Bouyon

What it is

Dominica is the mountainous island between Martinique and Guadeloupe, it has about seventy thousand people on it, and it is not the Dominican Republic, which is four hundred miles away and has two other entries on this page. Around 1988 a band there called WCK started running the local jing ping dance music through synthesisers and a drum machine. Jing ping is an accordion, a shak-shak, a boom-boom and the lapo kabwit, a goatskin drum played with two sticks at carnival. WCK kept the drum figures, dropped the accordion and put a very hard kick underneath. What came out runs faster than soca and has no dembow snare in it anywhere. Bouyon means stew in Creole, and it is now both the dominant music of the island and a carnival fixture across the Creole-speaking eastern Caribbean.

What it sounds like

Fast, hard and almost entirely rhythm. The kick is short, mid-heavy and very loud, because it has to punch through a drum pattern moving nearly as fast as it is. Toms and drums are dry and close with no room on them at all. Synths are single-note stabs and sirens rather than chords, and the bass is a sub doubling the kick rather than moving against it. The vocal is a chant, usually several voices, in short repeated phrases landing on the beats the kick misses. Modern bouyon is mixed flat and limited hard; the early WCK records have more air in them and a real accordion buried somewhere in the middle.

Key elements

• A kick that is not a dembowBeat 1, the a of 1, the and of 2, the and of 3 and beat 4. Two of those are dembow positions and the kick does not touch the other two, and that is why bouyon does not sound Jamaican.
• Lapo kabwitA goatskin drum played with two sticks, carried over from jing ping and from carnival. Sampled and pitched in a modern track, and carrying the syncopation the kick leaves alone.
• The boom-boomA length of bamboo or plastic pipe blown to give one bass note, out of the jing ping band. It is where the bassline comes from and it explains why that bassline plays so few notes.
• Snare on beat 3One crack in the middle of the bar rather than a backbeat, with a roll into the barline. Soca puts its snare on 2 and 4, and that is the quickest way to tell the two apart.
• Speed130 to 150, above most soca. At that tempo the kick figure stops reading as syncopation and starts reading as a run.

How to get them

• KickShort, around 65Hz with a hard click above 2kHz, decay under 130 milliseconds. Five of them a bar at this tempo means anything with a tail will smear into the next one.
• Lapo kabwitThe lane exports as a floor tom, which is the nearest GM has to a stick-played goatskin drum. Load a real one if you can, gate it short, and place its strokes only where the kick is silent.
• Shak-shakA gourd rattle on the and and the a of every beat, alternating hard and soft. It is the same instrument Trinidad calls a shak-shak and it does the same job here, which is to fill in behind the kick.
• BassOne or two notes a bar, sub-heavy, sitting exactly on the kick. Do not write a moving line: the boom-boom this part descends from can only produce one pitch.
• VocalTrack a group chant several times, keep all of it, compress it hard and place it on beats 2 and 3 where the kick is thinnest. These records are built to be answered by a crowd.
• SwingStraight, at 140. Every bit of the lilt is in where the kick and the lapo kabwit land, and a shuffle at this speed turns the tom figure into triplets.

Reference points

WCK and Cornell Fingers Phillip, then Triple Kay, Signal Band, Asa Bantan, Colton T, and the jing ping bands the drum figures came out of. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.