Primitive Dance
Notes On "PRIMITIVE DANCE"
TRACK DATA
Composition tool: MuseScore, Studio One 4 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 4 Professional
Number of tracks:126
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Mai-Tai, Mojito (All built-in sound sources of Studio One), TAL-NOIZEMAKER
Composition and Recording period: Nov 11 2020 - Jan 25 2021
（Remix）
Recording & Mix tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional
Number of tracks:16
(Also, the concert version of this work was released in January 2022. For further details please refer to "Leaked Live FMT".)
(TI writes:)
Although this track is titled "Dance," it is a music that
It is a music that has no physical elements at all, and only exists within an idea.
In other words, the music is fleshly, but without any physicality.
In other words, it is music that sounds only in my head.
In other words, the music is physical, but without any body.
I don't sweat at all, and I don't move my body at all when I compose music.
This is the kind of music.
This track was completed around November last year, but we put it in stock because we prioritized the release of other tracks.
Then, after the release in December, I listened to this track again and found many things I wanted to fix, so I did a lot of work on it.
This version is almost the same as the score, but the tone and mix are completely different. In particular, we completely changed the tone of the bass and drums, which greatly changed the atmosphere.
[How did I start composing]
This is my perception, and I didn't talk about it with TM beforehand, but I started creating this music with the idea of "the essence of Funk" in mind.
I have a hypothesis that the root of Funk lies in rhythm. In the past, I had a hypothesis that Funk would be possible without a bass as an instrument.
We wrote a track called "C-Funk" based on this hypothesis.
This time, I assumed that the essence of Funk is "rhythmic swaying.
And this time, unlike the hypothesis that led to the creation of C-Funk, I created it with the hypothesis, "Isn't the movement in the low frequency the basis of rhythm?
Therefore, the concept of this song was to emphasize the rhythms and low frequencies that define Funk, and to minimize other additional elements such as melodies and harmonies that would contribute to the creation of Funk.
The basic beat and bass line were created by TM.
Initially, I interpreted this beat as Kraftwerk-like music.
However, TM, who wrote the key phrases, said that the phrases were inspired by P-Funk.
When you thoroughly strip away the Funk elements, Kraftwerk and P-Funk share the same elements.
So, I wrote a Kraftwerk-like refrain for this bass line. The sequence in the treble clef is reminiscent of that, I think.
[My definition and interpretation of Funk]
Funk is simply "the swing of rhythm.
It's not "bouncing", it's "swinging". Of course, there is funk that bounces, and there is funky bouncing, too. However, I believe that Funk can be Funk without bouncing.
I believe that "jumping" is one of the forms of "shaking," so to speak.
For example, I think James Brown's Groove (the interval between notes) is bouncy.
In this case, "bounce" means that the intervals between notes are not evenly spaced, but they are regularly shortened or lengthened.
In contrast, I think Sly & the Family Stone is rather evenly spaced in the Groove itself. Also, the Grooves on the rhythm boxes they use are evenly spaced.
However, Sly and rhythm boxes are not perfectly evenly spaced. They are irregularly and subtly lengthened and shortened, or "shaken" so to speak. Or, even if the rhythms are evenly spaced, there seems to be accents of strength or weakness, long or short.
The Groove itself is evenly spaced. The Groove itself is evenly spaced, and the actual MIDI data is perfectly aligned on the Studio One grid.
However, the Groove is shaking irregularly. I think this is expressed clearly and loudly in the form of irregularly blending in the odd time signatures that are characteristic of this piece.
If you look at "sway" in a larger sense, it doesn't necessarily boil down to 4/4 time, which is the majority in funk and pop music.
(TM writes:)
The tentative title in our making process was the same, “Primitive Dance.” I chose this title as it's primitively sensual, but it doesn't actually involve the body. As always, when computers play, it's going to be zero groove, but I'm tired of zero groove, and we can do more, where we have the current technological premise. As TI indicates, I took some aspects of P-Funk into account for sure. I love Bootsy Collins, especially.
The image is that a clockwork or something like a music box creates a structural groove with a combination of so-called zero grooves. I even thought about making the tentative title "Clockwork Beat". The music box may not have odd time signatures, but this song mixes irregular ones irregularly. They are mainly 5 beats, but occasionally 3 beats are put immediately after 5 beats, creating a surprise. In what you might call Section C, 3 beats are used; I have never heard such a piece using 3 beats this way.
Not limited to this track, but perhaps I should explain the rhythm of FMT a little further.
Presumably more than half of FMT’s tracks use multiple drum kits. Basically, there are leading and supporting roles, and the tones are often completely different. The basic form of FMT percussion is a combination of a raw drum as the main character and a drum machine as the supporting character. This gives a subtle feel, whether it's timbrally like a human being or mechanical.
In this piece, the mechanical tone is not emphasised so much, but many of them are not sampled sound sources of raw drums that human beings play. This is the first time for FMT to aim like this. It also uses three kits, including electronic drums.
Human grooves often appear depending on the combination of strength and weakness, and the rhythm of FMT basically simulates that, but it is done with completely different tones. This feels very mysterious, as it has some human strength and weakness. It's as if a human with four arms and four legs (or even six of them) is playing. Interestingly, when you take out each kit, it has a really flat zero-groove beat, but I can't say that it is made up of one. The number of sounds is a little low. When you add up the multiple kits, there are so many types of sounds. This is related to the FMT concept of "non-physicality". The performance is something that cannot be done by playing a musical instrument using the body.
