Industrial Hardcore

What it is

Enzyme Records in Rotterdam, and a handful of producers who had been listening to Downwards and Ant-Zen as much as to Thunderdome. Ophidian, The Outside Agency and Hellfish took the hardcore kick and stopped putting it on the beat. Instead it plays a figure: a syncopated roll built from the same distorted sample, moving around the bar so the pulse has to be inferred rather than counted. Underneath it the mix is metallic, reverberant and largely atonal, and the tracks are structured more like industrial records than like dance tools. This is the part of the family that a techno listener can get into without adjusting anything.

What it sounds like

Distorted kicks that arrive in threes and fours where a four to the floor would have one, metal being struck in a large concrete room, and a snare pitched low enough that it reads as an impact rather than a backbeat. There is a lot of reverb and it is deliberately unpleasant: a spring, a bright plate, a convolution of an actual factory. Where a lead would be there is usually a drone or a field recording. Nothing swings and nothing is warm, and the whole thing carries a low rumble that sits under the kicks.

Key elements

• The broken kick figureThe kick plays a syncopated pattern rather than the beat: six or seven kick hits a bar, arriving on the beat, the a of 1, the and of 2 and so on. It is a riff played on a bass drum.
• A backbeat on 3One low, distorted electric snare halfway through the bar. With the kick refusing to mark the pulse, this hit is what tells you where you are.
• Metal in a big roomPipes, sheets and springs, sampled and pitched down, sitting in a two second reverb. They occupy the space that hi-hats occupy elsewhere and are much louder than hats would be.
• Almost no hi-hatsFour quiet closed hats a bar at most, tucked onto sixteenths off the pulse. The top end belongs to the metal lane, not to a drum machine.
• Structure over dropThese tracks develop across seven or eight minutes with no breakdown and no drop. Elements are added and removed rather than built and released.

How to get them

• One kick, many placementsBuild one distorted kick and then write with it as though it were a bass synth. Vary the velocity by twenty or thirty points between hits so the figure has a shape rather than being flat.
• Shorten the offbeat kicksTrim the syncopated hits to about half the length of the on-beat ones. If every kick has the full tail the figure smears into a single continuous tone and the rhythm disappears.
• Record your own metalA radiator, a bike frame, a filing cabinet, recorded on anything. Pitch down an octave, gate hard, then send heavily to a two second convolution reverb of a large hard room.
• Snare as impactElectric snare pitched down four or five semitones, through a distortion, with a bright plate at thirty percent. It should read as something falling over rather than as a drum.
• Rumble underneathTake a kick, stretch it to two seconds, low-pass at 80Hz and loop it under the whole track at minus eighteen decibels. That continuous rumble is why these records feel heavy even in the gaps.
• Arrange by subtractionStart with everything and remove one element every sixteen bars, then add it back changed. No drops. The form comes from industrial records rather than from dance ones.

Reference points

Ophidian, The Outside Agency, Hellfish, Sei2ure, Igneon System, Tymon, and the Enzyme, Deathchant and PRSPCT catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not endorsements.