Track-By-Track: Ghostcast #14
This is an entry in the Track-By-Track series for my mix for The Ghost.
Track-By-Track is a series that looks back at records you will have heard in my mixes, one by one in the order they were played. Who made them, and when? How did I come across them? And what do they make me feel?
How many times have you needle dropped a record in a shop or clicked through a snippet online and asked yourself: where’s the first beat? The track sounds great, all movement and funk, but something about it snags on the way from your ears to your feet, as your brain works semi-consciously to place the elements into a familiar bar structure. Then you realise that you were hearing the snare on the 1 and the 3 rather than the usual 2 and 4. Or, even stranger, if it’s got a broken groove, you find the kick doesn’t start on the 1 at all. Everything is a little out of joint, but pleasingly so.
What happens next probably depends on whether you’re listening to a record or a snippet. If it’s a short clip online, you may listen to it again a couple of times and think nothing of it until you get the full track. But if it were a record in a shop, you might let it play out a little longer. There might be a break in the track, during which time the snare and other elements in the music swirl around, now untethered from the mooring post of the kick pattern. Your brain almost, but not quite, lets go of its rigid 4/8/16/32 frame, until the kick comes back in, not necessarily where you expected it to be.
At this point, nine times out of ten, something will shift. All of the previous musical information you had built up about the track’s metre and phrasing practically flies out of the window as the dominance of that first KICK on the 1, and the almost as stern authority of that SNARE on the 2 and 4, now leave no room for ambiguity over where the beat actually is. Any movement or non-linearity or satisfying loopiness you were experiencing in the rest of the elements of the track must now cleave to this new enforced structure, often losing some, if not all, of that movement in the process. The track has become ‘fixed’ in your mind and, barring a great mental and practical effort, will forever remain so. You experience a small sense of loss for this and all other moments like it.
…
Just me then?
This is something I’ve known existed but been unable to really articulate ever since I started going out and learning how to mix. I remember hearing G Strings ‘Motivation’ for the first time (played I think by Prosumer in East Village, Shoreditch, c. 2008), with its backbeat snares and periodic flips into half-beat kicks:
I also remember being in house parties on the Botley rooftop and all of us at one point or another mixing in on the ‘wrong beat’, thus briefly transforming a well-known motif into an unfamiliar one. It was always briefly, because - as we will see - the brain is a diligent worker when it comes to putting things in order, and you can rarely hold on to the ‘wrong phrasing’ for too long. I often wondered then, and still do today, whether this is something producers toy with when making tunes. What if you made an entire track and then, afterwards, for shits and giggles, you shifted the whole rhythmic structure one beat to the left? These thoughts would occur to me, and then disappear in the mass of mysterious things I felt too stupid to investigate.
More recently, one thing that’s helped me put this process into words is the book Music, The Brain, And Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination by Robert Jourdain. If you can weather the sometimes unfortunate attempts at storytelling that open each chapter, and the rather paternalistic tone he is unable to avoid when talking about non-Western music, you will find this book is a thorough and compelling account of its title. Jourdain comprehensively breaks down the physical and mental structures of our hearing and explains how we interpret the different elements of music. His logic follows this sequence of chapters: “From sound… to tone… to melody… to harmony… to rhythm… to composition… to performance… to listening… to understanding… to ecstasy.” And who doesn’t want ecstasy?
Jourdain has a knack for explaining complicated things in accessible ways, and he returns again and again to the melody from Henri Mancini’s ‘Pink Panther’ theme to illustrate what he’s talking about, communicating in words what you would usually need actual audio to understand.
As you read you’ll come across innocent-looking yet mind-blowing sentences such as:
For octogenarians, discrimination around middle C is accurate to only a quarter step, and at low C it’s off by a full half-step - B no longer sounds very different from C, nor C from C-sharp. Nonetheless, a combination of long experience and bluster has allowed many a great musician to go on performing in old age.
(And apparently, by the age of forty the sensitivity of your ears at the highest audible frequencies has diminished by a factor of 10, and that’s presumably without having spent hours on end in front of big speaker stacks. The clock is ticking.)
