Riff Analysis 035 - Spawn of Possession "Scorched"
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- čas přidán 15. 08. 2024
- Feels pretty fast to me!
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The balls on this man to play SoP guitar parts on camera.
11:15 Whoa.
I think production quality also plays a factor in perceived speed specifically with drums as well-rawer recordings tend to sound faster than overly sampled ones as the raw performance captures the frantic energy and human-ness of trying to play at hyperspeeds
Agreed. Midi drums locked at 127 velocity don't feel fast at all, because there is no *feel* in the first place
Yes sir you're absolutely right.
I've noticed when i try to headbang to tech-death type of music i tend to headbang to the song in half time, and the actual song is a just mad tornado around me.
Ack Dack has one hell of a catchy riff. I'm sure they will be huge years from now and we will be hearing this riff for the next 50 years
They're drummer would be one lucky son of a bitch if they did!
This video is really awesome. I often get sad and frustrated about listening to tech death because most people think metal is "just a bunch of screaming" already, and tech death can easily sound like gibberish to an average non musician listener. If only they realized that this music is actually very beautiful and intricate.
This is super interesting. Archspire always claims to hit that "350bpm" mark but I really always feel like I'm bopping my head at 175 bpm, like something is kind of lost at that speed, even in terms of SPEED.
Just re-listened to Bleed The Future and my impression is that there's moments of high speed, but the average speed may be lower and played in the forms of bursts with space in between. (not counting, of course, the melodic breaks). And while the drums and voice may be playing fast, often times the background instruments may be much slower.
Whatever their peak speed is, there's elements that are certainly holding it back and might be easier to grab onto than the faster parts played at the same time.
Their music is also cloaked in a feeling of irony (look at their Metallum band image) that makes it harder to take it seriously. With SOP, you can tell they mean business and it's easier to get invested.
People often don't understand art. Art isn't about doing something. It's about making someone experience something. If you want to someone to experience raw speed, figure out a way of conveying that artistically. This CAN and often DOES involve "high" BPMs, but BPM is only a tool that ought to be used a certain way. Sometimes, tou convey something artistically, you physically have to do the opposite things you want people to _ feel_. Sometimes, a small distant sound conveys "silence" better than absolute silence. Or sometimes, you convey speed, you sandwich it between something slow as a frame of reference.
But holy shit! You've actually put my experience into words perfectly. I don't have much background in music theory (I used to play some tech death and Dillinger type stuff on guitar though). From producing electronic music, and having music tastes that include speedcore, I learned very soon that speed is only conveyed as "speed" up to a certain BPM. Once passed that, it tends to lose subjective qualities we associate with speed. Maybe the transients get so close to each other that it feels like white noise or ambient music, I don't know. Or maybe it's poor arrangement, and everything is put on a single element to sound fast (drums, or more specifically blast beats) where the rest grooves at half the tempo. But a lot of the intensity is just killed. Either way, DAWs allow you to play as fast as you want, and yet, one of the fastest sounding songs to me is in second half of "This Dream People Call Human Life" by Abelcain. Also, with a bpm of around 160.
One musician in the metal and grind world that TRULY knows how to convey speed, though, is Scott Hull.
Love this, especially that point about using little quiet sounds to convey silence! Thanks for the thoughtful comment!
Just watching the cursor bounce around that list of guitar techniques was anxiety inducing. It's interesting how someone's instrumental background could also influence how fast a song feels. For example, stuff like Converge/TDEP/etc feels way faster to me as a drummer than a lot of blast-happy tech death stuff. The former is constantly throwing new rhythmic information at me, whereas the latter feels like smaller subdivisions of a bigger, slower tempo. Cool to hear it from the guitarists perspective!
