Wave

What it is

Plastician started playing this on Rinse FM and signing it to Terrorhythm around 2015, which is what gave a scattered internet scene somewhere to point. Klimeks, Skit, Kareful and the Liquid Ritual crowd, Deadcrow and Barnacle Boi were making trap-derived instrumentals at 140 to 150 with the drums stripped back and the reverb turned up until the space was the loudest element in the track. It sits next to grime's tempo and next to weightless in its use of holes, but where weightless is metal and threat this is melodic and cold, built on bell and pad melodies with a lot of sub underneath. The name is descriptive of the shape of the sounds, which swell in and out rather than hitting.

What it sounds like

Wet. Long plate and hall reverbs on everything except the kick, with pre-delay set high enough that the transient still lands cleanly. Bells, glassy plucks and pitched vocal fragments, usually in a minor key with a lot of held notes. Drums come from a trap kit and are then processed until they belong in the space: the snare has a two second tail, the hats are dark and thin, the rim is dry and the only element left untouched. Sub is enormous and arrives one note at a time. There is often a foley layer, rain or wind or tape hiss, running under the whole track to hold the empty parts together.

Key elements

• HalftimeOne snare per bar, on beat 3, at around 146. The tempo is fast and the feel is slow, and that gap between the two is what the whole style is built on.
• Long gaps between eventsA gap of five sixteenths inside a two bar loop, and far longer than that in a real arrangement, so the reverb tail from the last hit becomes the thing you are listening to. Filling them turns this into ordinary trap.
• Reverb as an instrumentA four second hall on the snare and the bells, with the wet signal often louder than the dry. The decay is being composed rather than applied.
• A dry rimOne completely unprocessed element, used twice a bar, so the ear has something in the foreground to measure the depth against.
• Sub, one note at a timeA sine playing whole notes rather than a bassline. It arrives, holds, and stops, and its rarity is what gives it weight.

How to get them

• Write the holes firstSketch where nothing happens across eight bars before placing a single drum. Programming a full beat and deleting from it leaves the residue of a full beat behind.
• SnareA trap snare into a four second hall at 60 percent wet with 80 milliseconds of pre-delay, then a low-pass on the return at 4kHz. The dry transient should be audible for about a tenth of a second and then be gone into the tail.
• RimA side stick with nothing on it at all. No reverb, no delay, panned slightly off centre. It is the reference point that makes everything else sound far away.
• BellsAn FM bell or a music box sample, pitched down a fourth, with a long release and a slow filter sweep across four bars. Play three notes and let them overlap.
• SubA pure sine, whole notes, sidechained 6dB to the kick, high-passed at 28Hz to keep the sub-audible energy out of the limiter. Change the note once every two bars at most.
• Foley bedRain, wind or room tone under the entire track at about minus 30dB. The gaps need something in them or the track sounds like it has stopped rather than like it is waiting.

Reference points

Plastician and Terrorhythm, Klimeks, Skit, Kareful and Liquid Ritual, Deadcrow, Barnacle Boi and Sorsari, with Whitearmor and the Drain Gang records circling the same territory from the rap side. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.