Or:
Psychologically, pulse constitutes a renewal of perception, a reestablishment of attention. It is a basic property of our nervous systems that they soon cease to perceive phenomena that do not change. Pulses keep unchanging phenomenon alive. This process of renewing attention comes so naturally to us that our nervous systems add pulse where none is found.
At which point I am of course obliged to post this:
This point about our nervous systems adding pulse where none is found is part of a longer discussion by Jourdain about different conceptions of rhythm - metre and phrasing - and how our brains process, anticipate and combine these conceptions into our overall perception of rhythm in a piece of music. Anticipation is important, for as Jourdain, once again mindblowingly, says:
Music provides us with the longest sonic objects our brains ever encounter. A brain requires some way of breaking these objects into pieces so that it can analyse them piecemeal. It can’t wait until the end of a ten-minute composition to figure out what happened. And so a brain is always on the lookout for clues about where musical objects begin and end.
Jourdain uses the example of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ to illustrate how the brain chops up pieces of music into meaningful chunks based on rhythmic markers - accentuations, pauses, beats, syntax if there are lyrics - to understand its structure on the fly, and use this to interpret what is to come. We do this at different levels simultaneously, with smaller chunks being apprehended almost instantaneously and longer chunks tentatively forming based on the smaller ones until we can be sure our comprehension is correct. In the scenario I introduced this newsletter with, an online snippet might not give you enough information to build up these bigger chunks and you may remain happily ignorant of where a track’s phrasing really sits.
In the case of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’, if the lullaby were delivered in the wrong chunks - “Twinkle twinkle little/star how I wonder/what you are up” and so on - we might struggle to build up the necessary chunks and the language of the music would break down. The analogy with language is a good one: just think about the stereotype of the foreigner in Germany hanging on to a sentence until the verb finally drops and everything falls into place.
In music, this chunking (it’s actually called that) draws on both metre - its metronomic pulse - and phrasing - its linguistic ebb and flow. Despite what conclusions you may draw from his interest in ecstasy (spoiler: it’s not that kind of ecstasy), Jourdain is evidently not a dance music connoisseur. Indeed, when he writes:
But time presents no natural unit of measure akin to an octave, no ironclad tick-tock of a neurological clock that can be subdivided into smaller units, into a sort of temporal scale.
it becomes clear he is not someone who has spent weekend after weekend in Watergate at a sensible 127bpm, or endless late nights in front of the all-powerful Ableton grid. But what Jourdain has to say about metre and phrasing remains wholly pertinent to our topic, going some way to explain the phenomenon I described up above.
(Western) dance music generally has a rigid 4/4 metre, broken or not, and experiments in 5/4, polymetre or otherwise have until recently been rather uncommon, though not unheard of:
Many of us are so immersed in a grid-based musical environment that even before we drop the needle on a record in a shop, or press play on soundcloud, our brains are primed to hear a 1-2-3-4 with the kick mostly here and the snare mostly there. And although some records may play with unexpected phrasing (this one by Audri always catches me out by implying a three-bar structure that actually turns out to be a classic four-bar one) we can usually be pretty sure where the rhythm and frame sits: the music essentially comes ‘pre-chunked’ by our previous experience and expectations. Those of us who are DJs in many ways depend on this rhythmic spidey sense to help us half-follow a track’s phrasing and mix properly while cueing, and we’re all familiar with that moment when it breaks down in the headphones, especially in a back-to-back when you don’t know the track currently playing.
But it’s precisely this breakdown that can produce something different and exciting. I mentioned in my opening anecdote the way a track can have a lot of movement and funk to it when heard unexpectedly offbeat. Jourdain in fact mentions this specific effect, though I believe he puts it too strongly for our example:
If you disrupt a composition’s metre by accenting, say, every second beat instead of every third, as it is written, the composition disintegrates before your ears. With related notes no longer heard together, the composition becomes incomprehensible even though it still has “rhythm” in the sense of offering an easily perceived beat. This demonstrates that it is not metre’s beating per se that makes it rhythmic, but rather the way it organises perception. Similarly, when phrasing markers are misplaced, music ceases to make sense as assuredly as if the outlines of one drawing were superimposed on the shapes of another.
