"four to the floor"... my obsession.

i get the same thing. any 4/4 music sounds totally natural to me. it's a bit scary really- i can easily while away whole afternoons listening to techno mixes that i don't even like that much, just stuck in a 4/4 trance.

my theory is that once you listen to enough 4/4, it kind of reconfigures how you hear music, and that 120-140bpm pulse becomes like a bedrock, a natural resting-position, which you're always happy with, and against which you judge all other music as a kind of departure from.

i remember one year john peel said that his new year's resolution was to stop spending hours a day listening to techno and i can relate to that, definitely.

I agree very much. A lot of (old) drum'n'bass does sound very gimmicky now and very 90's, very "of its time". The whole sampled breakbeat thing is just very tacky unless done with uncommon grace. It's all about that steady pulse.

That's what always surprises me about tribal drumming. I was watching "Fitzcaraldo" the other day and it has that scene where they are going up the river and the natives are hiding in the jungle, playing their war drums and chanting. The rhythm they are playing is just a hit on every beat they just vary the volume/sound so it goes like "BOOM BOOM BOOM boom boom boom boom". I always thought that tribal drumming would be more like "tribal techno" where there are more complicated polyrhythms but I think it's more of a modern Cuban/Brazilian kind of influence.

Even electro, the key part is that Snare on every other beat. Take it away and it loses that propulsive quality. So it's like half a four-to-the-floor.

I'd be interested to know if there has been any structured/academic work done on this topic, many is the time i've heard (often drug-induced) conversations regarding 4x4's primal, natural nature, and hypotheses of connections to something deeper within man's development / genetic make-up. Not sure where I stand on an idea like that, it definately has resonance given my experiences with such music, but I know not the processes involved in the formation of such tendencies / emotions. Additionally I know many people who cant stand anything with a 4x4 kick, they say its boring and they want a break (regardless of the polyrhythms swirling around it!)

I actually wrote a paper in college on the rigidity of modern rhythms... it had something to do with the repetition in assembly line culture of post industrial societies, and seeking a simple base (bass) in regular beats in information overload environments or some such juvenile cliche.

I doubt there is much validity in any sort of claim that 4/4 is in any way "primal" or "natural" or a "universal" "all encompassing" beat. the incredibly complex structures of the Tabla in Indian Classical, or the Tar in ancient Mid East music, stemming from traditions which date back 10,000 years, much older than Bach or whatever, often use beats that go 5/8 or 7/13 or 15/21... and it flows like water to these ears - I even forget that I'm listening to music sometimes with rhythms like these... feels so "natural".

and the fractaline, ever-changing forms of these rhythms which continuously blossom into new patterns of endless psychedelic complexity before your eyes... just richer and have more inherent multi dimensional possibilities compared to a dumb boom boom boom boom.

should prolly take Mr. Peels resolution a bit more seriously: E-tarded does too much 4/4 (and MDMA) make.


PS - with that said I still love me some old Kompakt...

In Gamelan the music is based on a skeleton of I guess you can call it 4/4 pulse, and there is a "beat-keeper" who just bangs this out softly through the entire duration - usually with a hand-held bell. but the more mature and high level an ensemble is, the more muted and less needed this "beat keeper" becomes. I think in the most aged-to-perfection masterful orchestras this player is not needed at all.

simon silverdollar said:

my theory is that once you listen to enough 4/4, it kind of reconfigures how you hear music, and that 120-140bpm pulse becomes like a bedrock, a natural resting-position, which you're always happy with, and against which you judge all other music as a kind of departure from.

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Pretty much the exact opposite happened with me - I listened to enough 4/4 (only about a years worth) to really turn me off it, and to hunt out anything that didn't have it. I was pretty militant about it. I can dig some of it now, but it has to be some primo shit to get me to stick it on.

Funnily enough, when it comes to rock music, I find a lot of the time I like the more metronomic, repetitive stuff - i'd happily listen to a ten minute krautrock tune that hardly changed at all. There's no accounting for taste...

ive never been a massive fan of a kick on every beat of the bar music, as i guess thats what 4/4 really is.
The thing i've always been attracted to in dance music is that although its in 4/4 it's been the rhythmic variation and the massive amounts of ways to make machines get really funky/polyrhyrthmic /trancelike/emotive that's always got me, saying that the opposite gets me too, proper militant anti-funk you hear in harder darker techno.

