Phonk, Drift Phonk

[Corpsey.]

Seems like something discovered on accident and kept for stylistic reasons.

 

[william kent]

There are probably more tunes doing it. Just slamming some huge, jagged synth line over the top every few bars.

 

[Corpsey.]

Also in my very little experience mixing sound, its pretty much impossible to get other instruments to sit with a synth that loud and present, but I could be wrong. But theres a moment when your messing around with the preset sounds and theyre these amazing, full bodied crstyal clear blocks of sound and the moment you try to add drums or other synths in the mix they either sound out of place or you have to eq out the original magic of the first synth sound and this funk stuff just sidesteps that whole dilemma. Not dissimilar to alot of ag cook or lorrenzo senni stuff

 

[mvuent]

This ones a bit weirder.

The way the synth sits, or doesn't sit, in the mix on that tune is like the one Greens posted the other day, so I guess it's a stylistic choice and not just poor mixing.

honestly this stuff should be called drill, it literally sounds like someone drilling through metal

 

[william kent]

Also in my very little experience mixing sound, its pretty much impossible to get other instruments to sit with a synth that loud and present,

That's what I mean. It runs against the conventional wisdom that you balance the sounds in a mix, but it doesn't seem like an accident or poor mixing as the other elements are mixed normally. The synth obliterating everything else is deliberate.

 

[wektor]

it came out of bedroom cloudrap beats but does not have much to do with actual memphis rap apart from the cowbells and occasional samples.
it might have a similar relationship to memphis as vaporwave has to synthpop.
some early examples of the sound, suicideyear is probably an important person in this regard:

 

[wektor]

this whole thing was 10 years ago now (sic!), ofc parallel or slightly later than the vaporwave anime edits stuff.
then you had all the us souncloud rap and I guess people started making beats in a similar vein - gessaffelstein overdriven basslines drive the whole thing etc, you can hear the precedent in how this track is mixed too:

 

[wektor]

funnily enough it technically picks up a lot from the sterile nu skool dnb sound people on here usually hate.
plastician picked up on it at some point when he realised all the uk kids were no longer making grime, but started to use 808s a lot (before making drill must have been imported I suppose?)
bit too "epic trap gaming trap beats" for me personally, and not sure how significant it is culturally, but none the less there is some community around it, they have a discord and what not.

 

[wektor]

important thing is a lot of these earlier things were a bit more spaced out, then with hpop and all the genz stuff everyone started compressing even further, up to the point we have reached now.
what is hilarious is I have seen some discourse on twitter where, presumably, current 20 year olds were accusing current 15 year olds of bastardising the genre - claiming that suicideyear was the "original phonk".

 

[wektor]

brazilians occasionally str8 up use the same palette or even for varied results as per
I'll post a few cherrypicked favourites:






tactical @Cooking Mama 3 tag

notice the distorted donk FM bass sound they use is actually very similar to a pitched down cowbell!!

 

[wektor]

bonus moody banger that no soundcloud producer in 2013 would be ashamed of:

 

[wektor]

to compare:

 

[wektor]

oh and of course let's not forget this:


tbh the shots are exactly in the style of all these fuckin goku edits, all it needs is for someone to put it through an anime style transfer

 

[william kent]

Some of the Drift stuff's getting into noise territory. There's a bit of black metal in the fonts too.

 

[william kent]

Also stuff running counter to the usual art direction using shitty photos of wrecked cars rather than the stylised street racing thing.

 

[wektor]

Some of the Drift stuff's getting into noise territory. There's a bit of black metal in the fonts too.

that's the genz hyperpop esthetics I mentioned!

 

[william kent]

 

[wektor]

oh shit, zoomer extratone!!!!!!!

 

[william kent]

This first one sounds like Russell Haswell doing his drum machine thing.

 

[wektor]

also this track just appeared on my youtube recs page, strange how well this fits into the thread sonically, huh?



is all this shit the american equivalent of jump-up dnb? perhaps?