothes you wear, your favorite colors, everything grouped into one big word. Like, Y2K futurism that was a big one, it was the defining aesthetic fandom of music from 2019 to probably now, still, I guess. It was like, Oh you really like Jet Set Radio, you really like Sonic 2006, and you wear Koss sport clip headphones because you're cool, you know, and even though they're $10 headphones everybody on Reddit says they still sound pretty good, if you think about it, because it's just plastic and you get straight to the speaker. You have a Sony CD Walkman for three CDs that are all breakcore.

When I see the lineups at the parties you play, it doesn't seem that hyper-dialed, it seems a bit more eclectic. 

Yeah, I think that's because there's the kids that were gonna get in that way and then the kids that were gonna start from randomly finding some ‘90s shit. That was kind of more where I came in. The real nerds who become aware of the established culture of rave, they're gonna enter in on the other side. The intersection is more kind of in the punk sector where everybody's really serious about graffiti, one in every three is a skateboarding nerd, everybody's wearing military surplus because it's fire.

But then it sometimes ends up being all encapsulated by one big tent genre, like breakcore or emo or shoegaze.

That was because of TikTok or Instagram, they need one word, they can't promote a whole set of phrases, they need one word to attach to it. Breakcore became this word for really atmospheric drum and bass sounds, when before it was Doormouse, Venetian Snares—really nerdy, aggressive breakbeat music. 

Your discography is somewhat varied. 

I had a very unplanned level of attention when I started producing as XXHARDBIT3S, my second song ever was this track called “prsm transformation,” It's my most popular song, numbers-wise, that I've ever made.

Was TikTok a part of that?

Yeah. It was the second song with a breakbeat I had ever made. It was me learning how to use FL Studio. It uses samples from a Sailor Moon soundtrack, very anime vibes, whatever. I put it out, I go to bed, I wake up and the next day it has three thousand plays on SoundCloud and I have all these DMs. People thought I was a secret second account for a producer that already existed or something. So, a very sudden large amount of attention. At that point I didn't know what the current wave of breakcore was. I really only knew about ‘90s jungle. 

You’ve released a lot of music since then.

So, that song comes out, I was calling it jungle. Because to me, I was just doing my take on jungle. I was like, Oh, let me bring in these sounds from rap music. Because I'd always really connected with rap. So I was trying to throw in stuff that I'd heard from trap music at the time. And then I come out with that song and everybody's saying I make breakcore. And I'm like, what the hell is that? And so I think a lot of my early sound was me being told a lot of things, and not really being sure like how much I had to listen to it. 

I definitely folded into that breakcore sphere for a bit. The producers you meet, the scene you end up in, is always going to change how you do things. It took me a while to get back to the sound I wanted to actually do myself because I was just too busy listening to what a lot of other people were saying around me. Later on, I did start making more what I wanted to make, which was jungle and hardcore with that rap and trap influence. But very seriously doing it in a way to adhere to those genres. 

That “KEEP MY HEART OPEN!” cut, I first heard that at a Helltekk rave, actually, and that was the track that made me be like, Okay, there's a new rave language being spoken here.

So you were at the forest. 

Yeah. 

That was the first time I ever played that song. Like, ever. And I had made it two weeks before that in the Denver Airport when I was trapped there for like two and a half days. 

Amazing. 

It's crazy that you were there. That is like one of my favorite shows I've ever played. 

That was a real moment for me when you dropped that tune, some of the samples made me think about Jersey club. You’re from Jersey, right? You fuck with Jersey club?

Yeah, of course. I'm a film and video head first. When I was a kid, I got really into making gaming YouTube videos, and it snowballed into me becoming a professional video editor. And I was in high school on Fiverr getting paid to make trickshot montages and stuff for YouTubers. Towards the end of my time in high school and the start of me going to college, I was freelancing filming music videos for like Jersey Club rappers and stuff. 

Oh, wow. 

And that was how I had learned about Jersey Club and really got into it, because you cannot film with those rappers and not know the dances, not know how to talk shop. You have to understand what they're doing to be able to film those videos and do it in a way that makes it fit in with the rest of what's going on in that culture. I was in the Jersey Club culture. It was a very big part of where I was spending my time for a few years of my life and it was very formative for me.

You know, I'm Indian, but I never really spent a major part of time in India or anything. A lot of my family grew up in New Rochelle and Jackson Heights, Queens. My grandpa ran a business in the fashion district. I'm born and raised in Jersey. Jersey is kind of where I have all my born-and-raised culture. There are a lot of Indians in Central New Jersey. When people try to talk to me about where I'm from, what I'm about from a cultural sense—like, yeah, I'm Indian, but really, it's about being from Jersey first and foremost. I really lived the Jersey experience. I dealt with all those white guys who were like, Jersey's the home of rock and roll.

Do you fuck with Springsteen? 

No, I don't fuck with Springsteen. Contrary to popular belief, everybody from Jersey does not have to fuck with Springsteen. 

XXHARDBIT3S on SoundCloud and Instagram and Bandcamp and Twitter

(Photo by Zippeee)