I just completed the final draft of an actually consequential essay for a teaching qualification, but I'm still in the writing-zone, so I'm treating myself to another blog post! Before it gets underway, I have to give enormous thanks to everyone (friends, colleagues, and strangers alike) who came to the Shacklewell Arms show with Popular Music! We had a blast, I finally sold out my personal stash of Pluperfect Mind vinyl records, and I was beyond delighted to meet Zac and Prue and witness them give a spell-binding performance. A really special night... But, enough fond reminiscing now...
The previous post was mainly about "rhythmix parallax" — the way people interpret the same rhythm differently depending on their relation to it — but also explored tactus modulations, in which the subjective feeling of the beat changes for the listener. It can be a very cool thing to play with, so I wanted to share some examples of songs and tracks outside of extreme metal which use it.
It's appropriate to begin with another band deeply entangled with Popular Music... What an addictive song! The opening guitar chords have a 6/8 feel to me, but then Nick Tamburro's drums come in and it throws the tactus off completely! It's the sort of beat you really have to count: the first instinct is to try 4/4, which almost works when Sam Mickens starts up his trademark warble, but there's a bit of extra time at the end of each bar which gives an awesome lurching feeling. Turns out it's best counted as an even faster 9/8, meaning it's in a 2:3 temporal ratio with the opening guitar part (which continues playing hemiolas underneath). At [0:33], the tactus seems to modulate back to the original 6/8 tempo, thanks to Mickens' lilting vocal melody. Perhaps this is more a case of rhythmic parallax than clear-cut metric modulation though, as it could be that Mickens, Bischoff and Tamburro are all feeling different tactuses to each other...
EDIT: I've been in correspondence with the lovely Nick Tamburro and he set the record straight. Everyone is feeling the song in 6-time, but Sam is subdividing into duplets while Nick and Jherek are subdividing into triplets... Nick doesn't feel the hi-hats as a tactus at all! So this is a case of rhythmic parallax where the band feels it in 6-time while listeners such as myself might hear it in 9-time. Big thanks for the insight, Nick! x
I get the impression that this is something of a Marmite song: either you love it or you hate it. The overall structure is dead simple, as it's just a verse repeated over and over, no chorus, no bridges, certainly nothing fancy like a middle eight. But the verse it repeats is just dynamite. My friend and boomer-shooter champion Ceasepool brought this song to my attention when he asked what the hell was going on with the time signatures, and I was all too happy to help. The opening feel is definitely one of compound time, thanks to the tripletty part of the scrappy guitar melody, with the cymbals and bass establishing a strong beat... but every now and then a beat is elongated or curtailed, causing some fun lurching and stuttering. Eventually, a completely different, solid simple-time beat kicks in at [0:26], continuing for the rest of the instrumental verse. Again, this is another 2:3 temporal ratio with the original beat (as capricious as it was). If you're counting with the drums rather than the bass or guitar (which complicate the matter with some sick cross-rhythms), the beats are grouped like this: 3333334 / 33343334 / 3333433 / 33343334 / 44 / 4etc... but there are a few ways it could be counted/interpreted. Very cool! But again, through rhythmic parallax, each performer and listener probably has different interpretations of the tactus... And what a gorgeous melody Mr Longstreth sings!
"Math rock" and "Midwest emo" are like the coolest things in the world when you're a teenager. Then you discover Yank Crime and never look back (I could've put Do You Compute in this blog post now I think about it...). But Pretend manage to stay golden to me, probably because they sound more like Bluetile Lounge than American Football. And this song is so gorgeous! Before the tactus modulation begins, the lead guitar begins looping a 4/4 riff at [5:07] while the drums keep jamming in 4/4; at [5:21], the drums shift to playing a kick every dotted crotchet (that's a dotted quarter-note for any Americans reading). The effect is to draw the listener into a slower 6/8 feel — yet another 2:3 tactus modulation — and this change is cemented at [5:44] when the texture thins out. Of note in the proceeding section is the second guitar in the right-hand stereo channel: it begins totally in sync with the kick, but then at [5:51] it plays a lick that seems out of time with the other instruments, and it will play it three more times before the end of this 6/8 section. What's happening is that the second guitarist is (almost certainly) still counting in 4/4 instead of 6/8, and plays a crotchet triplet at the end of every other loop the lead guitar completes; if you're counting with the 6/8 drums, it sounds like the second guitar is playing three notes in the space of 4/3rds of a beat. Eventually everything locks neatly back into place in 4/4 at [6:16].
Will Wiesenfeld has been an inspiration to me since I was a teen, especially the album Obsidian. And this song has more 2:3 shifts! The piano plays a jaunty solo in 13/8 in between the slower, heavier 4/4 sections of the track; if you listen, you can hear a quiet guitar part continuing the piano's quaver rhythm as triplets, creating hemiolas against the lumbering beat.
God knows there's tons of tactus modulation in Autechre's discography, but this is a particularly neat and approachable one. A beat is established in 4/4 after the glitch intro, but then a new synth line gradually fades in from [2:48] and begins corrupting the beat, until the synth lead and bass drop out completely by [3:40]. Eventually, the percussion twists into a 6/8 feel before the 4-minute mark. This is more of a 3:4 tactus modulation. What's happened is that, if you take the original tactus to be a crotchet, the new tactus plays every three semiquavers of the original crotchet beat.
Let's finish with another 3:4 modulation. I was obsessed with this album as a teenager, so inspirational! It builds so patiently... Little stutters and swings aside, you latch onto a clear 4/4 tactus by the 1-minute mark. When the bass comes in at [1:15], it has a kinda swung, synchopated feel, and the higher-pitched percussion further complicates the rhythm; when the four-on-the-floor kick drops at [1:45], the tactus changes completely. Taking the kick as playing every crotchet in the new tactus, the original tactus would be a dotted quaver in the new tactus. Legendary track.