Absolutely! Like you can be really athletic with one technique and push it really fast, but it takes more processing power to be switching between a bunch of different ones. Physical speed vs conceptual speed, maybe. This also kind of dovetails into this thing I call structural density, which I ended up not getting into in this video but has to do with like how jagged and non-repetitive stuff is, which is definitely at play in this and mathcore stuff. And I definitely agree about a lot of tech death actually feeling kind of slow-SoP are one of a few bands that I think combine the really fast subdivisions with constantly changing rhythmic information (Anomalous and Cryptopsy are other big ones, and I've got an article coming out about this idea in Anomalous's music in March, so stay tuned!).
I feel like traditional blast beats aren't really meant to feel fast. If I recall correctly, Thomas Lang considers them something of an 'economy' technique (even the single-foot one, lol), and I don't disagree with him on this point.
@@icipher6730 That's a good way of putting it! Sometimes I think of blasting as a rhythmic highway, because blasting puts the entire rhythmic grid into play you can use them to get from one rhythmic feel to another smoothly.
220 bpm is actually around where I can't consistently use one hand for 8th notes anymore, so I'm glad it's the tempo you referenced.
Hell yeah. My mans out here on some tech death. Can we take a moment to collectively shit our pants about Archspire’s “Bleed the Future”?
Awesome video dude. You have helped my writing a lot.
These are becoming some of my fav vids on CZcams. Sick cover at the end too
The intro about "rhythm hounds" really cracked me up haha
Excellent analysis as always. This is actually something that's always bothered me about speedcore and related electronic genres, I'm only vaguely aware of the style but whenever I try to give something at "600 BPM" another shot it sounds disappointingly slow because in reality the brain just reframes everything at a substantially slower tempo and turns their "beats" into 16th notes. The disconnect between how music has advanced (both with technology and with people in genres like tech death physically playing more and more notes in shorter periods of time) and our general ability to perceive that advancement is both interesting and frustrating.
Love these long-form videos. Good shit
When you played that song in part of number 4 about guitar technique, there's much switched guitar techniques in every phrase riffs, that's the characteristic of their band that I've heard so far.
Thanks for your great analysis about that song.
Great video and great points made.
Always found it laughable years ago (and even now) when bands advertise songs as being 280bpm+ tempos but they don't feel that fast or intense.
I haven't found much that feels faster or more intense than Scorched, Church of Deviance, Psycroptic's (Ob)Servant or Antaeus' Blood Libels.
Thank you! And I agree. You might dig Anomalous's Ohmnivalent if you don't know it! I also put some of the early Cryptopsy stuff in the same camp. Love (Ob)Servant, and now that you mention it there is a certain really crisp speed they get that I haven't heard a lot of bands do.
The _drums_ are what make this song feel so fast, I think. The blasts on the snare aren't just fast-they're unrelenting. Not start-and-stop blasts like in a lot of brutal death metal (not a criticism). And the way the guitars occasionally play eighth notes juxtaposes the unfaltering 16th-note snare and makes it feel even faster imo.
the guitars ALSO occasionally rip into 32nd notes, as in the second-to-last riff change. SoP's insane syncopation skills and raw musical chemistry are so impossible to replicate.
@@milesmccollough5507 Yes, good point! Agreed
This format has great potential. Keep going dude!
My favorite band of all time! Can't believe you have done a video with them!!
Basically, this band made my appreciate guitar playing so much more. Masters of tech death. R.I.P.
Edit: Spelling. Got so excited I typed something that made no sense...
Excellent analysis and content
Had to bust out the laptop to type my comment on this one. As always, thought provoking content in this video. First off, you are very generous with the "ack dack" pronunciation. I always went with Ass Dick but that's not exactly academic.
"The way you move parts of your body is the way that we feel the beat," is a great quote. You've said in interviews that you plan to use motion capture cameras to gather data on this concept, and this video makes me very interested in seeing that research. You've spoiled us with the in-depth analyses - I'm almost surprised this video didn't include a sort of body-language self-analyzation where you describe why you might (subconsciously) "choose" to move a certain way during certain parts of the song! This is purely anecdotal, but this video makes me wonder if there's something more concrete to it: When I'm playing with my band, it feels most appropriate to bob my head up and down to rhythms (within reasonable tempo) that are 4/4, whereas if a riff has swing, I can kind of move my head in a small circle, and mentally imagine the swing of the rhythm as a circle, where one full rotation of my head lands me back at beat 1. If a riff is faster, I can move my head from left to right, and it's easier to feel the rhythm as its true tempo this way. We consciously and subconsciously use our bodies to control the inflection, intonation, and tone of what we're playing, while also expressing our own emotional feelings of what we're playing in real time, the same way that a conductor controls the vibrato of a string section in an orchestra.
