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Freestylers are a British electronic duo centred on producers Matt Cantor and Aston Harvey, a partnership that became one of the most recognisable names in the late-1990s and 2000s breakbeat continuum. Their work sits at the intersection of breakbeat, big beat, electro and bass-heavy club music, with a sound built for both festival stages and underground dancefloors.
The project emerged from London club culture and from a shared grounding in hip-hop, electro and break-driven dance music. That background mattered: Freestylers were not simply following the breakbeat boom, but drawing on older DJ and soundsystem lineages that connected street-level dance music, sample culture and UK club energy.
Aston Harvey had already been active in British dance music before the duo fully took shape, and that earlier experience fed into the group's practical understanding of club records. Matt Cantor brought a similarly broad musical frame, and together they developed a production identity that was direct, rhythmic and highly functional in the mix.
Freestylers came to wider attention in the second half of the 1990s, when breakbeat was expanding beyond specialist circles and finding a larger audience through clubs, compilations, radio and crossover electronic press. Their records helped define a strand of UK breaks that was tough but accessible, rooted in hip-hop attitude while open to rave pressure, electro references and vocal hooks.
Their debut album We Rock Hard became a key statement of that moment. It captured the duo's ability to turn breakbeat into a broad-spectrum club language: heavy drums, cut-up funk, MC-led energy and a sense of momentum that connected with both big beat audiences and more break-focused scenes.
Tracks such as "B-Boy Stance" and "Ruffneck" became especially associated with the Freestylers name. They circulated widely in DJ culture and helped establish the duo as reliable makers of high-impact club material rather than a short-lived crossover act.
The follow-up period confirmed that the project had range beyond one breakthrough album. Pressure Point pushed their sound further into bass pressure, vocal collaborations and a more polished but still forceful studio approach, showing how Freestylers could adapt as the breakbeat landscape shifted in the early 2000s.
Across their catalogue, collaborations were an important part of the formula. The duo regularly worked with vocalists and MCs, using featured voices not as decoration but as structural elements that linked their productions to soundsystem culture, hip-hop phrasing and the live energy of club performance.
Freestylers were also closely associated with the UK breaks infrastructure that connected labels, DJ circuits and international touring. They were part of the generation that helped move breakbeat from a largely British specialist network into a more global club language, particularly in territories where bass-heavy dance music found strong festival and rave audiences.
Albums such as Raw As F**k and Adventures in Freestyle showed their willingness to keep reworking the formula rather than freeze themselves in a late-1990s template. Even when the wider market changed, they remained identifiable through punchy drums, low-end weight and a DJ-minded sense of arrangement.
Their reputation has also been sustained by DJing and mix culture. Freestylers have long functioned not only as recording artists but as selectors and club technicians, and that practical dancefloor knowledge is audible throughout their productions, which tend to privilege movement, impact and utility over studio excess.
In historical terms, Freestylers occupy an important place in the story of UK breakbeat. They were not the first artists to work with broken beats in Britain, but they were central to the period when breaks became a major club and festival language, and they helped give that sound an enduring international profile.
Their legacy rests on a body of records that linked hip-hop, electro, rave and bass music without treating those traditions as separate worlds. For listeners tracing the route from big beat and late-1990s breaks toward later bass culture, Freestylers remain a useful and influential reference point.
The artist appears in Optimal Breaks’ weekly breakbeat chart «40 Breaks Vitales», a Beatport-sourced, editorially curated snapshot of the current scene.
