Welcome to Club Harlecore: Danny L Harle is taking over Dazed

This week on Dazed we explore the high octane, utopian dream world of musician Danny L Harle, his debut album Harlecore, and the magically immersive digital club space of Danny and his fantastical collaborators. Here, Danny guides us through the serotonin superwave experience, and curates a playlist that speaks to the best of Harlecore’s big room bangers through the years.

This is the Club Harlecore Dazed Digital takeover.

In 2017, I started a rave that toured the UK, Europe, and America. I named the rave ‘Harlecore’ – a useful title for the night as it was a showcase for all the euphoric hardcore rave music that I, Danny L Harle, wanted to hear.

I also wrote a lot of music that was exclusively played at these raves. Music that encapsulated everything that I love about the euphoric experience. In collaboration with some other artists I found uniquely inspiring, I built up a library of music. It started to seem more and more like the soundtrack to the rave of my dreams.

Eventually, I realised that the music had taken on a life of its own and that the only way I could present the music in its truest form was through Club Harlecore.

Club Harlecore is a multi-room club that exists on the threshold between perceived reality and a kind of shared utopian dream.  It is a place that one visits in those moments of unexplainable transcendent euphoria.

The nature of a multi-room club is to choose which room you want to visit based on your mood, however there is a known path that some devoted ravers take.

Once a raver discovers Club Harlecore, they enter DJ Danny’s Stadium and ascend with him, as if it is just the two of them together, glimpsing the euphoric plane for a moment, before descending back down into the club.  

When grounded, they find themselves manic with an energy that requires immediate release – MC Boing is the boy for that, and so a short elevator ride leads them to his bouncy boing dome, bouncing all night, everybody here is safe and nice, angels are singing, the bass is tight.  

This experience leaves them satisfied, but they feel something calling from the depths of the club, in the basement, in what once was a cave smashed out by a great hammer. The hammer of DJ Mayhem. The ravers descend into this fiery pit and discover the monster that dwells there, but more importantly confront the monster within themselves.

After being beaten to the edge of their existence, they wake up on DJ Ocean’s floor. They glow among the mushrooms as the healing lullaby of the cosmos sings them into a state of inner peace. 

Once this state is achieved, they find themselves back in the crowd in DJ Danny’s Stadium, ready to start the process again.

Visit Club Harlecore – you may find that the music sounds the way you feel.

Check out Danny L Harle’s ‘History of Harlecore’ playlist for Dazed below