I'm about to be a freak and make some comments about some of your physical cues during your full-speed playthrough at the end. The "stank face" is pretty commonplace in metal - if you look it up images of it, it's kind of like this face: >:( ..whereas you make a different face, with eyebrows raised, and a frown. I think that these faces nearly express the same emotion, but there is a difference. To me, you make a face that indicates an awareness of the thought that goes into a well constructed riff, whereas the typical stankface indicates a kind of aggression that is commonly associated with metal bands. Mosh pit type riffs. To leap even further, it seems that melodic or structural heaviness results in your stank face, and tonal heaviness results in the typical stank face. Another thing that you do at 11:23 and 11:32 is you make a very quick face that I believe to be a physical cue of a sudden change, or landmark in the riff. I think of this face as an exclamation point - the riff has a sort of "musical interjection" and by memory, you flex your face muscles to indicate to yourself where this musical interjection or landmark lies in the riff. You also seem to close your eyes during certain parts when you're certain that your hands are positioned exactly where they need to be to play all the notes in a chunk. I think this something we do subconsciously for fun when we play. It's like a form of mental validation that we are focused and know where we are on the neck in relation to the piece we're playing. I think back to that video of Lyle Cooper playing Planetary Duality I and II where he barely looks at the kit. He doesn't have to. He's completely calm and in total control. He's so aware of his instrument that the visual component is no longer necessary, and it's kind of Swaggy to just not look at all, so why not just look away? I'm interested if my intuitions about your body movements are close to being true!
Thanks for the video.
Thank you as always for the thought provoking comments! Really interesting stuff. I hadn't really thought about the differences between up and down vs side to side vs circular or other head movements, but that's an interesting thread to look at-how they're shaped and constrained by what's possible at a given tempo, and how they maybe take the same metaphorical shape as how the music feels. Definitely worth thinking about as I try to get my dissertation stuff together.
About the movements I make when playing: I've thought about it a little, but those are some really interesting ideas too-facial expression as a form of analysis seems like a promising idea that I haven't thought about at all. The little momentary interjection faces I make are me highlighting / trying (and mostly failing) to hit the pinch harmonics. Playing with eyes closed is I guess a little bit of a flex, and a little bit of a pragmatic thing where I don't let myself start trying to record something until I can play it with my eyes closed (except for parts that move around the fretboard a lot), and it also does what you said with trying to limit distractions and hone in on what I can hear to lock in with time and technique.
If I'm not super prepared trying to record these my first few takes I'm normally standing completely still with no facial expression just trying to get the notes, then I normally watch those and realize I have to move a little for it to be fun to watch, so the moving and facial expressions are also a little bit of performance, trying to play the role along with the music. There's also something interesting in the tension between the super precise, machine-like nature of tech death like this vs the idea of feeling, I wonder how that links in. It seems to be a performance style that requires a ton of motion, but also doesn't really allow much extra movement-there isn't space for a lot of theatricality in between notes if you're playing this stuff, but you can't help communicating something with how you move to this.
Thank you as always for giving me stuff to think about!
Super interesting stuff. This channel will be huge one day
I remember being blown away upon first listen when this album dropped, great vid!
Watching this after listening to Inferi's "Vile Geneisis" which feels cartoonishly fast and intense
Yet another awesome shirt.
amazing video! i've thought about this a lot for years as a metal listener but have never been able to put it in to words- you've summed it up perfectly
Watching you fight through at tempo gave me chills. What a tough song! Reminds me of trying to learn necrophagist (miserably failed). Now I understand better why their music feels faster than objectively faster stuff that’s come out in the past decade.