Infact it's only been a few years since ive been listening to more of the minimal techno and house where i've been able to really enjoy softer music that has a pulsing 4/4 and nothing much more,
It's generally one of the most dissapointing things about that music that overall it often can't rinse any hip shaking rhythmic energy- groovy drums , although in terms of constantly changing bars of music and rhythmic sound effects it's very exciting, n one in minimal techno apart from a few guys has really really rocked the polyrhymic possibilities, the pulse is usually too bare and at the forefront for me.

There definitely are people (or maybe it's just students...) who just shut off instantly when they hear any variant of a disco beat. I think it's because, for a lot of people with fairly narrow tastes, the only music like that they hear is funky house in awful crowded high street bars and bad trance on TV adverts for Ibiza compilations, so it's all about association.

Up until about 12 months ago I used to live my life to syncopated rhythms, particularly Broken Beat. Actually I was probably one of those snobbish students turning my nose up at proper four to the floor dance. In the end I was roped into techno via two events. The first was hearing Nathan Fake's Dinamo on the radio. Up to this point I hadn't given techno the time of day, but Dinamo has a weird hypnotic effect and really caught my attention. The second was seeing Carl Craig play an all-nighter in Leeds - four four was ringing in my ears for days after that.

A common critisim of four four by students and other haters is that its too boring, too rigid and samey. Definately not the case. The other evening I heard a wicked set by Moodymann spanning the whole of four four. He took it right though from disco to nasty minimal techno in a way that made total sense. Not something I would have been able to comprehend 12 months ago I guess.

so yeah. four four kicks.

tox said:

so yeah. four four kicks.

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i can't stand 4/4. boring as hell. used to be a BIG techno/house fan, then i started DJing and making music. the changed my perception of music considerably.

tox said:

A common critisim of four four by students and other haters is that its too boring, too rigid and samey. Definately not the case. The other evening I heard a wicked set by Moodymann spanning the whole of four four. He took it right though from disco to nasty minimal techno in a way that made total sense.

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my claim is that people who like 4/4 don't actually listen to/focuss on the rhythm as much. for them it's just background structure, whereas for me, the rhythm is a key aspect of the musical experience! but it is possible for a DJ to play music that is otherwise interesting enough, that one doesn't notice the lacking rhythmic interest. usually this means that the music has syncopated rythms elsewhere (i.e. not on the bass drum).

There's a difference between broken beat or drum and bass which is still in 4 time but has breaks, and the stuff that Confucius is talking about in 7/13 or whatever (if you play a techno track at the right speed over a drum and bass track the bars will repeat at the same time, not so if you play it over a waltz). I remember asking a friend who studied music why music that repeats every four beats is so prevalent and he said it's simply because people have two legs. It's easiest for people to walk or dance in time to music that repeats in twos (which 4/4 does). Unless you have a limp or something the 2 beat is something you are automatically familiar with and 4/4 is just this doubled up.

Getting into rave music back in the early nineties, I had a really complicated relationship with four to the floor. I was immediately attracted to it, loved it in all sorts of techno - belgian hardcore, acid, gabber; even trance fascinated me exactly because of those heavy, monotonous kick drums. At the same time, however, a lot of people I knew really hated that beat structure, calling it stupid, moronic, primitive, unimaginative, enervating, cheap and so on. To some degree this had to do with what they mainly associated with it - chartbusting euro-dance and the fad of combining childrens songs with fttf. Hits for Kids, The Smurfs, Rednex and so on. They also had a more important point, though: That it is just such an easy, uninspired option - simply put a massive fttf kick in it, and everyone can dance to it, and there's no creativity in that, now is there? In a way I could see what they meant, it really did seem very, very easy. But then again, I did love a lot of the music, and simply lacked the vocabulary to describe why it was great.

Saying that it is "tribal" is a well known strategy for defending fttf, as if that's somehow by definition a good thing, the noble savage beat putting us in touch with our infallible instincts. I've never been able to use that strategy, it seems like such a forced attempt to redefine it as something natural, dress it up as the the newest incarnation of an age old holy tradition, avoiding the fact that in the end it really is simple machine music.

