Deconstructed Club
Club music with its load-bearing parts pulled out and metal put in the holes.
The pattern
2 bars, sixteenth notes. Loops until you stop it.
Two bars at 130, true tempo. There are four kick hits in bar one and they are all finished inside the first two beats: 1, the a of 1, the and of 2 and the a of 2. After that the lane is done for the bar. The clap sits on the and of 3 at 124, nowhere near 2 or 4, and once it has gone the grid holds nothing for four sixteenths, from the a of 3 to the and of 4. That gap is the longest in the pattern and it is the whole reason to play it. An open hat at 104 on the a of 4 shuts the bar. Bar two then refuses the downbeat: the first step of bar two is empty, the first thing that sounds is a metal hit on the e of 1, and the kick does not turn up until the and of 1. Velocities run 34 to 127.
What it is
Janus was a party in Berlin, started in 2012 by Lotic, M.E.S.H. and Dan DeNorch, and for a few years it was where a particular kind of DJ set happened: club records taken apart live, the kick pulled out from under them, a scream or a sheet of metal dropped where the drop belonged. Total Freedom had been doing something related in Los Angeles since the late 2000s, and the Fade to Mind and Night Slugs crews were pushing club structure around from the functional side. Critics reached for deconstructed club around 2015 and most of the artists it landed on disliked the term, partly because it makes a demolition sound like a seminar. What the records do is keep just enough club architecture that a floor can read it, then withhold the parts that make it comfortable. The kick arrives in a cluster and then goes missing for a beat and a half. The backbeat is late, or somewhere else, or simply not there.
What it sounds like
Hard surfaces. Sheet metal, blade rings, car doors, breaking glass, and stock library sounds used without embarrassment: an alert tone, a system error, a sword being drawn. Voices get pitched up past the point of legibility and gated into short bursts, so a syllable functions as a percussion hit. The kick is often one clipped transient with the body removed, which reads as an impact rather than as a drum. Reverbs are either architectural and enormous or completely absent, with nothing in between. A sub note turns up once and leaves. Most of the material starts life as a recording rather than a synth patch, and much of it has been resampled two or three times until the artefacts are the timbre.
Key elements
- The withheld kickKicks arrive in a cluster inside the first half of the bar and then the lane stops entirely. The cluster tells you where you are; the hole afterwards is what stops it turning into a functional four-four.
- A backbeat somewhere elseOne clap per bar, and not on 2 or 4. Moving it to the and of 3 keeps the weight of a backbeat while removing the thing a dancer counts against.
- Found metal as percussionStruck pipes, tools, scaffolding and car panels used in place of drum machine hits. The transient is the whole event, so these are recorded dry and left dry.
- Voice used as a drumA single syllable pitched up a fifth or an octave, gated hard and triggered on offbeats. It is doing rhythmic work, not lyrical work, and it usually replaces the hat.
- Silence with a shapeGaps of a beat or more, placed so the ear is still counting when nothing arrives. Fill them and you have a competent club track and none of the genre.
How to get them
- Build the functional version firstProgram a straight 130 club loop that works, then delete. Removing hits from something that grooved leaves a shape behind. Starting from nothing and adding strange hits leaves nothing behind.
- KickTake a hard club kick, high-pass it at 90Hz and shorten the decay to about 60 milliseconds so only the click and the knock survive. Layer a separate sine that plays on maybe one kick in six, which is where the weight goes.
- Record your own metalGo and hit things with a phone recorder running: a radiator, a bin lid, a bike frame, a stairwell handrail. Trim to the transient, normalise, and tune three of them to different pitches so they read as a kit.
- Pitch the voiceTake one word, pitch it up seven semitones with formant correction switched off, and gate it to a 30 millisecond envelope. Duplicate at a fifth above for the accents.
- Mute in awkward lengthsAutomate the drum bus off for three beats, or five, or seven. Cutting on bar lines gives you a normal breakdown; cutting at lengths that do not divide into the phrase is what makes the arrangement feel unstable.
- Resample the whole bouncePrint the loop to audio, reload it as one sample, and chop that. Two generations of resampling glue the found sounds and the drum machine together in a way no amount of bus processing will.
Reference points
Lotic, M.E.S.H., Total Freedom, Arca, Amnesia Scanner, Elysia Crampton, Rabit and Chino Amobi, on Janus, PAN, NON Worldwide, Halcyon Veil and Tri Angle. 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.