You should check out the Archspire song that came out today. First song I've heard in a while that feels too fast to me in some sections
To be fair, necro stuff is all at like 220-240bpm so it's insanely fast. The rhythm stuff is just crazy on songs like Ignominious and Pale.
Yeah that’s a really good point about the tempo.
@@OCNmeticadpa I honestly find find rhythm sections just as challenging as the solos when it comes to necrophagist
@@neonblack211 I find them much much much harder to be honest. Especially on songs like advanced corpse tumor.
It would be interesting to hear your tempo canoe approach applied to the opening of "Dopesmoker" by Sleep. I always heard the beat twice as slow as those guys are headbanging in live recordings.
I guess both the beat they're hearing and what you're hearing won't rock the tempo canoe, because they both allow at least one slower and one faster level that's still in the range of .1 to 2 seconds. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it though! I'm basically extending London's stuff just a little based on some rough tendencies I've noticed, mainly that idea of a limit around the rate you can tap with one hand.
For what it's worth I tend to hear along with Sleep, with the cymbals marking the beat, but I have reasons to believe (from some research I did for a video that will be out in October) that I'm in the minority, and a lot of people seem to think that record is slower (and a lot of people seem to think that it gets slower throughout, even though it doesn't really on the recording or in any live videos I've seen).
Those guys are hearing it twice as slow as those guys are hearing it.
that's some next level analysis! Amazing work (as always!)
excellent analysis as always. Another layer perhaps is that of 'propulsion' as a function of subdivision play on a backbeat. A polka beat sounds more 'propulsed' (and to some minds, more fast) with sixteenth kickdrums underneath it. Furthermore, there is a 'sweet spot' for fast music before the subdivisions of any backbeat coalesce to blast beat intensity, which can be argued to feel less fast than on beats with backbeat propulsion. Too fast death metal sometimes feels chaotic, swirling, spiralling, instead of linearly fast.
Thanks for your hard work.
What a clear explanation of speed! That was amazing! Nice play though as well :))
I love the bit about being an embodied mind; the world (or in this case the phenomenon of speed) is mediated through the body (does Merleau-Ponty come up in music theory?)
A way less interesting observation than you made in the video is a lot of tech death bands doing triplet 8th (guitar) riffs at around 250 which can be felt at about 330 if you just see the triplet as a straight 8th (I think) and they can drop down 250 with straight 8th notes so you have these two speeds in the song essentially kinda high gear and low gear (the low gear speed you can also play 16th notes, which feels like a hyper speed). I always found this whiplash effect to really show the fast and the faster.
Thanks for the content! This channel is AMAZING!
Thank you so much! My dissertation advisor's first book went deep into the Merleau-Ponty stuff as it relates to musical time (Mariusz Kozak "Enacting Musical Time"). And that's definitely true about the "high and low gear," I like how you put that! Kind of reminds me of a recent MTO article by Jose Garza which goes into categorizing the different like subdivision feels that bands have: mtosmt.org/issues/mto.21.27.1/mto.21.27.1.garza.html
Thanks for the thoughtful comment!
I determine tactus by what’s confortable to headbang too, upper limit is around 180bpm, though I think things in the 240 range often sound as fast or faster than the 160 range. Scorched sounds unique because of the blast beats, which don’t really sound fast until you compare them to other blast beats.
Am I weird that Cabinet is my favorite SoP album?
Not at all, it’s my favorite also
Killing it as always!
I love this kid....
If you’re curious these are the official sop tabs on ug : Cabinet, swarm of the formless, eve of contempt, sour flow, in my own greed, dead and grotesque, scorched, by a thousand death’s fulfilled. Also, this song is probably one of the least complex of the bunch, which is horrifying. Eve of contempt and sour flow are for madmen.
I was really hoping for some harmonic analysis on this band☹️ but thanks so much for this channel.
