Martial Industrial

What it is

A field drum, a bell and a recording of a crowd is most of the instrumentation. The style grew through the nineties out of the ritual end of industrial, on Cold Meat Industry in Sweden and a handful of small German labels, and it works by subtraction: no hi-hats, no bassline, no sixteenths, and a tempo around 88 that reads as half of whatever else is on the shelf. What is left is a marching pattern played on toms and a snare, a sustained choir or string sample, and a lot of room. The imagery attached to a fair amount of this music is provocative by design and has been argued about for thirty years. The drums are what this page is about, and they are genuinely unlike anything else in the family.

What it sounds like

Large and slow. The snare is a deep field drum recorded in a hall, with a real tail rather than a gate, and it is usually the only thing with an attack. Toms are big and untuned, closer to a timpani than to a kit. The kick barely appears, and when it does it is a soft thud with no click. Above the drums: a choir sample held for eight bars, a bowed cymbal, a bell, and sometimes a spoken recording from an archive. There is no synthesiser bass and almost no midrange activity between hits, so the reverb reads as the main instrument rather than as an effect.

Key elements

• Half timeThe backbeat sits on beat 3 alone rather than on 2 and 4. At 88 that means one snare every two seconds, which is the entire reason this reads as a procession.
• No hi-hatsThere is nothing in the loop above about 2kHz except reverb and cymbal wash. Adding a hat pattern collapses the style faster than any other single change.
• Marching tomsThe toms carry the pulse the kick would normally carry, on beat 1, beat 2, the and of 2 and beat 4. They are the closest thing here to a groove.
• The rollTwo to four quiet sixteenths, velocities between 48 and 60, running into the loop point. It is a drum corps figure, not a fill in the dance music sense.
• Sustained choirOne sampled chord held across the whole loop, usually a Mellotron-style choir or a string pad, providing the harmony nobody plays.

How to get them

• Record the snare bigA deep field or marching snare in the largest room available, one microphone at three metres and one close, blended. If sampling, pick a sample with a 900ms tail and do not gate it.
• Toms instead of a kickTwo low toms tuned a fourth apart, played on beats 1, 2 and 4 with a pickup on the and of 2. Compress at 3:1 with a slow attack so the skin sound survives.
• Use the kick sparinglyBeat 1 and the and of 3 only, a soft sine at 45Hz with a 500ms decay and no click at all. It is felt rather than heard, and doubling it ruins the pacing.
• ChoirA Mellotron choir or a sampled ensemble on one chord, filtered at 5kHz, with a 6 second hall at 40 percent wet. Fade it in over four bars and never change the voicing.
• Leave the gapsThe longest gap in this loop is three sixteenths and that is deliberate. Every instinct will tell you to fill it; the pacing is the effect, and filling it makes a slow rock beat.
• Master quietlyPeak around minus one but keep the average low, in the region of minus sixteen LUFS. This is one of the few styles in the family that depends on dynamic range surviving.

Reference points

In Slaughter Natives, Puissance, Arditi, Karjalan Sissit, Triarii, and the Cold Meat Industry catalogue. Named as reference points for the drum sound, not as endorsements of the artists or their imagery.