anyone up for some break-core/trance/industrial-noise/trad-irish?
no?
i bet your curious though?
yeah i thought so.

*disclamer*
this was about an hours work, the primary goal was to create a congruent 'sonic sketch' with the rhythmic parts reacting correctly to the melody (swinging on the gate), the harmony (synth) was added as an afterthought as a checkpoint to make sure i can harmonise ITM using my existing skillset, - as such there is very little arrangment/structural composition in this track and given more time it could all be a lot tighter and more innovative.... wether or not i give it more time is another matter

that said.
heres the link:

http://www.box.net/shared/43k81ta009

i hope you enjoy it, but i wont be offended if you dont, and either way i would like your thoughts and reactions once the initial rage has boiled off

I think this is good fodder for discussion.

It's very easy to dismiss your clip out of hand, but in the spirit of glass houses and all that let me first reveal that while I am an exponent of the Pure Drop, at the same time, depending on circumstances, I am also a tried and convicted accomplice at playing pretty fast and loose with it, myself.

My main discomfort with the track is that the backing to the tune doesn't refer to the tune's basic rhythmic form. You could wiggle-boogie in some absent way to it, but not dance a reel. This is where the call of the traditional will not let me go.

It all comes down to what one's intent is. Basically speaking, your track doesn't pass the "gateway drug" test for me. I guess that's what my standard is for trammelling the Pure Drop. But, nothing ventured, nothing gained. As I always say: really, you have to try, and hear, to know whether it's gonna work or not.

Make me want to dance. REALLY dance. Even if it's not a reel.

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"Time is the wisest counselor of all." - Pericles

"I remain not entirely convinced of it." - Nano

all good points; and i must admit the majority of my exposute to folk is 'pure drop', i just have this big stockpile of synthisisers and skills from what seems like another life and i have been meaning to show one to the other for quite some time.

this i suppose is the first step, its technically correct - the electronics are in the same time and key as the whistle tune but, this kind of thing is like doing up a zip, you start with only a few points of contact and as you progress you add more and more until you have a compleet unit... what i would hope for is not so much a 'this track is great' but a 'this track showes potential'

definatly pulling more rhythmic elements from the tune into the rhythm is a good starting point for improvment... getting rid of the tackey synth noise might also help.

given that no one has banned me, ill assume its bad but not 'deadly sin' bad

*edit* id also love to know if anyone has herd anyone doing anything similar

I know a fellow who does the same stuff, some of it brilliant, some hilarious, some ho-hum, some disbalanced, and some downright irritating. The irritating stuff sounds like he's taking the music and purposefully making an insult to it, and I think there's no call for that. But then I would, wouldn't I.

One of his efforts included Harvest Home (don't recall the main instrument, but let's say it was a whistle) overlaid with an overbearingly topheavy skippityskippityTHUMP that was nothing so much as a musical impression of risking a trampling by dancing orc-hippos and made me feel as if I was going to topple over. My point is that it did not enhance the tune; the tune was merely incidental to the effect. His point was that he was simply amusing himself, and that was sufficient for him. He and I will never see eye-to-eye on this particular track, I fear.

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"Time is the wisest counselor of all." - Pericles

"I remain not entirely convinced of it." - Nano

so i need to add the arrangment to the melody, not add the melody to the arrangment.

I can't tell you what to do! All I can do is come from my own taste, but, yes, that's what I use as my guideline when I'm arranging: the tune is supreme, and I am in service to it. Now, that service may earn me only vilification for my trouble, but at least I see my functional position as correct and in order IF my intent is to refer to the tradition at all. But please note that that's just me.

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"Time is the wisest counselor of all." - Pericles

"I remain not entirely convinced of it." - Nano

I enjoyed this. I got a definite visual image of someone playing a whistle at a disco club where they scratch those records and then gun fire breaks out and the whistle player keeps playing without missing a beat. I wanted him to hold and sway some of those notes like he was dodging gunfire or shot glasses. He's a bit too Zen.

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Rose tint my world. Keep me safe from my trouble and pain.
白飞梦

Stuff like that has been done before, back in the 90ies! Check some of the later albums of the very unfortunately late Scottish Piper&Fiddler Martyn Bennet! There's nothing new under the sun...

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Dilige et, quod vis, fac!

ace tip-off, this guy has some skill.

thats said the 'everything has been done before' argument is very very damaging, nothing else is so capable of insuring that nothing new gets done, its defeatism and its bad philosophy.

The 90s? You make a decade sound hoary with age. I thought it was the Yanks that had short attention spans. Gimme me something from the 70s, and we'll talk.

Ah, Martyn Bennett. At the end of his career (and too-young life) he went off in directions others in Trad circles found hard to accept; his treatment of Oran nam Mogaisean, while I get the concept, is hard for me to listen to (from about 1/3 of the way through the track). Still, the rhythm and extranea work from the tune (well, for the most part, admittedly ). By the way, that's his mother, Margaret Bennett, singing. She is a prodigious collector of old Canadian Gaelic music in the Maritimes, and without her, this otherwise obscure material from a rich tradition might be lost to us.

Here's a track vid, though, of Deoch an Dorus, part 2, that also fuses the modern with the traditional in a less challenging manner than Oran nam Mogaisean, and while it appears to bring the traditional into the modern, by another token the modern refers directly to the traditional in supporting the tune-as-ground-of-all. In the end it's not to my taste, but nevertheless I think it's well done, and the roots aren't lost.

Here's another vid of Bennett playing MacCrimmon's Lament followed by a couple of strathspeys and a rant (maybe?), strictly Pure Drop smallpipes, that I think demonstrates where he was coming from and why he was arguably in a position, at the end, to go where he did with it whether it was my or anyone else's cup of tea or not.


I have to agree. Better you should acknowledge what's been done, take it, and go further.

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"Time is the wisest counselor of all." - Pericles

"I remain not entirely convinced of it." - Nano

Well, that's actually just the way I understand that sentence! Takes a lot away from this strange obligation many people seem to have to always re-invent themselves and the world around them. In German, we say: "You don't have to invent the wheel again every day..." - I find that very relaxing! Just see, what's already there and take Your freedom to combine it as You like it. To me, Martyn Bennet's music is nothing but a logical evolution of trad music... That's why I enjoy it so much...



[Edited to correct attributions. - Mod]

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Dilige et, quod vis, fac!

I believe it can be done. The fusion of both the modern Industrial characteristics (rhythmic glitches and dark ambient) over traditional instrumentation or melody. But, one can't just put a loop over a whistle track (I recognize the first drum loop from one of the Acid Pro samples). The beat needs to compliment that melody (in the same sense a Bodhran needs to compliment the melody) and the tempo shouldn't have a big rhythmic contrast (if the tempo of the melody is ~80 BPM, the glitched drums shouldn't be ~160. Sure it'll match, but it won't sound natural)... essentially, the drums and synth has to be programmed from scratch for the melody/song you're trying to fuse.

The easiest exercise to fuse both Trad/Folk and Industrial would probably be with an air or slow-tempo melody.

EDIT: Here's one of my toys:

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