Octa Sheffner on behalf of More ？Sugar, 2025/08/02
In the mid 2010’s one man called Myles Dunhill, aka Treasure Hunt, started a label called Pedicure Records.
This is not an accurate retelling of why he started it. The only thing that matters is that back in those days a nightcore revival was ongoing amongst the hundreds of microgenres that rose and died – it was called NXC to (ironically?) reflect conventions of ‘extreme’ music, specifically the way hardcore punk-derived genres are abbreviated. Well, the other thing that matters is that I was on that label ––– several times. I was dragged into the nightcore revival by association, really. If you were versed in one thing you were versed in all the others.
Often I see spiels by people I cannot verify the presence of during that time about the revolutionary potential of vaporwave or whatever, here in the modern day – about its aesthetic reach and how it reshaped the culture and understanding of (re)appropriation and reuse, the ‘real metamodernist current’. How we are still living in its shadow and we have not fully understood the way it reconfigured the broader ‘zeitgeist’, the feel of the times, the fabric, the urges of culture. I don’t buy those things, they make you look silly. I honestly cringe at the self-assurance of these things but something has to make you post them. Sentimentality is silly, life’s a joke. I figured for about 40 minutes I’d try believing in the things people pour their hearts out into comment boxes for, become a ‘Nightcore Revisionist‘ – suddenly it is not just editing music you like for your five friends, now it is the grief of unachieved and unrealized aesthetic transformation.
I was on Pedicure back in the day. Several of the songs that appear here are on Pedicure. This is a full discog revision (more or less) of the original run of More ？Sugar, nightcored cored even further, Nx2C. As brute as possible, as much force. The fullwidth question mark is to evade the Windows file system which won’t let you include certain punctuation or ‘symbols’ in file names. This is all the innocence lost, the primordial sentimental ideas, that make you praise the apparent just-so impact of all the things you were part of that felt magical and like the true purity of creation or whatever when all you were doing ‘objectively’ was making art-objects of disposable metadata with tertiary sound to become lost at a later date. This is When Things Were Good. This is the joy of the child with carpal tunnel from stretching muscle to stretch a DAW timeline. This is the ‘Before Times’. This is repetitive strain injury from clicking to select regions of audio. This is when you weren’t an artist. This is every Bandcamp page you forgot the password to.
This is nightcore.
Towards the end I reach even further into my past because at the time this was current I was taking classical piano and being that I’m post-Soviet there was always that petit bourgeois background appreciation of European high art, not so much in the way of ‘playing this to my baby will make my baby a genius’ but more ‘reading old novels as a hobby activity’ with recordings of last-century classical concerts another omnipresent fixture. I dropped out because I couldn’t manage both school and music school because it’d stretch late into the evening combined altogether like I’m a fucking American or something. From a kayfabe sentimentality to the first true sentimental sound, or maybe the first forced sentimental sound with the wear and urges of culture. Beethoven who could only feel vibrations and me who can only feel speed.
Is all dance music very sad? Maybe.
Further inside the ‘metatext’ is another conceit – the original material for most of this is like, future bass, man. Faceless music of convention as rigid as the emotionality was high. A lot of EDM producers tended to have a calling card, a producer tag, a thing born of and transferred from hip hop, I think. You can find a lot of this in the type beat economy that even when people are just copying the general ‘vibe’ of somebody else, often the most popular, to make money from beat sales to survive, for the public upload of this thing that comes up when you enter the keyword they’re aiming to be encountered at (‘Playboi Carti type beat’) they put their watermark there. This is the stamp before the transaction where you lease the beat and it becomes yours to use. This is the differentiation within assumed facelessness. It is the festival that makes the EDM producer. To give some agency to the music itself when I play the drop for the 2nd time but faster I adhere to this convention and devise an extremely simple Pavlovian calling card, two claps on top with a slight delay between the two hits, a prim little drum fill. This is as elemental as I could get it – this is Shostakovich’s little calling card theme, DSCH (D-Eb-C-B). Sometimes I play a clip of Erika from Umineko – my ‘yo Pierre, you wanna come out here?‘. Pop cultural elements reappropriated to become New Identity, differentiation within a Universal Consciousness – to be Freudian: a descension of the secondary sex organs. Or something. It is the balls that make the man. It is the cores that make the Soundcloud page and it is the 3 hour time limit that wipes the page out. This is some nightcore somebody remembers hearing once. Here today, gone tomorrow.
