Darkpsy

What it is

Somewhere past 150 beats per minute the music stops being able to carry a tune, and Russian, German and Japanese producers spent the early 2000s finding out what happens after that. Darkpsy took full-on's tempo up, threw the melody away and replaced it with layered noise. Parvati Records, Osom and the Russian forest party circuit are the centre of it. Everything is faster, drier and less legible: the bass loses its pitch, the leads become clusters of resonant clicks, and the samples are usually horror films. It has a close relative in forest, which runs a little slower and swaps the noise for wet organic squelch, and the two share most of a drum grid; darkpsy is the one that put the tempo up, so it gets the page. The point of the style is disorientation and the drum programming is doing as much of that work as anything else in the mix.

What it sounds like

Dense to the point of being hard to parse. The kick is short and clicky with almost no low end in it, so the mix can carry an enormous amount of midrange activity above it. Hats land on the beat, the e and the and, which puts three hits in every beat and leaves only the last sixteenth free, and that last sixteenth belongs to the open hat. Percussion is metallic and dry. The bass is a fast rolling line with the pitch information stripped out of it. There is no backbeat to speak of, and four minutes in you have lost the bar, which is exactly the intention.

Key elements

• Three closed hats a beatOn the beat, the e and the and. Only the last sixteenth of each beat is left free, and the open hat takes it, so the top end covers all sixteen steps.
• No backbeatOne electric snare on the and of 4 and nothing on 2 or 4 anywhere in the loop. Removing the backbeat at this tempo is what makes the bar disappear.
• Clave clicksA dry wooden tick on the a of 2 and the a of 4, with a quieter one on the e of 1 and the e of 3. It is the one element that reads as a rhythm rather than as texture.
• A kick with no bass in itHigh-passed around 70Hz, all click and body. The low end is left entirely to the bass line, which is moving too fast to share it with anything.
• Tempo above 150The style is defined by it. Below 148 the same programming turns back into forest, which is a slower and considerably wetter thing.

How to get them

• KickShort, about 180ms, tuned high, high-passed at 70Hz, with a click layer at 4kHz on top. It has to punch through a mix that is already completely full.
• BassSixteenths on a distorted square with the filter tracking a fast envelope. Detune the oscillator slightly flat so the line refuses to settle on a pitch you can name.
• HatsThree closed per beat with the downbeat around 70, the e around 46 and the and around 80. That inverted accent, loudest on the offbeat, is what drives the whole thing forward.
• PercussionMetallic and dry. Resample a hat through a resonant band-pass, pitch it up, and use that as the clave. Reverb on anything at this tempo turns the mix to porridge.
• SamplesOne spoken sample per two minutes, pitched down and heavily filtered. Used more often than that it becomes a punchline rather than a threat.
• Do not resolve anythingAvoid a chord change, avoid a backbeat, avoid a drop. The arrangement moves by swapping one layer for another on a bar line with no build in front of it.

Reference points

Kindzadza, Psykovsky, Derango, Xenomorph, Highko, and the Parvati, Osom and Insomnia catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.