isopropanol is the shit

[Freak of the week]

There is no point in analyzing a music that is not meant to be analyzed, but simply enjoyed at it's face value. From the music theory perspective his stuff is so trivial that it's simply not worth the effort. It's like if you asked CERN physicists to analyze some elementary-school experiment. If you are interested in the theory-heavy stuff listen to academic electronic or modern classical.

[brian trageskin]

There is no point in analyzing a music that is not meant to be analyzed, but simply enjoyed at it's face value. From the music theory perspective his stuff is so trivial that it's simply not worth the effort. It's like if you asked CERN physicists to analyze some elementary-school experiment. If you are interested in the theory-heavy stuff listen to academic electronic or modern classical.

 

i don't agree with your argument that it's too simple to be worth the effort. i personally think the rhythmic "shift" i tried to analyze (poorly probably but i did the best i could) is very uncommon in that style of music + the way it functions in relation to the introduction of the synth is interesting and deserves attention. 

i get why you would think the rhythmic intro isn't worth analyzing on its own but it's imo worth analyzing in relation to the introduction of the melodic "theme", which is the destination of my analysis i haven't reached yet. 

[Freak of the week]

i don't agree with your argument that it's too simple to be worth the effort.

I was talking from the perspective of professional music theorists who write papers and stuff, should have been clearer I guess. It would be interesting to try and analyze Formula.

[chronical]

Is this what it feels like listening to autists go off about old elevators?

[brian trageskin]

I was talking from the perspective of professional music theorists who write papers and stuff, should have been clearer I guess. It would be interesting to try and analyze Formula.

 

i think music doesn't have to be very complex to deserve analysis. imo the intro of isopropanol is more complex that it seems because its "deceptive cadence" is actually subtle and probably went unnoticed by most people. you can feel it yet you don't necessarily notice it when it happens.

by the way, i now think the weird stuff about that intro is you don't necessarily notice the rhythmic shift until the synth is introduced. you then suddenly realize you got lost at some point and mistook bar 1 for bar 2, which only makes that unnoticed and unexpected resolution more impactful. 

 

regarding formula, i don't think it features any subtle musical device like that so not worth an analysis in my book. 

[Freak of the week]

regarding formula, i don't think it features any subtle musical device like that so not worth an analysis in my book.

I find Formula interesting because of it's "disruptive" factor, but that is different from what you are after it seems.

[zkom]

I remember RDJ saying in some interview that early jungle was interesting because the people making the music didn't really have any knowledge of music theory, they were just interested in banging out sick tunes.

 

Maybe similar thing with gabber he seems to adore? Gabber is perhaps the least "analysable" genre of all electronic music genres. It makes very little sense outside the rave or club.

[Guest]

excellent thread idea. completely agree that looking analytically at music that wasn't necessarily composed in a very calculated/methodical way can be worthwhile. I'll have to give isoprapanol a listen with your description in mind...

[brian trageskin]

excellent thread idea. completely agree that looking analytically at music that wasn't necessarily composed in a very calculated/methodical way can be worthwhile. I'll have to give isoprapanol a listen with your description in mind...

 

let me know if you agree or not with my analysis .

 

back to business now.

> introduction of the synth riff:

 

the rhythmic shift i've had such a hard time analyzing gets resolved in a weird fashion with the echo of the melodic line unexpectedly emerging.

that shift subtly introduced chaos in an otherwise rigid and predictable structure. in the meantime (bar 16 to 21) the beat temporarily functions like a meaningless "surface": there's no directionality anymore because of the shift, no sense of linear development.

that temporary absence of directionality, by canceling any sense of purpose, also cancels out the very function of rhythm, which is to organize musical discourse by the interaction of tension and release over time.

 

by removing those indicators and repeating a drum-only loop, you're left with a tensionless section (or one in perpetual tension depending on how you look at it) that functions as an object, because of its purposeless physicality.

that object (the non-directional "surface" from bar 16 to 21) that is 2-dimensional (sound + time/duration) suddenly gets 3-dimensional when the synth emerges:

 

the very wet reverb on the synth has the acoustic effect of introducing spatiality in the tune (obviously there were panned elements so far but the reverbed synth functions differently).

i'm a bit tired now so i'll get back to this next time.

[Real Human Bean]

 

excellent thread idea. completely agree that looking analytically at music that wasn't necessarily composed in a very calculated/methodical way can be worthwhile. I'll have to give isoprapanol a listen with your description in mind...

 

let me know if you agree or not with my analysis .

 

back to business now.

> introduction of the synth riff:

 

the rhythmic shift i've had such a hard time analyzing gets resolved in a weird fashion with the echo of the melodic line unexpectedly emerging.

that shift subtly introduced chaos in an otherwise rigid and predictable structure. in the meantime (bar 16 to 21) the beat temporarily functions like a meaningless "surface": there's no directionality anymore because of the shift, no sense of linear development.

that temporary absence of directionality, by canceling any sense of purpose, also cancels out the very function of rhythm, which is to organize musical discourse by the interaction of tension and release over time.