In this particular track, not only percussion but also bass, rhythm guitar and electric piano are included, and the sound is reduced on beat. The strong beat puts the sound in a position like an off-beat. Moreover, the position of the strong beat is not constant.
In that sense, what FMT often says is "minimal, but there is no repetition", whereas in “Primitive Dance”, I had an intention to hit the opposite like "there are a lot of unexpected irregularities, but overall it is very minimal".
In general, today's rhythms are either a raw drum kit or zero groove. I'm challenging that. I make another groove that human percussion cannot make and multi-dimensional groove that we have never heard so far.
[Tone Creation and Mixing]
(TI continues:)
The bass tone that forms the core of this track was initially an acoustic guitar sample in a lower key.
C-Funk" was an attempt to create "Funk that doesn't rely on the bass instrument.
Based on the experience of creating "C-Funk," I initially thought that the bass line itself did not necessarily need to have a heavy bass sound, but could be complemented by percussion instruments such as the bass drum and other electronic sounds.
In the beginning, I thought that the bass line itself did not necessarily need to use heavy bass sounds, but could be complemented by percussion instruments such as bass drum and other electronic sounds, so I deliberately used acoustic guitar sounds with little low frequency, but I still felt that it was lacking in some way.
This year, I listened to the track again, and at the final stage of revisions, TM said, "It's good, but the bassline is too dull," and at first I reinforced the guitar tone with sine waves. In the end, I cleared the land and replaced all the tones in the bassline, like rebuilding a building.
When I wrote the score for C-Funk, I made the decision not to use the bass as an instrument, but this time, I was conscious of the bass as an instrument and wrote the bassline, so I realized that it would be difficult to do without using the bass sound.
So I tried to alternate between the "P-Funk"-like slap bass that TM imagined and the Kraftwerk-like synth bass that I imagined.
Come to think of it, the combination of slap bass with synth bass reminds me of Yellow Magic Orchestra's Technopolis.
I was quite confused about how and when to combine the two.
It's almost as if I was in a soft-serve ice cream store in the basement of Nakano Broadway (imagine an old, chaotic shopping center in Tokyo, Japan*, or a wholesome Kowloon Castle), wondering how to mix the flavors, or whether it would be okay to use a single flavor in the first place. It's almost like wondering how to mix flavors in a soft-serve ice cream shop.
*The store is attached to a residential facility that was built more than 50 years ago, and contains daily necessities such as food and beverages, anime and manga specialty stores, fortune telling and bodywork corner, and rare CD and record stores.
It was very difficult to make people understand that the sound was switched while not giving them a sense of discomfort. The reason for this is that the acoustic characteristics of each are completely different. We spent a lot of time and effort to eliminate this sense of discomfort. At first, I layered the common low frequency tones and then alternated these characteristic sounds. However, since the common tones are sounding all the time, that "alternating face" feeling is diminished.
Therefore, in the end, I fine-tuned the sound pressure and left the slap bass and synth bass alone.
However, in order to keep the sound pressure the same, I made some minor adjustments such as adding notes above or below the octave of each other according to how the phrases are connected.
In addition, I used a heavy bass DUB around 50Hz in the middle part, so I used 18 tracks in total for the bass part.
This mix is also based on Larry Levan's mix. No matter how much I raise the bass, the upper part doesn't get crushed. On the other hand, no matter how much I raise the top, it doesn't interfere with the bass.
In terms of rhythm, the sound image and acoustics of each part are changed for each location. For the rhythm, I changed the sound image and acoustics of each part for each location, and for each individual instrument, I changed the effects and localization for each note.
One method that I used for the first time was to use reverb and delay in a different key from the original sound. In some places, the key of the rhythm note remains the same, but the reverb is played at a lower pitch and in a different place from the original note.
For this, I played the rhythm part down an octave, sampled only the reverb sound, and pasted it by hand into the sub-tracks of the individual instruments.
(TM supplements:)
The female voice of [pe], [pa] and [po] is sampled voices of the Mandarin Chinese language. I like its pronunciation of [p], so rhythmical.
[Production Process]
It was time to update Studio One, so I used StudioOne4 for the initial version of the production last year, and StudioOne5 for the remix.
These two versions were compatible, but the sound was quite different ("5" is clearly clearer sounding). Also, the parameters of the effectors had changed, and even with the same settings, they sounded different.
I mixed down the sounds created with "4" for each instrument part, and remixed them with "5".
The bass line, for example, which was replaced with a new tone, was created in "5", but it was also mixed down with just the bass line, and then mixed in a new "5" file for the new mix.
By separating the "sound creation file" and the "mix file" in this way, I had to do more work, but the mixing itself became easier because the sounds for each part were all in one file, and the operation speed was also improved by reducing the load on the CPU and hard disk. This was a discovery of a new mixing method for me.
[Summary]
I wanted to eliminate the physicality and materiality as much as possible from the music that is considered to be extremely physical, Funk, and to find out what elements make Funk pure and Funk as music.
To put it another way, music and art are fostered by the history and culture of a people or race, but even people from outside of that history and culture can be attracted to them, and in the end, what are the elements that attract people who don't have the same historical and cultural background? In the end, what is it that I am attracted to?
This is not limited to the Funk genre of music, but I believe that music is not necessarily (only) produced by the body, nor is it the origins or the method of expression itself, such as culture, history, or racial background.
All of these are very important matters when considering music and should not be disregarded, but I do not believe that they are the very essence of music (a temporal art that stimulates air vibrations with the sense of hearing).
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