Futurepop

What it is

1999 is the year. VNV Nation's Empires and Apoptygma Berzerk's Welcome to Earth both landed sounding like EBM bands who had spent a summer at trance nights, and Covenant followed a year later. Ronan Harris coined the name half in irony and it stuck anyway. What carried over from the older music is the voice, baritone and declamatory rather than sung, and the bass, a sequenced sixteenth line off a Pro-One patch that never leaves the root for long. What got replaced is everything underneath: the kick came from Hamburg, the offbeat came from trance, and the pads came from a JP-8000. It is the point where this family stopped trying to sound like a factory and started trying to sound like a stadium.

What it sounds like

Wide and wet, which is unusual here. A short dry kick with a fast pitch envelope, a clap layered with a snare and drowned in a 1.8 second hall, and an open hat on every offbeat that carries the whole arrangement. The pad is seven detuned saws with a slow attack, sidechained to the kick, and there are usually two of them an octave apart. The bass sequence runs constant sixteenths with a gate on the amp so it pumps against the pad. Vocals are close, compressed and doubled at the unison with a long reverb behind them. Delays are dotted eighths, and there is far more 10kHz here than on any other page in this family.

Key elements

• The offbeat open hatOn the and of every beat, ringing into the next sixteenth. Straight out of trance, and it is what makes these records feel like they are climbing rather than marching.
• Sequenced sixteenth bassThe one EBM part that survived. A monophonic line in constant sixteenths, gated, sitting under the pad and doing the job a bass drum tail does elsewhere.
• Declamatory vocalSung in a narrow range at the bottom of a male voice, more spoken than melodic, with the phrasing landing on the beat rather than across it.
• Supersaw padsJP-8000 style, slow attack, heavily sidechained. Two layers an octave apart with a chorus on the upper one, filling everything between 300Hz and 8kHz.
• The pre-chorus fillA clap on the and of 4 and another on the a, pushing into the downbeat. Every record in this style uses it and it appears at the end of bar two here.

How to get them

• KickShort, 140ms, with a pitch envelope falling from 180Hz to 50Hz over 30ms. Dry, no reverb, high-passed at 40Hz and compressed lightly. It is a timekeeper, not a feature.
• Clap and snare togetherLayer a clap with an electric snare eight milliseconds later, then send the pair to a 1.8 second hall at 25 percent wet with 40ms pre-delay. High-pass the return at 500Hz.
• Offbeat hatOne open hat sample on every offbeat eighth with a 300ms tail, so it rings across the following sixteenth. Around minus twelve, and slightly wider than mono using a five millisecond delay on one side.
• PadSeven saws detuned by 22 cents, attack 400ms, low-pass at 6kHz. Sidechain to the kick with 4 to 6dB of reduction and a 120ms release so it breathes rather than pumps.
• Bass sequenceConstant sixteenths on the root with the fifth appearing every fourth bar. Square wave, low-pass at 600Hz, amp gated by the same sixteenth clock. Keep it under the pad, not over it.
• VocalRecord low and close, compress at 6:1, then double at the unison panned 20 percent each way. Behind it a 2.5 second hall and a dotted eighth delay at 20 percent with two repeats.

Reference points

VNV Nation, Apoptygma Berzerk, Covenant, Assemblage 23, Icon of Coil, Rotersand, and the Metropolis and Dependent labels. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.