Electro-Industrial

What it is

Vancouver, 1986 onward. cEvin Key and Nivek Ogre had an Emulator, a Prophet and a growing pile of quarter-inch, and Skinny Puppy's records stopped being songs and turned into assemblages. Front Line Assembly, started by a departing Puppy member, industrialised the method: sampled percussion stacked four and five layers deep, a kick that refuses the downbeat, and arrangements built by editing rather than by writing. The difference from EBM is structural, not cosmetic. EBM marches; this stumbles, because every percussive hit is a sample of something else and none of them agree on where the beat is. Numb, Mentallo & The Fixer and the whole nineties Zoth Ommog roster picked it up from here.

What it sounds like

Layered and muddy on purpose. The kick is three samples welded together, usually a synthetic thump, a recorded impact and a short noise burst, and it changes shape between hits. Percussion is sampled objects: springs, glass, breaking wood, all gated and pitched. Snares are electric snares run through anything to hand. Above that, sequences from a Prophet or a Matrix-12 that are more texture than melody, and dialogue lifted from film and television running underneath everything. Reverb is a long dark hall rolled off at 4kHz, and the whole record is compressed until the transients disappear.

Key elements

• The broken kickNot on the beats. It takes 1, the a of 1, the and of 2 and the and of 3, which is the electro figure slowed to a limp rather than a bounce.
• Two percussion layersA metallic clang and a rim sample running against each other on different sixteenths, so the top end never repeats identically inside a bar.
• Ghosted snareThe backbeat holds 2 and 4 but is shadowed at velocities in the forties on the a of 2 and the a of 4, which is how the loop keeps moving at 112.
• Sampled dialogueSpeech from film, documentary and news, cut into fragments and used as a rhythmic element rather than as a statement. Often reversed or pitched.
• Kick layeringThree or more samples per hit, tuned to different notes, so the kick has a pitch that argues with the bass instead of reinforcing it.

How to get them

• Build the kickLayer a synthetic 909 body, a close-recorded impact of something heavy, and a 30ms noise burst. Tune the body to the root, leave the impact untuned, and vary the balance between hits by hand.
• Sample your own percussionRecord breaking wood, a dropped chain and a struck window frame. Pitch each down three to seven semitones, gate at 80 to 150ms, and use them where a hat would go.
• Ghost the snareCopy the backbeat onto the a of 2 and the a of 4 at velocity 40 to 48, then shorten those copies to 60ms and high-pass them at 400Hz so they read as texture.
• DialogueChop speech into syllables of 100 to 300ms and place them on the sixteenths the drums leave open. Pitch alternate fragments down two semitones so the voice never settles.
• ReverbA hall of 2.5 to 4 seconds with the return low-passed at 4kHz and the pre-delay at zero. It should sound like the sample was recorded in the reverb, not sent to it.
• Compress the busSlow attack of 30ms, fast release, four to six decibels of reduction on the drum bus, then a limiter. Losing the transients is the point; this music is not meant to be punchy.

Reference points

Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly, Numb, Front 242's later records, Mentallo & The Fixer, Haujobb, and the Nettwerk and Third Mind labels. Reference points for the sound rather than endorsements.