Psybient
The chill-out tent, at half the tempo and none of the urgency.
The pattern
2 bars, sixteenth notes. Loops until you stop it.
Kick on 1 and 3, snare on 2 and 4, and at 92 that reads as half time rather than as a rock beat. Closed hats tick the eighths at 42 and 56 and stop before the and of 4, which is left to the single open hat at 70 to 74. The kick pickup moves between the bars: the last sixteenth of bar one, the and of 4 in bar two. A conga takes the and of 2 and the a of 3, with an extra on the a of 1 in bar two, and a ghost snare at 38 appears on the a of 3 of bar two. Bar two also adds a last quiet hat at 34 on the final sixteenth. Swing sits at 0.54, a small amount, because these records were played in rather than drawn.
What it is
Every outdoor party has a second room, and by the mid nineties the people making music for it had a genre of their own. Psybient, also called psychill or ambient dub, is what The Orb and Shpongle and Ott and the Twisted and Interchill catalogues put on at nine in the morning: 90 to 100 beats per minute, a half time drum pattern, a dub bassline and enough reverb to lose things in. It is the only branch of this family that is not four to the floor, and it is here as a reminder that the trance lineage always had a slow half. The rhythmic vocabulary comes from dub and from downtempo hip hop; the sound design and the sample choices come straight from Goa.
What it sounds like
Long. Nothing has a short tail. The kick is soft and round, the snare has a plate on it that runs into the next beat, and the hats tick eighths well below the level of the pads. Underneath, a dub bass playing two or three notes a bar with a filter opening slowly across sixteen. Above, layered field recordings, tabla, a flute or a sitar sample, and delays with the feedback set high enough to be slightly unstable. It is mixed to be listened to lying down, which in practice means the low mids are fuller and the top end is gentler than anywhere else in this family.
Key elements
- Half timeOne kick on beat 1, one on beat 3, and a snare on 2 and 4. At 92 that reads as half the speed of everything else on this list rather than as a rock beat.
- A pickup that movesA soft kick on the last sixteenth of bar one and on the and of 4 of bar two. It is the only forward motion anywhere in the pattern.
- Dub delayA quarter note delay with feedback near 60 percent on the snare and on fragments of everything else, fed by hand on the send rather than left permanently up.
- Hand percussionA conga or a tabla on two or three sixteenths a bar, moving between the bars, sitting in a longer reverb than the rest of the kit does.
- One open hat a barOn the and of 4, ringing over the barline. It is the only cymbal event in the loop and it does the work a fill would do at any faster tempo.
How to get them
- KickRound, no click, decay around 400ms, weight at 45Hz. Compress it gently with a slow attack so it swells into the bar rather than punching into it.
- SnareA soft acoustic snare into a 3 second plate, high-passed at 300Hz, with the return also feeding a quarter note delay. Automate that send rather than leaving it up.
- BassTwo or three notes a bar on a sine with a slow low-pass sweep, played slightly behind the beat and not quantised hard afterwards.
- ReverbOne long hall for the pads at 6 seconds, one medium plate for the percussion, nothing on the kick. Duck the hall by a decibel or two with the snare.
- Swing it slightly0.54 is enough. Straight sixteenths at this tempo sound programmed, and the reference records were all played in or nudged into place by hand afterwards.
- Let the arrangement driftEight minutes with no repeat structure. Sections should overlap rather than change, and nothing should announce itself on a bar line.
Reference points
The Orb, Shpongle, Ott, Entheogenic, Carbon Based Lifeforms, and the Twisted, Interchill and Ultimae 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.