Yeah I should probably do some tech death harmonic analysis some day... I did a little in my Gorguts video. Basic gist for this song and most of SoP's stuff is it's like a negotiation between functional harmony (B harmonic minor type stuff) and some modular, up-and-down-the-neck-guitar-shape and symmetrical scales (octatonic and hexatonic) stuff. But there are probably some cool details in there to talk about
@@metalmusictheory5401 I've analyzed some of it, but my understanding of harmony probably isn't quite on your level. Eve of Contempt is pure madness, especially before the baroque section. Octave displaced chromatics,etc. I do know Jonas is super influenced by Bach and Shostakovich. A lot of death metal-isms that aren't scalar in nature whatsoever as well. This song, despite it's speed, is probably the most straightforward one on the record. Love your content and I've watched all your vids :)
Can't wait to hear you talk about the new BTBAM album. It's soooo good!
Really digging it! It will be a while because I've got a long queue of videos ready to go and I need to come to terms with it, but it's been a ton of fun listening and finding the layers of references to Colors, and there's just so much music on it.
I have a great and super known example, Metallica´s "Master of Puppets" is at a higher bpm that "Batery", but Batery feels faster by comparison
Put that in your spawn and possess it should be the name of someone's next album.
Spawn of Possession's long awaited comeback album :)
Thanks
It seems this track is an absolute tour-de-force for all instruments (and vocals), pushing to the limits of human endurance. Is it even possible to perform it live?
In interviews with them they did say they played it live a few times.
Yo man great video that shit was interesting as hell
160 bpm...but double time 😈
If you ever do another SOP video would you please consider "Sour flow". I would love to understand that song on a deeper level.
Sop are so unique. Not wankery like the current tech fad. They actually wrote very good musical theory which seems to show me something new everytime I listen.
was that a negative harmony pirate of the Caribbean theme cover at the end?
Anyway thank you for the clear explanation 🙌
haha I wasn't thinking negative harmony but I did have fun and take some liberties with the voice leading (and the rhythm). Thank you!
Have you checked out the new Alluvial album? Give it a gander if you haven’t
That’s a great recommendation. Seconded
Thirded
Been listening since it came out, I dig it! First few times I heard them I was getting them mixed up with Alustrium in my head (another sick tech/prog death metal band) and was wondering about their change of direction lol, but it's an entirely different band and they're both great
Loving this stuff. Awesome cover. More tech death and less Meshuggah lol
What island is that tempo canoe from? Depending on where the island sits longitudinally and lattitudinally wise plays a part in tempo fluctuations. For example, time moves at infinite speed as well as no speed at all at 100% north
where there is no lat or long nor time zones
Not sure about south, which is where Gwar reside
Well, if you wanted me to put your video on pause right at the start and listen to Pierced from Within, good job I guess :D.
I think that, theoretically, you could push the feeling even further, if there were more subdivision changes. Personally, that makes me think of Immolation (Ive listened to them a lot yesterday, for some reason), or band like TDEP would be quite an obvious example. Those abrupt changes are what make TDEP such a difficult listen for the uninitiated after all. It makes the song feel unchained, less under control, because you have to adapt to fast section quickly.
If you haven’t already check out Vildhjartas new singles
Make a video on enmity - bloated slabs
I've heard the song was about 280bpm, which would put it at 140 in another subdivision right? My music theory is shit sorry. Only citing from other comments on videos I've seen of people playing *drums specifically*
I've been watching videos about shit like this all my life and never came across the concept of TACTUS... I might have to rematch adam neelys video about the fastest possible music, it might be the same concept with a different name.
I just spend 13 minutes wondering what a tactus is
My bad I should have made that clearer up front. Tactus = what you feel as the main beat. So the rate you bob your head or tap your foot, probably.
Ack dack is not your dad's rock!
you hip to chicago footwork?
No!
@@metalmusictheory5401 i forget why i asked this but you gotta scope it out. 160bpm syncopated rhythms based around a competitive dance culture.
What is the name of his band?
My band is Florid Ekstasis!
Wut