Braindance
Drum machines programmed by someone arguing with the sequencer.
The pattern
2 bars, sixteenth notes. Loops until you stop it.
Two bars at 138, true tempo. There is a downbeat and a backbeat, and that is what stops this being the glitch pattern with different labels. The kick holds beat 1 in both bars, then goes somewhere unhelpful: the a of 1, the e of 3 and the and of 4 in bar one, and the and of 2, beat 3 and the e of 4 in bar two. The snare keeps 2 and 4 but bar one puts an early hit on the a of 3 that pulls the backbeat forward, and bar two adds one on the and of 1. Hats run sixteenths with holes punched in them rather than a steady figure, and the woodblock lands on steps nothing else is using. Nod along to it: it still works, which is the test.
What it is
The Rephlex label coined braindance in the mid nineties partly to avoid the term IDM, which had come from a mailing list and which most of the people it described disliked. Either name points at the same music: Warp's Artificial Intelligence series, Aphex Twin, Autechre, Boards of Canada, Black Dog. The common thread is electronic music that keeps the machines audible while refusing to keep their patterns. Kicks land off the beat, accents fall in the wrong place, a melody arrives detuned, and none of it is random. It is written that way and it grooves.
What it sounds like
Analogue machines used carelessly on purpose. A 909 or 808 with the tuning pushed off, a snare that has been resampled at a low rate until it is crunchy, and a melody on a detuned synth playing something wistful. There is usually tape hiss or vinyl noise in the background. The overall register is nostalgic rather than aggressive, and the strangeness comes from the rhythm rather than from the sound design.
Key elements
- Displaced kicksKicks on the e and the a rather than the beat, so the pattern still has a downbeat but keeps stumbling around it. It is the difference between braindance and glitch, which has no downbeat to stumble around.
- A groove that survivesHowever odd the placements, the bar still repeats and you can still nod to it. Randomness that never resolves is the failure mode, and it is what makes bad braindance indistinguishable from bad glitch.
- Detuned melodyA simple, often sad line played on something slightly out of tune or through a wobbly tape emulation. The melodic material is usually more conventional than the drums.
- Resampled drum hitsSounds bounced down at 8 or 12 bit and reloaded. The aliasing and quantisation noise become part of the timbre, which is a technique that came from limited memory and stayed for the sound.
How to get them
- Program against the gridWrite a straight pattern first, then move individual hits one sixteenth left or right and see what still works. Moving things at random gives you noise; moving one hit at a time gives you a figure.
- Abuse the sequencerRun a pattern of 15 steps against a bar of 16 so it rotates, or set two patterns to different lengths. Aphex Twin's early records are full of figures that came from equipment doing something unintended.
- Bit reductionBounce your drums, reduce to 12 bit at about 22kHz, and reload. Do it to the whole bus rather than to individual hits so the quantisation noise moves with the pattern.
- Detune deliberatelyPut the lead synth 8 to 15 cents flat and leave it. Tape wobble on top, at a slow rate and a small depth, gets you the rest of the way.
- Keep the melody simpleFour or eight bars of a plain diatonic tune. Complicated harmony on top of complicated drums cancels out, and the records that last put something singable over the mess.
Reference points
Aphex Twin, Autechre, Boards of Canada, Plaid, Bogdan Raczynski, Ceephax Acid Crew, and Rephlex and Warp as labels. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.
The pattern is a starting point rather than a rule. If you want the theory underneath why any of it works, Battuto measures it.