I say he puts it too strongly because, depending on what is going on in a piece of dance music and how it is phrased, I have found that my brain can be quite adept at reconstructing a track in a newly defined metre, and interpreting the shifted phrasing that emerges. Sometimes there is disintegration and incomprehensibility, but at other times there is the emergence of something new, and when that happens it’s exhilarating.
Which long dissertation brings me to ‘Memento’ by Blazout, which appears exactly halfway into my mix for The Ghost. The track before it - ‘Assinie (Escape Mix)’ by Irie Nation aka Tomas Station - revels in an elegantly classical arrangement, and ‘Memento’ itself is indeed far from a non-linear techno track: the kick, hi hat and snare all dutifully appear and disappear at the expected moments along the arrangement. But for some reason - the prime suspect being the phrasing of the bassline - from the very first time I listened to it I heard the 1 on the 3 and not the 1. This effect was so strong that my brain enforced this reading of the track on me whenever I mixed it, rejecting it if I mixed in on the 1. Never mind that it shifted all the breaks and drops by two beats to the left, that’s how it had to be, and that’s how it is in the podcast (skip to 50m15s to hear the transition):
As I mentioned, the half-bar shift has the effect that all of the end-of-phrase moments in ‘Memento’ now arrive two beats before they should do. So when there’s a break, the kick, like an overly punctual friend, comes back in slightly early, as do the wooshy noises and pads that announce it. This is actually a very pleasing effect that plenty of producers, especially in garagey US house and UKG, work into their tracks as a matter of course, with both early and late arrivals adding an extra skip to these setpiece moments. For a recent example, check the way the kick often skips a beat when coming back in on GIDEÖN’s ‘Over Back Then’:
In the case of ‘Memento’, though, the track was not produced with this effect in mind. I worried when recording the podcast that other people wouldn’t hear the tune in the same way I did, and would thus be confused by the off-phrase transition. You can hear me try and account for this at precisely 51m30s and again at 51m45s, as I EQ out the bass on the early-arriving drop and then bring it back in to actually drop on the 3. (I have no idea if this strategy was successful for people listening, so if you know the mix perhaps you can tell me which way round you’ve been hearing the track since then.)
As an experiment when writing this newsletter I decided to do the same transition over again but with ‘Memento’ brought in on its original pattern. To my ear the result is a bit weird but not unpleasant:
In this clip, I purposefully included plenty of the previous track upfront in order to build up the necessary rhythmic world in the mind before the new track comes in (to give you sufficiently big chunks, as it were). As I listen to this refigured transition I can feel my brain and body fighting against the now unfamiliar bassline phrasing in ‘Memento’ and the placement of the different markers - the vocal ‘ah’, the flams on the snare, the little wooshes - but, if I concentrate a bit, I can fix it like this and enjoy it. Even the few times I’ve listened to it during the writing of this newsletter has somehow retrained my brain to be able to hear this track in its original phrasing.
When I wrote recently about cue points in Rekordbox I had to include the caveat that I was talking about tracks with meaningful progression in their arrangements. If you’re playing dry techno or wonky house or tools, then phrase matching is not really an issue, and in fact a lot of the dynamism of that music comes from unpredictable timing. But when it comes to classically arranged dance music I’m a bit of a purist, and I rarely want to hear the new track come in a bar early or late. Where others say they often enjoy the effect, the snare on the 1 is likely to make me wince.
There does seem, though, to be a bit of a sweet spot, some room for manoeuvre, where a track might slip satisfyingly between framings in a way that never quite resolves but, equally, doesn’t confuse. One example could be ‘Bonus Beat’ by Frhanks on the new EP on my label, with its cyclical motifs and missed beats. The track opens on a snare and then flips phrasing around the 90 second mark, which is highly DJ-unfriendly yet plugs in somehow to what I think I’m looking for.
The previous entry in this Track-By-Track series, Jaime Read’s ‘4-D’, is another good example of a track that, if it catches you unawares, could be listened to on various different beats. Until, that is, a little rhythmic hook in the phrasing catches your ear and pushes your brain and your body on to a fixed frame, like a looped GIF stuttering slightly to reveal the join.