 

by removing those indicators and repeating a drum-only loop, you're left with a tensionless section (or one in perpetual tension depending on how you look at it) that functions as an object, because of its purposeless physicality.

that object (the non-directional "surface" from bar 16 to 21) that is 2-dimensional (sound + time/duration) suddenly gets 3-dimensional when the synth emerges:

 

the very wet reverb on the synth has the acoustic effect of introducing spatiality in the tune (obviously there were panned elements so far but the reverbed synth functions differently).

i'm a bit tired now so i'll get back to this next time.

 

1. Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly.pdf

 

2. That you can grind so much water about a layer coming in 1 bar earlier than expected and another coming in 4 bars later than expected says more about how predictable most dance + popular music is than anything else.

Things like this happen plenty when you're jamming things out/working the board rather than obeying the grid in a DAW.

 

3. "the very wet reverb on the synth has the acoustic effect of introducing spatiality in the tune" No shit, that's what reverb does.

 

4. Discussing music can be fun but we don't really have suitable vocabulary for music that relies so heavily on timbre/sound design. Unless you went to get bogged down in super specific descriptions of every sound.

 

5. His early stuff was 'naive' but some of his later stuff is melodically and rhythmically complex. It still has to be based on repetition to be at all danceable but yeh...Syro is chromatic as fuck in places while still being funky, no mean feat.

[brian trageskin]

@ brian dance

 

haha thanks for the academic paper, i'll read that. i'm quite fond of intellectual imposture debunking in general.

 

if i use such big words it's because i'm limited by my poor knowledge of music theory as well as its terminology. "if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough" i hear :) - english not being my first language doesn't help either but that's secondary.

i wasn't trying to disguise my ignorance with the appearance of knowledge is what i'm trying to say. i simply don't know how to explain simply that theory stuff, partly because i don't understand it well enough so i use big, poetic, pompous gibberish instead :)

 

aside from that, i think i should have made myself clearer when i talked about "choice" in regard to music composition:

what i meant by "choice", and that applies to my whole analysis, is not necessarily that he meant for everything you hear in the tune to be, but that he chose ultimately to release it like that. in that, he "chose" stuff.

the argument that those tunes were composed intuitively, jammed out on the go, therefore careful analysis of them is silly since many of their components were accidental and determined by the gear and the methods he used, that argument is irrelevant to what i'm trying to do here because i'm not analyzing the intents and genesis of that tune but the results.

so while the "rhythmic shift" in the intro most probably wasn't planned, it's there, forever there, and i'm trying to analyze only what's there and how what's there works, on its own, regardless of its maker's intent.

 

yeah i get that me explaining the function of reverb must have been facepalm material to you hahaha! i had to do so though for later explanation. it's just infortunate i got tired at that point and left it there. i'll get back to it soon and i hope i'll make it worth being mentioned.

 

about timbre and sound design, that's not my focus here. my focus is song structure and arrangement, maybe harmony next time, well anything but timbre. fuck timbre lol.

 

i agree that some of his later stuff can be melodically and harmonically more complex (but not a whole lot imo) but i disagree with it being rhythmically more complex, it really isn't imo.

tbh one of the reasons i'm analyzing this tune is because those few bars are some of the most complex stuff he's ever made imo, not in terms of time signature but song structure, in spite of appearances.

now if those bars have nothing mind-blowing in your opinion (i'm not saying they do btw), i think the rest of rdj's catalogue doesn't get any more complex so there's that.

[YangYing]

brian dance and brian tregaskin are not the same user!

[hello spiral]

the argument that those tunes were composed intuitively, jammed out on the go, therefore careful analysis of them is silly since many of their components were accidental and determined by the gear and the methods he used, that argument is irrelevant to what i'm trying to do here because i'm not analyzing the intents and genesis of that tune but the results.

so while the "rhythmic shift" in the intro most probably wasn't planned, it's there, forever there, and i'm trying to analyze only what's there and how what's there works, on its own, regardless of its maker's intent.

 

y tho

[brian trageskin]

 

the argument that those tunes were composed intuitively, jammed out on the go, therefore careful analysis of them is silly since many of their components were accidental and determined by the gear and the methods he used, that argument is irrelevant to what i'm trying to do here because i'm not analyzing the intents and genesis of that tune but the results.

so while the "rhythmic shift" in the intro most probably wasn't planned, it's there, forever there, and i'm trying to analyze only what's there and how what's there works, on its own, regardless of its maker's intent.

 

y tho

 

because music theory 

[hello spiral]

Makes no sense

If you're saying you have no interest in replicating the effect because you're acknowledging it can't because it was 'made' intuitively. What's the point?

[brian trageskin]

Makes no sense

If you're saying you have no interest in replicating the effect because you're acknowledging it can't because it was 'made' intuitively. What's the point?

