Dark Electro

What it is

Zoth Ommog and Off Beat, two Frankfurt labels a tram ride apart, spent the early nineties putting out records that took the Vancouver method and slowed it down until it stopped being dance music. yelworC, Placebo Effect, Wumpscut and Mentallo & The Fixer all worked the same way: a hundred beats a minute, a kick that fires in sixteenth clusters rather than on the beat, and a snare drowned in gated reverb until it is the size of a room. What replaced the hi-hat was sampled dialogue and orchestral noise, and the tops of these records end up sounding unlike anything else in the family. Everything sits low and moves slowly, and the sequencer is doing less work than the sampler.

What it sounds like

Cavernous. The kick is short but repeated in threes, so what you hear is a machine-gun rather than a pulse, and it is usually tuned to a note the bass then contradicts. The snare is an electric snare fed into a gate on a two second plate, chopped at 400ms, and it is the loudest thing on the record. Hi-hats are almost absent. In their place: choir samples, orchestra stabs pitched down four semitones, film dialogue, and a lot of reversed cymbal. Synths are detuned strings and a slow-attack pad on one minor chord, and the vocal is shouted through a ring modulator or a pitch shifter set an octave low.

Key elements

• The sixteenth cluster kickThree sixteenths in a row on beat 1 and a doubled hit on beat 3, rather than one hit per beat. It gives the loop a walk instead of a pulse.
• Gated reverb snareA two second plate cut off hard at 400ms. The eighties production trick, kept twenty years past its expiry date and used at four times the depth.
• Orchestral samplesChoir, timpani and stabs from a sample CD, pitched down and played back badly. The Emulator and later the Akai S1000 are audible on almost all of it.
• Almost no hi-hatsThree or four hat hits in the bar rather than sixteen. The top of the frequency range belongs to dialogue and reversed cymbal instead.
• Processed vocalPitched an octave down, ring-modulated, or both, then compressed until it sits under the snare rather than over it.

How to get them

• Program the kick in clustersPut three sixteenths on beat 1 with velocities near 120, 70 and 66 so the repeats decay, then a pair on beat 3. Shorten each repeat by 20ms so they do not smear into one long note.
• Gate the reverbSend the snare to a plate of 2 seconds at 100 percent wet, then put a gate across the return with the hold at 350ms and the release at 50ms. Key the gate off the snare itself.
• Sample an orchestra badlyTake a choir or a string stab, pitch it down four semitones without formant correction, then resample at 22kHz and 12 bits. The aliasing is the character.
• Vocal chainPitch shift down twelve semitones with the formants left alone, then a ring modulator at 60 to 90Hz at 30 percent wet, then compress at 10:1. High-pass at 200Hz afterwards.
• Leave the top openUse three or four hat hits per bar and fill the rest of the space above 5kHz with reversed cymbal and sampled speech. A sixteenth hat pattern makes this sound like aggrotech immediately.
• Tempo disciplineStay between 95 and 105. The kick clusters stop reading as clusters above 110 and start sounding like a roll, which is a different genre and a later one.

Reference points

yelworC, Wumpscut, Placebo Effect, Mentallo & The Fixer, Blok 57, Dive, and the Zoth Ommog and Off Beat catalogues from Frankfurt. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.