This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic. I was reviewing Floating Zero, a Various Artists EP put out on Invisible, an imprint of Noisia's Vision Recordings. This piece concludes with a dialogue between Niloufar and Shmin. I am Shmin, and Niloufar is Niloufar Shabahang. She is one of my best friends: a great musician and person, and someone who has taught me (and helped me teach myself) much of what I know.
I used to think that a hyper specific approach to a genre was bad for creativity. Artists who devote themselves to a specific scene, leaving themselves closed off from experiences and lessons to be found in other music, is how we end up with stagnation. I often hear this described as “incestuous”, which perfectly describes the constant reuse of genetic material leading to poor stock. Incest also leads to mutation. Following a scene like drum & bass which, in the 00s, became increasingly self obsessed, reveals how something like Floating Zero came about. There's this really interesting progression in drum and bass where the snares get more and more compressed and high pitched, producers in neurofunk today call them “bippy”. From jungle to late 90s techstep the breaks get increasingly fragmented, with less and less of the contiguous drum break surviving un-chopped, until eventually the done thing was to just sample loads of different individual drum sounds, compress them, and then arrange them into a fairly rigid pattern which loops. These patterns tended to become simpler as time went on, with more focus devoted to programming complicated, CPU intensive bass sounds, and the individual drum sounds started getting EQ'd such that they didn’t muddy the more important parts of the mix. Complex sound design necessitated that snares and hats primarily occupied the mostly unused top middle frequency ranges in order that they didn’t obscure the basses and other synthesised accents.
I remember listening to Floating Zero in 2010, at age 14, and not thinking much about this. I wasn’t a particularly precocious thinker so I doubt I possibly could have noticed any of this, whatever my reference point. But, coming back to this track after a month of listening to lots of earlier material, like Rollers Music, Ruff Ride, Da Bass II Dark, Shadow Boxing, China Cup, Don’t You, Facade, Seven Year Glitch...
(I really shouldn’t have put so many of those links in there but I want to recommend all these tunes. Anyway:)
...listening to all of that earlier material makes me realise just how weird and mutated this genre ended up. It’s like all of the incestuous development of the genre railroaded Noisia and friends into making these really strange tunes that only make sense if taken in the context of the entire history of the genre leading up to that point. Perhaps any music is that way really—following the progression and development lets one into aspects of the music that would otherwise be irrelevant or insubstantial. I can’t envisage myself being really interested in whatever quality it is that makes Playboi Carti such a fascinating figure for hip hop fans, but I am endlessly fascinated by how high pitched and compressed the snare drums are on this various artists EP. The fact that it’s a various artists release also makes it that much more enjoyable to me because it feels so much more like a point in a logical progression, instead of being an instance of Noisia’s radical vision as they continue to reinvent the genre.
Niloufar: it's exciting how much u care abt this
Shmin: If I don't care about this stuff no one will