Electroclash

What it is

Larry Tee booked a festival in Williamsburg in October 2001 and called it Electroclash, which is how a loose set of records made in Berlin, Detroit, Paris and New York over the previous three years acquired a name and then, within about four years, a reputation for being embarrassing. The records themselves are better than the reputation. DJ Hell's International DeeJay Gigolo had been putting out Miss Kittin and The Hacker since 1998; Adult. were doing something colder in Detroit on Ersatz Audio; Peaches, Chicks on Speed and Fischerspooner came at it from performance art. What they shared was the decision to build dance records out of eighties electro machines and put an unimpressed spoken vocal on top instead of a diva. It was the first dance scene of the internet era to be image-led, which is most of why it aged badly and none of why the drum programming works.

What it sounds like

Thin on purpose and very loud. The kick is a 909 with the decay short and the tone knob up, sitting over almost no sub, and the clap is an 808 hand clap printed dry with nothing on it. Hats are 808 and 909 samples layered, closed hats bright enough to hurt. The bass is a mono saw from a Juno-106 or an SH-101 with the filter mostly open and no movement in it. Synth leads are square waves through a phaser. Vocals are spoken rather than sung, close-miked, compressed hard, and often run through a light vocoder or a telephone filter. Nothing is warm and nothing is meant to be.

Key elements

• The 808 cowbellRiding a three three two figure across the bar. It is the single most identifiable sound in the genre and it is the one part that stops the pattern reading as plain house.
• Dry clap on 2 and 4An 808 hand clap with no reverb, no room and no layering. The sample already contains its own stutter, which is why it needs nothing added and why adding anything ruins it.
• A spoken vocalFlat, unemotional, close to the microphone, often listing things. Miss Kittin naming hotel rooms and Peaches repeating a single line are the same technique from different directions.
• One filter positionThe Juno or SH-101 bass is parked with the cutoff set and left there. Filter sweeps belong to French house, and consciously not doing them was part of the point.
• No swing at allStraight sixteenths throughout. The stiffness is the attitude, and a swung electroclash record turns immediately into something else.

How to get them

• Program the cowbell firstPut an 808 cowbell on 1, the a of 1 and the and of 2, then repeat the same three from beat 3. Pitch it up two semitones and give it a short slap delay of about 90 milliseconds.
• Keep the kick shortA 909 kick with decay at about a third and tone up high, high-passed at 55Hz. There is no sub in this music, so anything below 50Hz is taking headroom from the clap.
• Print the clap dry808 clap, no reverb, no doubling, no transient shaper. Compress the drum bus lightly at 2:1 so the clap and the kick sit at the same apparent level and neither one moves.
• Park the filterSet the bass cutoff where you want it and remove the automation lane. If the track needs movement, mute a part rather than sweeping one.
• Record the vocal flatOne take, 15cm from the microphone, no performance. Compress at 6:1 with a fast attack, high-pass at 150Hz, and add a vocoder doubling six decibels underneath rather than a harmony.
• Stop before the arrangementTwo synths, drums and a voice. These records are three or four elements deep and they get their size from level and from being dry, not from layers.

Reference points

Miss Kittin and The Hacker, Fischerspooner, Peaches, Adult., Chicks on Speed, Ladytron, Tiga, Felix da Housecat, Vitalic and ARE Weapons, plus the International DeeJay Gigolo and Ersatz Audio catalogues. Reference points for the sound, not endorsements.