Drums

About a year ago I finally got back around to making music, something I hadn't done for about 10-12 years.  And this time I went a step further than I ever had, which was to compose all the tracks (in Noteworthy as MIDI) and arrange them in a real "studio" application, ACID Pro.  I soon grew frustrated with the limitations of scoring drums in MIDI, so I tried out some drum apps and settled on Hotstepper for its flexibility, ease of arrangment, controls, and ability to accept any .wav file as a "drum."  Even with the increased facility that Hotstepper gave me, my drum tracks still lacked a certain something.  So I started reading about drumming techniques, and above all, listening to real live drummers.  Pierre Moerlen of Gong was the first drummer to catch my ear; most recently I've been admiring Alphonse Mouzon's work on Eugene McDaniels's 1971 album Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse: not just the beats, but the fills, trills, embellishments, accents, and whatever else you call all the things he does with the drums so that no two measures are quite the same.  Here's the leadoff track, "The Lord is Back":

Apart from Mouzon's drumming, the album contrasts a message of Christian love with some bitter anger against racism, warmongering, and societal inequties; in other words, problems that are still with us, for pity's sake.  In that respect Horsemen is timeless.  Deeper insights than mine are available at Uppity Music and Stylus Magazine.

As is always the case, my mission to "see how it's done" took on a life of its own, and I found myself listening to more and more music, collecting and cataloguing (figuratively) and not getting back to my original project.  But I am embracing the fact that collecting and cataloguing is my project; I've always done it, it brings me joy, why fight it?  But a side effect of getting so attuned to drummers is that now it's hard for me to listen to any music built around drum loops.  They sound so sterile and lifeless.  Too bad for me, most of electronica is built around drum loops.  A genre I used to enjoy has become less fun than it was, with one notable exception.  Tom Jenkinson, a.k.a. Squarepusher, creates amazing drum tracks (using nothing more than Roland drum machines, I understand).  He must use some looping, but he manages to do something different in most measures (well, not in all his songs, but a lot of them).  And if one measure of an artist's success is his employment of techniques that are specific to the medium, Jenkinson succeeds by including bits in his drum tracks that are impossible for a human drummer to play.  It could be too many drums at once, or incredibly fast snare rolls, or different reverb patterns on the drums that make them sound like they're being played in different rooms, but at the same time.  His drum programming skills are right up front on "Squarepusher Theme" from 1996:

Jenkinson is also a wicked bassist, as you can see on the front page of the official Squarepusher website.  Take that, Ivan the slap-bass-hating bear!