 

wow, you clearly didn't read carefully:

i never said i had no interest in replicating the effect, or that it couldn't be replicated, or that the reason it couldn't is because it was made intuitively.  

on the contrary i'm very interested in me or anyone else replicating effects, because that's the beauty of identifying and understanding musical devices, you can then appropriate them and (in that specific case extremely easily) replicate them at infinitum. then you can build on them and the sky is the limit from there. 

and just because you made something intuitively doesn't mean it can't be rationalized or easily reproduced.

[Guest]

that shift subtly introduced chaos in an otherwise rigid and predictable structure. 

 

 

I have so many questions

 

[hello spiral]

 

 

the argument that those tunes were composed intuitively, jammed out on the go, therefore careful analysis of them is silly since many of their components were accidental and determined by the gear and the methods he used, that argument is irrelevant to what i'm trying to do here because i'm not analyzing the intents and genesis of that tune but the results.

 

 

y tho

 

because music theory 

 

 

 

 

Makes no sense

If you're saying you have no interest in replicating the effect because you're acknowledging it can't because it was 'made' intuitively. What's the point?

 

wow, you clearly didn't read carefully:

 

 

Literally what you said, bolded for ease of reading comprehension

[hello spiral]

Furthermore it is my opinion that analysis of something made intuitively and/or organically in order to reverse engineer and replicate it is some whack shit

[Real Human Bean]

Treggers I think you're getting tripped up because you think there's more to this than there really is. 
For sure you can analyse intuitively performed music, happens all the time with jazz solos etc. Just pointing out that it's the rigidity of lots of machine and computer made music (and 'pop' more generally) that we're all used to hearing that makes this stuff stand out. What's happening is simple.
Even just a hihat coming in a bar earlier than add a lot of flavour/change the tension.

I meant to say harmonically not rhythmically but it's got more rhythmically complex too, there's way more rhythmic changes after he got into jungle stuff. There's more going on harmonically too.

Anyway, that bit in Isopropanol is cool. Another good lil' structural surprise of his that springs to mind is the nice resynth'd drum bit about 7mins into Ziggomatic getting interrupted interrupted after 12 bars when it feels like it's going to go for at least 16, helped by the fact that it comes in relatively bare and is in the process of building.

p.s. there's a thread somewhere about tracks where you lose the 1. Easyfun does this really well in a v poppy way.

[brian trageskin]

 

that shift subtly introduced chaos in an otherwise rigid and predictable structure. 

 

 

I have so many questions

 

 

 

lol. yeah that turn of phrase was probably poor and unnecessary but it was the best i could do to explain that the "rhythmic shift" disrupts the tune's binary structure and groove in a very discreet yet confusing way.

the fact that the structure is so banal and stable before the shift gives more impact to the shift in contrast, and there's no way of telling what's next the first time you listen to it. hence its "chaos-inducing" effect in the tune.

 

 

 

 

the argument that those tunes were composed intuitively, jammed out on the go, therefore careful analysis of them is silly since many of their components were accidental and determined by the gear and the methods he used, that argument is irrelevant to what i'm trying to do here because i'm not analyzing the intents and genesis of that tune but the results

 

 

 

Literally what you said, bolded for ease of reading comprehension

 

 

i don't see how any of what you say i said is contained in what i said. i respectfully suggest you read again what i wrote and leave it at that.

[brian trageskin]

@ brian dance

 

i get what you mean about the open hi-hat layer going on for an extra bar being an extremely simple thing, you already made that point and i already got you the first time, i just disagree with it having a relatively banal effect. on the contrary i think that such a simple and unsignificant feature induces deep unstability in the tune, which is fascinating to me given the technical simplicity of the thing.

 

i've listened to quite a bunch of rhythmically challenging western music in the past and still do to a certain degree (jazz, fusion, 20th century composers etc.) so i know how "rhythmic shifts" and "losing the 1" feel like. it's just that the specific way it operates in isopropanol, i don't think i've ever heard anywhere else.

 

that's why i now think the trick resides in:

 

1) establishing the 2-bar loop as the tune's indivisible basic unit (bar 1 to 12)

2) giving the illusion that bars 1 and 2 of the loop were switched, by:

- playing an extra layer for only one bar (bar 15)

- concealing the next bar's identity (bar 16) until its second half thanks to the fact that you can't tell one from the other until you reach that half.

which leads you to perceive bar 2 of the loop as bar 1, because you expect to hear bar 1 at that time for several reasons i discussed (bar 2 wouldn't make sense) and because of the similarity between the 2.

 

so no actual shift occured, only your perception of the tune's rhythm did. that such a powerful illusion can be acheived by such simple means is brilliant and unheard of to me.

[brian trageskin]

i forgot to mention that the trick's also achieved by the L¤ patch (drill + filtered thingies) being introduced on bar 1 of the loop at bar 5, which conditions us, the second time we hear the patch (bar 16) to perceive it as bar 1 again, because its first half is the same, and your memory now associates that patch appearing again with the first time it appeared.