Coupe-Decale

What it is

It was invented in Paris, not Abidjan. In 2002 a group of young Ivorians around Douk Saga and the Jet Set were throwing money on dancefloors in Parisian clubs during the years the war at home made going back difficult, and the music they commissioned to go with it took soukous guitar, zouglou vocals and an Ivorian percussion bed and put them over a beat with a hole in the middle. The name means something close to cut and run. The rhythmic signature is that hole: in every other bar the kick abandons the second half completely and a bottle keeps time on its own until the snare comes back. Abidjan adopted it wholesale and it has been the dominant Ivorian club sound ever since.

What it sounds like

Percussive, bright and top heavy. A glass bottle or a high bell struck with a nail, hit in a fast eight stroke figure, is the loudest thing in most of these records. Congas underneath. A snare with a lot of crack and very little body. Soukous guitar plays fast picked lines high up the neck, doubled and panned wide. Vocals are shouted call and response, usually naming people, with a lot of ad libs. Bass is present but thin, and a great deal of the low end is actually the kick. Reverb is used on the guitars and almost nowhere else.

Key elements

• The bottleEight strokes a bar on a glass bottle or high bell, at 58 to 80. It is the timekeeper, and it keeps going through the bar where the kick drops out.
• The kick that drops outBar one has five kicks. Bar two has four, and none at all between beat 3 and the and of 4, which is the cut the genre is named for.
• A plain backbeatSnare on 2 and 4 with nothing decorative, so that when the kick vanishes there is still a fixed point in the bar.
• Congas off the bottleFour strokes in bar one on the and of 1, the a of 2, the and of 3 and the e of 4, deliberately avoiding the bottle's own hits.
• Soukous guitarFast picked lines in the top two octaves, doubled and panned wide, playing the melody the vocals do not. The Congolese inheritance is entirely in this part.

How to get them

• Record a real bottleA glass bottle struck with a metal object, close-miked, high-passed at 800Hz. Sampled cowbells are close but the pitch instability of glass is what makes the lane sound alive.
• Cut the kickWrite two bars. In the second one delete every kick between beat 3 and the and of 4 and leave it deleted. The bottle covers that space and the record does not need help.
• SnareBright, short, high-passed at 250Hz, on 2 and 4 at around 100. Add two hits at the end of bar two and stop there; this is not a genre for snare rolls.
• CongasPlace them only where the bottle is silent. Solo the two lanes together and remove anything that lands on the same sixteenth as a bottle stroke.
• GuitarClean single coil, bridge pickup, picked not strummed, tracked twice and panned hard. Keep both takes and do not tighten them against each other.
• Swing0.55. The bottle needs a lean or it sounds sequenced, and this is about as far as you can push it before the congas start reading as triplets.

Reference points

Douk Saga, DJ Arafat, Serge Beynaud, Debordo Leekunfa, Bebi Philip and the Jet Set crowd who started it in Paris in 2002. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.