Percussion Sings
TRACK DATA
Composition tool: MuseScore 3
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 6.5 Professional
Number of tracks: 25
Sound source: Recordings of live performances and sound effects, Sample One (Built-in sound sources of Studio One)
Composition and recording period: Aug 16 2023 - Dec 6 2023
Almost all made of percussion with auxiliary polyrhythm
(TM writes:)
This work is what I was thinking as the start of a new series, in which the concept is a sort of unusually grooved atonal music. Since the previous series called "Placid Wanderings" was designed as atonal beauty with some relaxing vibes, I wanted more rhythm-centred music this time.
But that concept is what FMT has been doing for all these 7.5 years. All such past tracks titled as "Life In Hanno" (2018), "C-Funk [with Gary Rees]" (2020) and "How I Like To Align My Things" (2021) are similar to that. No conclusion has been made, whether we make an album like that. It won't be bad at all, but will seem nothing outstanding to me. Let me think for a while.
The introduction is played on melodic toms and TR-808 toms with the bass of taiko drums, all of which have ambiguous tones. They are written in a scale a little bit like the Phrygian mode: C#, D, F#, G#, A, B and C. Castanets, which join later, are also treated as an instrument with ambiguous tones. I love those ambiguous tones like I used one for the bass in the track called "Free Day" in the Placid Wandering series.
As its tentative title "6-8 Percussions Sing" implies, the time signature is 6-8, but the groove is not a typical 6-8. Although I sometimes use 6-8 for swinging 4-4, that's not the case here. It's mixed with 4-4 feels, which must give you some gap feels. I wrote a similar trick in "Alley Play (featuring The Windscale Blues Experiment)", which has also the time of 6-8.
In terms of a mixture of 4-4 into 6-8, I'm reminded of the track titled "Unloosed" in the "Auditory Art For Visual Arts" album. It's polyrhythmic but apparently different from pure polyrhythms like in our piece "Parallel" from the same series. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky sometimes made some tricky sections with a polyrhythm, which is what I call here a pure polyrhythm. I call what we are making this time, say, an auxiliary polyrhythm.
In my view, historically we've seen a lot of works having the 4-4 time with dotted eighths for about 50 or 60 years, which is close to auxiliary polyrhythms, but that sort of rhythms have shown a poor variety and got even narrower. Dotted eighths in 4-4 tend to yield swing or syncopation feels, like the background vocals sing "Get up, get up, get up, get up" in Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing."
That's 3 beats put into 4 beats, but what I designed here is 4 beats embedded into 3 (or 6) beats.
Later in the track, when a marimba, vibraphone, piano and bass appear, they clear the ambiguity and play strange atonal phrases. It's a little bit funny that it changes from the strange to the other strange. But, anyway, all of them can be said to be percussion, including the slap bass.
Arrangement and mixing
(TI writes:)
For this track, I tried various attempts, but after twists and turns, I reverted to the earliest form.
I tried various things with this song, adding sounds and tweaking the structure in the middle stages, but none of them made it into the final version, and in the end all I did was transfer the score created by TM into Studio One, do some basic EQ and compressor processing on those sounds, balance them, and add harmonies and effect effects in places. I did not add any new parts or make any changes to the data created in MuseScore.
The sound creation was mixed with reference to minimal techno and dub techno genres, as the song is composed entirely of percussion sounds, but the music is completely different, so I think it has a different feel.
Specifically, I have focused on the combination of low frequency instruments and adjusted the sound so that the sounds around 40Hz are evenly distributed throughout the track.
The following section details the attempts made in the intermediate stages.
The first act was a 360° immersive mix. This is where the low-pitched Japanese taiko drum-like sound (created by Sine Wave) moves backwards and forwards, and the marimba moves up, down, left and right. However, although this can be done manually, it is still functionally impossible to programme, and some distribution sites do not support the specification, or the sound does not sound as intended, so we gave up on this project.
The next action taken was an attempt to add new noise. This was an attempt to match the so-called 'Shepard tone', a 'scale that keeps going up or down infinitely'. This had a good atmosphere and I liked it, but I had the impression that a certain amount of time was needed to express the 'infinite rise and fall of notes' and that the song would be dragged down by the impact of this, so I stopped doing this as well.
The next step was to add guest musicians. For this one, we approached a vocalist we were approaching for the first time, but we didn't get a favourable response, so we decided against it.
We also considered asking for additional tracks from other Noise music creators with whom we had been in contact, but we gave up on this before we could ask them, as there was a high possibility that we would not be able to utilise the underlying 'Rhythm characteristics' in this case.
In the meantime, we felt that we should utilise the fact that the song is 'just this "rhythm"', so we decided to present it in the first take.
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