Weightless

What it is

Different Circles started in 2015 as a home for a kind of grime instrumental with the floor taken out from under it. Mumdance and Logos had been making tracks that kept grime's tempo, its stabs and its sense of threat while dropping most of the kick and snare pattern, and their Proto mix put the idea in front of a lot of people at once. Rabit, Yamaneko and Bloom worked the same ground from different angles. The name is literal: with no regular backbeat the music has nothing to sit on, so the melodic material and the silence have to hold the bar together between them. Some of these records go thirty seconds with no drums at all. What follows is the skeleton version, which is roughly as much rhythm as the style will take.

What it sounds like

Metal, air and threat. Sound design comes from field recordings, industrial noise, sword clashes, glass, and synths with no oscillator warmth at all. Where grime would put a square wave riff, this puts one detuned tone held for four bars with a slow filter on it. Drums are single hits placed like punctuation, dry or with a huge convolution reverb and nothing in between. The low end is often absent rather than deep, which is disorienting on purpose. When a sub does arrive it is enormous and it stays for one note. The stereo field is wide and mostly empty, and reverbs are used to imply architecture.

Key elements

• No regular backbeatThe rim appears once a bar, on beat 4 rather than on 2, with the occasional ghost ahead of it. Removing the pulse is the compositional decision the whole style rests on.
• Silence as structureBars with two or three events in them. The gaps have to be long enough to become uncomfortable, and shortening them turns the track back into grime.
• Held tonesA single detuned pitch or a filtered noise band sustained for four bars, doing the job the riff does elsewhere by refusing to move.
• Found sound percussionMetal impacts, glass, blade rings and knocks used instead of drum machine hits, kept dry so the transient is the entire event.
• Implied architectureConvolution reverbs from real spaces, tunnels, stairwells, halls, used to place sounds at different distances rather than to add polish.

How to get them

• Write the gaps firstLay out where nothing happens, then put events at the edges of those holes. Building the drums first and deleting hits afterwards does not produce the same result.
• RimA dry side stick or a metal knock at around 98, once a bar, on beat 4 rather than on 2. Let it be the loudest transient in the track and give it no reverb.
• Held toneTwo saws detuned 8 cents, low-passed at 1.2kHz, sustained across four bars with the cutoff drifting slowly. Automate the volume rather than the notes.
• WoodblockA hard knock or a struck pipe, dry, panned 30 percent off centre, used two or three times a bar as the only regular percussive element.
• SubOne sine note per phrase, arriving without warning and stopping dead. Its rarity is what makes it land; a sub on every bar would defeat the whole approach.
• Swing50 percent. With this few events there is nothing for swing to act on, and a shuffled hat here would sound like a stylistic apology.

Reference points

Mumdance, Logos, Rabit, Yamaneko, Bloom and Acre, on Different Circles, Keysound and Tri Angle. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.