I think the reason fttf can be so overpowering and fascinating is that it's exactly not natural in any way. The machinic rigidity and tightness of the beats is totally unlike anything ever heard before, and in a way this is registered as something not-of-this-world by our bodies, never having experienced that kind of tightness in the millions of years it took for them to evolve. That's why I'm more fascinated by a simple 909 fttf kick drum, than by an ensemble of african drummers, even though there's so much more detail and creativity in the latter. Tribal music is organic and unpredictable, a changing same. The fttf kick in itself is never changeing, or rather, it highlights the unchangeing metronomic precision within all machine made music, and that is simply so strange and incomprehensible that it continue to amaze us. Or some of us at least, I suppose you could just as easily be turned of by it.

It's probably a mistake to even think of fttf as a "beat" in the traditional sense, it's much closer to a drone in many ways (a dotted drone?), or maybe the wall of distortion used in noise rock - all the creativity lies with the sound of the kick, not the programming, obviously. That's why it is not a cheap and easy degeneration of the complexity of "real" beats, machine made fttf have no real relation to acoustic drumming, it's not an immitation of drumming, it's something completely it's own, and we're still very much lacking words to describe it.

Eventually, I'm not that much into fttf anymore, I'm much more taken by machinic tightness when it's used to create unnatural syncopations (as in dubstep and grime) or unnatural complexity (as in jungle, breakcore etc.). I'm still keeping an eye on the newest developments in the outskirts of gabber/noisecore, though, that have allways been the fttf-based genre that took the pulse-as-drone and bassdrum-as-sound-in-itself strategy the furthest, and it still is.

borderpolice said:

my claim is that people who like 4/4 don't actually listen to/focuss on the rhythm as much. for them it's just background structure, whereas for me, the rhythm is a key aspect of the musical experience! but it is possible for a DJ to play music that is otherwise interesting enough, that one doesn't notice the lacking rhythmic interest. usually this means that the music has syncopated rythms elsewhere (i.e. not on the bass drum).

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That seems a pretty outrageous claim. When you say 'rhythm' are you defining it solely as drums? As that seems a very narrow way to characterise it. How can you say that the reason one doesnt notice the lack of rhythmic interest is because of syncopated rhythms elsewhere? For me, the right techno or 4/4 or whatever has as much rhythmic value as the right jungle/brokenbeat etc

hamarplazt said:

I think the reason fttf can be so overpowering and fascinating is that it's exactly not natural in any way. The machinic rigidity and tightness of the beats is totally unlike anything ever heard before, and in a way this is registered as something not-of-this-world by our bodies, never having experienced that kind of tightness in the millions of years it took for them to evolve. That's why I'm more fascinated by a simple 909 fttf kick drum, than by an ensemble of african drummers, even though there's so much more detail and creativity in the latter. Tribal music is organic and unpredictable, a changing same. The fttf kick in itself is never changeing, or rather, it highlights the unchangeing metronomic precision within all machine made music, and that is simply so strange and incomprehensible that it continue to amaze us. Or some of us at least, I suppose you could just as easily be turned of by it.

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this is an interesting discussion. its worth noting that the 4/4 pulse beat has been round a lot longer than house music has. disco had a prominent kick drum back in the 70's and that was (mostly) played on real instruments. i'm not so sure that its unnatural in this context.

also from a production angle, each kickdrum is not equal. producers go to great lengths to un-quantise beats (you probably all know this already, but this means ensuring that each beat does not fall rigidly on the quarter of a bar). on top of that people typically add varying amounts of reverb on to certain beats. something that sounds flatly metronomic in fact is not consistent and deliberately so. its what gives house music its hip sashaying swing.

i think too much of anything becomes boring after a while. i remember going to haywire (discussed in a recent thread) and after a night of electro, when someone dropped a house track you could visibly see the energy levels rocketing. conversley, house djs who drop an old breakbeat rave tune midset get the same reaction - also look at the reaction anti war dub got. good djs play with peoples expectations in this way - confounding them can be an electric experience.

For me, though, breakbeats are my first and true love. i zone out to jungle rhythms the same way that others do with a house set, i love the way that my mind goes off on different threads, one of which follows this tremendously intricate beat. not knocking 4/4 though, god knows i've bought enough of it over the years.

IdleRich said:

I remember asking a friend who studied music why music that repeats every four beats is so prevalent and he said it's simply because people have two legs. It's easiest for people to walk or dance in time to music that repeats in twos (which 4/4 does). Unless you have a limp or something the 2 beat is something you are automatically familiar with and 4/4 is just this doubled up.

