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The Beat Goes On

Lately I’ve been reviewing a lot of loop-oriented music software — programs like Sonic Foundry Acid Pro, Propellerhead Reason, Image-Line Fruityloops, and Spectrasonics Stylus. While very different from one another, these programs are all dedicated to the proposition that music is built up out of multiple layers of repeating loops (known in the trade as “beats”).

With Acid, for instance, you can load a professionally recorded beat into your song with drag-and-drop, and then repeat it simply by dragging its right edge with a mouse tool. It’s true that most pop music relies on repetition, so creating a five-minute song in Acid that sounds plausible and even exciting on first listening is a piece of cake. Load a drum loop, a bass loop, maybe a rhythm guitar loop, and you’ve got a groove that has never been heard before — instant originality.

As the beat repeats, though, boredom will quickly set in.
As the beat repeats, though, boredom will quickly set in.
As the beat repeats, though, boredom will quickly set in.

The challenge is to use these easily abused tools in truly creative ways.

Hip-hop and dance are the main genres where loop-based productions are the norm. In Kalmopyrin (www.tonecasualties.com), Gabor Csupo twists his loop tools in the direction of edgy electronic rock. Like many loop users, he provides variation mainly by adding and subtracting loops from the mix. Often, five or six layers are chugging along at once, a turbulent stew in which half-heard voices and metallic echoes bubble up and are submerged again.

In the hands of a less talented producer/arranger, that could be a recipe for a mess. But Csupo coaxes a dark, almost wistful energy from his loops. He never lets the emotional focus wander, and he doesn’t try to impress with virtuosic electronic trickery. The production skills he deploys are the kind you don’t notice unless you know what to listen for — subtle sonic blends where all the elements are clearly audible.

In “City of Forgotten Souls,” a woman sings a looped minor-key phrase in what sounds like Japanese. One synthesizer plays a simple xylophone pattern, another an echoing flutelike figure. The rhythmic beeping in the bass is unabashedly electronic, and the main sound effect (again, repeated) seems to be a heavily processed male voice uttering a single word. A word of agreement? Dismissal? Impossible to say.

In the trancelike final track, the 14-minute “Three Fish and the Seven Dwarfs,” a rock drum loop marches steadily, surrounded by dreamily swirling chords and a funk bass figure. Above this foundation voices come and go — a bluesy disco diva, a British character actor, a phrase rendered incomprehensible by being chopped apart into single consonants, other characters saying “far out,” “pick up on this,” “don’t cry,” “getting nasty.” That last phrase ends the CD, and in context it seems clear that no sexual innuendo is intended. Maybe nothing is intended except to leave the listener in an unsettled state.

Andreas Tilliander takes a more dry, cerebral tack in Elit (www.mille-plateaux.com). His loops are wired together out of little clicks, thuds, beeps, and gurgles — the audio equivalent of glass beads, nuts and bolts, and shards of smashed crockery — and you can always see through the wireframe to the other side. There’s nothing over there.

Most of the CD is instrumental, but in “Rescue Me Now” a vocalist sings, in a quiet melodic manner that’s utterly detached from the lurching percussion in which it’s embedded, “Science won’t rescue me now. Experience won’t rescue me now. Mommy won’t rescue me now.” It’s a chilling effect, in part because by juxtaposing the voice with the electronics, Tilliander seems to be commenting on his own musical style.

“Ashor Livs” is funkier, almost danceable in an ironic way, thanks to the throbbing kick drum and quacking synthesizer loop. But the rhythm of “Stockpiled Safety” threw me completely until I figured out it’s in a fast 11/8 meter. 11/8 can flow or swing (I’m sure I could dig up an old Don Ellis Orchestra track that would prove it), but flowing and swinging are not on Tilliander’s map. This piece staggers and falls down, chillingly, in every measure.

Looping may have invaded and taken over pop music, but it originated elsewhere. The earliest examples, dating back to the ’60s, are found in the classical subgenre called minimalism. The leading proponent of minimalism today is unquestionably Philip Glass. Like other minimalists, he doesn’t like to be labeled a minimalist, but the numbing repetition in Naqoyqatsi (www.sonyclassical.com) could have sprung from no other aesthetic.

Naqoyqatsi is first and foremost an avant-garde film (to learn more, go to www.qatsi.com). The CD presents Glass’s film score as a pure musical experience, but the music is so stiff and graceless that I found myself yearning for the distraction of the visual element. The march of wooden rhythmic figures never relaxes. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma struggles in his solos to restore a sense of fluidity, but ultimately he’s borne down under the weight of Glass’s material.

Minimalism arose as a reaction to some of the turbulent excesses of early-20th-century

classical composition. In that context, reevaluating the virtues of simplicity and a cool, unemotional surface made a lot of sense. What Glass has done, unfortunately, is to inflate minimalism by restoring the grandiose emotional rhetoric of an earlier generation, while scrupulously avoiding the sophisticated flow and interplay of ideas that was once considered essential. It’s classical music for people who are intimidated by Mahler but who enjoy Yanni.

Glass is operating at a disadvantage because he writes for a traditional orchestra. The veriest tyro using computer-based music tools can employ a far broader palette of sounds. When you have little or nothing to say melodically or rhythmically, dazzling your listeners with a fresh sound palette and the intricate interplay of prefabricated beats is surely the way to go. If you do have something to say, so much the better.

Jim Aiken
editor@musicwords.net

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