Toward a definable "Industrial" style, Pt.1 (Full Article)
Toward a definable "Industrial" style, Pt.1
|
POSTED ON: 02/17/11 16:27:12 |
|||
|
I've been thinking a lot about the structures and musical tropes of Industrial music and how a semi-formalized and evolved "style" of DJing with its own conventions and tropes etc. could be formulated or the genre... Over the close to three years or so that I've been doing this, I've noticed that many of the local DJs that I know that play music for Goths and Industrial fans only mix by what I call "groove" or vibe or energy or whatever. They worry about tempo in a general sense (ie: they won't try and go from 105 to 135 in a single leap or anything like that) but many of them don't watch it closely. Furthermore, none of them pay much attention to key signatures as far as I can tell. Finally, they are not religious about carefully choosing the points in a given track where they are full mixed in and points where they want to start mixing out. All they really care about is howB "feels" when layed down immediately after A. Do A and B "feel" like they belong together or like they're building a groove or a mood. All they really care about is groove. I am concerned for "groove" as well. On the other hand, I don't trust "groove". It's too damn subjective. My treasure is your trash etc. I'm interested in the more technical aspects of mixing, I always have been. The technical stuff requires additional levels of knowledge and skill (over and above simply knowing one's format) which appeals to me. Listening to Industrial Goth DJs who do care a bit more for technical things has shown me that there are some similarities between how they mix and how House and Trance DJs mix. For instance, for the last 10 or 15 years, (maybe longer) Industrial dance floors have been dominated by the EBM sub-genre of Industrial primarily with a strong secondary helping of various other sub-genre stuff that's harder provided that said harder stuff has obvious percussive schemes with a tempo in the EBM range. EBM's tempos are House tempos for the most part although now and then they start to move up into slower Trance country as well. Consequently, Industrial DJs often employ the blend when mixing vs. a cut or some fancy sample-looping or something like that. These blends tend to be steeper and more abrupt than a House or a Trance style blend...say, uhh, maybe it takes 10 seconds to completely move from one track to the next one vs. 20 seconds or even 30 seconds. Anyway, so...blends. Usually (unless you're listening to Led Manville or Ade Fenton or somebody, y'know...NOT genre super-stars) "steeper" blends. |
|||