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that's a bit hard to reconcile with the fact that a lot of african music has a feel that divides by 3. not surprisingly, afro latin music, being a combination of the european and african tradition, often has a 6/8 feel which you can count as 1..2..3..4.. or as 1...2...3..., hence being compatible with both traditions, and a lot of the rhythmic interest in this music comes from the tension between the two feels, the most obvious example being the "clave" rhythm that's pattern behind all afro-cuban based musical styles. The clave just juxtaposes a 3 based pattern with a 4 based pattern, and that rhythmic uneasyness creates an interesting tension.

it is also the case that any rhythm can be reconciled with the two legs thing for the simple fact that every number multiplied by two is even.

i think the real reason for the prevalence of 2 and 3 is to do with short term memory. to recognise something easily, subconsciously, without effort as a repeating pattern, i.e. a rhythm, it has to fit within the automatic processing capacities of the human short term memory. this capacity is strictly limited. i think the limit is between 7 and 9. any pattern that repeats only after more than 7 to 9 units is simply not processable on the fly (this is also the reason why we cannot detect melodies in e.g. 12 tone music, because the unit of repetition is too big. things only repeat after the short term memory has already "cleared the cache"). this basically leaves 1,2,..., 6 as units of repetition. but 6 can be processed as 3+3 or 2+2+2, and 5 as 2+3. and it seems that breaking down e.g. 5 as 2+3 is more natural/easy for humans. The pattern based on 1 is just too uninteresting. even in techno/house, where the bassdrum is often just repeating on every beat, allmost all other musical elements repeat based on 4, hence creating the overall 4/4 feel of the tune, rather than 1/1, as the bass drum plays. hence we see patterns of 2 and 3 everywhere in music.

i think

Sounds very plausible.

elgato said:

That seems a pretty outrageous claim. When you say 'rhythm' are you defining it solely as drums?

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I admit that i was imprecise, due to lacking time. within the context of this discussion (4/4) we are talking about the (dominat) bassdrum, yes.

elgato said:

For me, the right techno or 4/4 or whatever has as much rhythmic value as the right jungle/brokenbeat etc

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sure, but that not because of, but despite the bass drum. the 4/4 bass drum is so simple and so predictible that the brain ignores it. the brain is basically an expectation based filter. we notice only what is different from our expectations. and once one is accustomed to 4/4 nothing unexpected happens, hence the brain filters out the bass drum. thus possibly clearing headspace for preceiving other musical aspects.

borderpolice said:

sure, but that not because of, but despite the bass drum. the 4/4 bass drum is so simple and so predictible that the brain ignores it. the brain is basically an expectation based filter. we notice only what is different from our expectations. and once one is accustomed to 4/4 nothing unexpected happens, hence the brain filters out the bass drum. thus possibly clearing headspace for preceiving other musical aspects.

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I generally find that I can't dance to 4ttf, but I absolutely love it as listening music - often for the way that the kickdrum lays down a basic structure with respect to which the other elements can move. You can stick down crazy funky polyrhythms, or shifting, locking, splitting fragments of whatever over the top, and the kick keeps the whole thing anchored and possible to get a grip on. It's less exciting than the jungle approach (cf the Blissblogger's comment about the bass in jungle being a replacement for predictable drums, but being in itself slightly tricksy) but otoh it's more meditative.

Also, as you suggest, 4ttf can function to give a basic rhythmic drive to the tune without distracting you from everything else, and to my mind this is a perfectly valid function. For the same reason, I'm not as down on two-step drum and bass as a lot of people seem to be, provided thaere's something interesting happening elsewhere. I think the same comments apply here, too.

DigitalDjigit said:

I agree very much. A lot of (old) drum'n'bass does sound very gimmicky now and very 90's, very "of its time". The whole sampled breakbeat thing is just very tacky unless done with uncommon grace. It's all about that steady pulse.

That's what always surprises me about tribal drumming. I was watching "Fitzcaraldo" the other day and it has that scene where they are going up the river and the natives are hiding in the jungle, playing their war drums and chanting. The rhythm they are playing is just a hit on every beat they just vary the volume/sound so it goes like "BOOM BOOM BOOM boom boom boom boom". I always thought that tribal drumming would be more like "tribal techno" where there are more complicated polyrhythms but I think it's more of a modern Cuban/Brazilian kind of influence.

Even electro, the key part is that Snare on every other beat. Take it away and it loses that propulsive quality. So it's like half a four-to-the-floor.

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Fitzcaraldo is sick! I watched 'even dwarves started small' a few weeks ago which was pretty good too.