sadmanbarty

Well-known member
just picking up on a couple of barty's strands; this abolition of narrative is achieved by two means really either a lack of repetitiveness or extreme repetitiveness (pedal points and drones, etc.). that's where 8 bar grime fits in.

it's not a coincidence that lots of wayne shorter's modal compositions are based on these alternating 8 bar motifs just like early grime.

that's great. exactly.
 

droid

Well-known member
8 bar was a platonic example of 'the loop' as a means to an end and the end itself. Obv parallels with hop hop, but also with hardcore, in which the loop was key. You have one loop to increase tension, one loop to release tension, one loop to roll out, one loop to break it down... all in one bar chunks, or maybe 4/8 max. Musical sophistication usually means looking at bigger chunks of sound, creating progressions over longer bar phrases (32/64 etc), so the discrete units increase in size and there is less granular space to change things up, and therefore less unpredictability.

Count the loops and the length of the loops:


All compelling sample based music has the loop at its heart. Everything else is window dressing. If you can master the loop you can do anything.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I'm guessing that the tech they were using to make hardcore had a big role in that the sample lengths were much shorter in those days - so you're automatically working with a lot of fairly short samples/loops, you're probably going to be looking to throw them together in combinations, that patchwork/collage effect.

Also sampling I think opened the music up to a much wider range of sounds, cos they were using their record collections (or their parents or whatever).
 
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droid

Well-known member
yeah, the S1000 had a total sample length of 23 seconds expandable up to 90 secs in mono. Length of a bar at 130 bpm is 1.846 seconds, a 4 bar loop is 7.38 seconds - so you could have 3 of those in your tune or 12 one bar loops.

Incidentally a 4 bar loop at 164 bpm (classic jungle speed) is 5.85 sec, so you can do more with the same sampler at a faster tempo, though by that stage most producers had moved onto the S2000, EMU E64 or newer.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Reminds me of this Aphex quote from a Pitchfork interview



That's one of the reasons this tune was so influential and exciting - it was so amateurish, but only an amateur could have made something like it


Believe me once you've heard it almost nonstop for 13 years it really gets so fucking boring. this is like inverted crowley though isn't him, cussing out Dillinja but would probably say the same here. the problem is luca wants to think he's god but only the historical communist party which does not know votes, personalities, democracy or arbitration, (the totality of all organised proletarian activity) can correspond to that great godly rhythmical breath.

I always prefered Pulse Y anyway in terms of sheer excitement.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
as for 8 bar.


and all that purpose maker stuff.

actually the most minimal dance music is the very industrial german techno on e-com from around 97. literally one bar looped over and over again.

I think 8 bar was always dance music otherwise you'll start turning into ash sarkar corpsey and that would be a dreadful shame.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I'm sceptical of thirds historical and retrospective revisionism here!

I'm not saying the hardcore period from 90-93 didn't exist, it obviously did otherwise we wouldn't be talking about it. I'm saying that within that period when things were in flux people saw themselves putting their own takes on house, techno, dub, industrial/ebm, ragga and hip hop.

It is that convergence that we call hardcore now (and that is correct) but I'm not so sure if people at the time actually saw that convergence as its own distinct sound let alone scene, (although of course it was.) Colin Dale and Frank Da Wulf and Lenny Dee were still playing at raves into 92, 93, 94. That's the only retrospective element to me defining it as a retrospective historical period. Don't forget that one of the hardcore labels also later became the first IDM label (in the most ironic of ironies.)

The problem is i get a feeling you want to confine nuum to the injection of soul and acoustic values, but fine let us do that, we can all agree that techstep et al was very white and hardly qualifies, but then techstep was just a certain intensification of 93 darkcore which in turn was an inner city multiracial rebellion against 92 'plinky plonky piano' stuff, as SUAD call it. but then 93 was a recontextualisation of 91 which itself was an intensification of the machinic and trippy aspects of 87-90 to appeal to a more lumpen psychedelic audience. where do we stop? we could get caught up in knots and knots.

 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
for my theory not to hold you have to argue that hardcore was not deterritorialised, but then that begs the question. why was noone making old skool in 95? in all its spin offs, be that jungle, happy or hard techno. each went down their own processes of internal evolution.

people only started making neo-oldskool when 90-93 oldskool become something to revive.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
1999 There was a moron pavlovian aspect in d&b completely absent from house& garage

Ironically of course 2step was the injection of the house back into the post-96 dnb beat. like i used to dismiss you slating dark garage but i can kind of see your point now, it is basically dnb for grown ups. Of course I'm not disowning it I just acknowledge that as a fair criticism. the real rhythmic ingenuity is in the little synth/organ licks, the vocal science and crucially the MC. But ultimately that is why dubstep failed for the most part around 2010, people said it became too dnb, but it didn't. it was far too faithful to UK garage but increasingly expunged the garage house.

Thinking about how I always said ukg owes far more to house than it does garage and there was a tim finny post i stumbled on a couple of minutes ago on here and it was making a similar point to me. Like, el b, if he made stone cold at 170 bpm, it would sound like a 2step dnb track, it wouldn't sound like a multiple layered breakbeat thing from 94. this always seems to get missed in these sorts of discussions.

On that same thread blackdown was talking about how dubstep was more sonically diverse than dnb for a while and i tend to agree but the central driver of keeping interest in dance music is the rhythmic aspect. of course UKG had many aditional elements to intersect with the beat.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Listen at 1.25 speed and you'll see what i mean. it even sounds like jazz n bass, much to the consternation of bliss I'm sure...

 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
whereas if you listen to this at 0.7 speed you can see that there are far more rhythmic disjunctures. it's gangsta bebop.

Garage was roy ayers whereas jungle was art blakey.

 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
in jungle there is not the jittery tension of gak or whizz. it's much more militant. people say you couldn't do garys at garage rave but that's tosh, it's way easier to do garys at garage rave whereas at jungle rave it's much better to drink and maybe get zooted. totally different type of kinesthetic responses are engendered in the body. with garage it's like this wanker is gonna do me in because i ruined his shoes.

With jungle it's like this is one man you don't wanna fuck with even outside the rave. probably why i gravitate to jungle more. I'm irrascibly bad tempered. again listen to this beat at 0.75 speed. you'll see what I mean. there was definitely something non-dance in the air back then. whereas UKG for all its amazingness had regressed back to a pretty standard grinding sexy aesthetic. again not a value judgment, give me UKG any time over most post-98 dnb.

 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Like listen to this at 1.25 speed, when people are like nah nah nah dubstep isn't slowed down dnb, play this in a half time leaning set and you won't know the difference.

 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
like the discontinuity for a junglist here isn't rhythmic simplicity, it's just that what is being done is alternating a loop per bar with the accompanying 170 bpm speed. so it just rushes by. but slow it down and it actually sounds a lot more varied than a lot of the dubstep techno hybrids or whatever. but yeah cracking tune.


Whereas if you listen to a paradox tune he's chopping the break within the bar, how a real drummer would drum it. so the antihuman discourse is a lot more complicated than a lot of people frame it. it's more like, militarising discipline through the machine.
 
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