Microhouse
House reduced until the silence between the hits is the arrangement.
The pattern
2 bars, sixteenth notes. Loops until you stop it.
Nothing in this grid goes above 100, and most of it sits between 30 and 58. Kick on all four beats and a rimshot on 2 and 4 rather than a clap, with a ghost rimshot on the a of 4 in bar one and on the a of 2 in bar two. Closed hats land only on the a of beats 1, 2 and 3 plus a ghost on the e of 4, never on the beat itself, so the pulse comes entirely from the kick. The cabasa ticks the e of each beat underneath. There is exactly one open hat in the whole two bars, on the and of 3 in bar two, and being alone is what makes it an event.
What it is
Microhouse is what happened when a group of producers around Cologne and Frankfurt in the early 2000s took house apart and kept only the smallest pieces. Akufen, Ricardo Villalobos, Thomas Brinkmann and the Perlon and Kompakt catalogues built records out of clicks, cut-up radio, room noise and single hits, at levels that force a listener to lean in. The kick still lands on every beat, and that is the only thing keeping it house at all. Everything else is granular, quiet and placed rather than played, and a track will happily spend four minutes adding one element.
What it sounds like
Very quiet and very detailed. A soft kick, a rimshot where a clap would be, and hi-hats that sound like a microphone being tapped with a fingernail. The rest is fragments: a vocal syllable, a click of vinyl noise, half a second of a jazz record, placed on the sixteenth grid and repeated with tiny variations. There is often no bassline as such, just the kick and a filtered pad. It works on headphones and in a very good room and almost nowhere in between.
Key elements
- A rimshot backbeatA side stick rather than a clap on 2 and 4, quiet enough that it reads as punctuation rather than as a backbeat you would dance to.
- Everything under velocity 100The whole pattern lives between 30 and 78, with only the kick above that. The narrow dynamic range at a low level is the genre.
- One open hat every two barsA single open hat in the second bar, which becomes the loudest event in the loop after the kick simply by being alone.
- Cut-up fragmentsVocal syllables and record noise sliced into thirty and forty millisecond pieces, then used as percussion rather than as samples.
- SpaceMore of the grid is empty than full. Every hit you remove makes the remaining ones louder without you touching a fader.
How to get them
- KickSoft and short with the click rolled off, around velocity 100, which in this context is by some distance the loudest thing in the track.
- RimshotA dry side stick at 78 with a ghost at 34 in the other bar. No reverb, or a room so short that it reads as another click rather than as space.
- HatsPlace them on the a of beats 1, 2 and 3 between 44 and 52, plus a ghost on the e of 4 at 30. Never on the beat itself.
- FragmentsRecord a radio for ten minutes, slice it at zero crossings, and audition slices until two of them work as a rhythm together. Then use only those two.
- Cabasa or shakerOn the e of each beat between 32 and 46, so there is texture underneath the silence instead of actual silence.
- Resist addingWhen the loop feels thin, take something out instead of putting something in. This is the one genre where that advice is literally rather than metaphorically true.
Reference points
Akufen, Ricardo Villalobos, Thomas Brinkmann, Isolee, Luciano, and the Perlon, Kompakt and Playhouse catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.
The pattern is a starting point rather than a rule. If you want the theory underneath why any of it works, Battuto measures it.