At first, the beat is like a pack of Pick Up Stix that have been set loose in zero g and left to jitter and bounce around in a compact, three-dimensional space, the tiny emanations of their myriad chance collisions resulting in a constant pitter patter that hints at chaos but, in fact, reveals a logical system at work. Deeper material, more tonal than percussive, appears, but it seems more like an echo of the drum, a sonic shadow. It’s a sonic shadow. The beat is the main event. In time the rhythm congeals, gravity sets in, and the beat reduces to a singular enterprise. The track is “Since It Happened” by the Vancouver, Canada-based A Scanner Darkly.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/scannerdarkly. A brief liner note mentions that the project was completed on two instruments, the drum machine MachineDrum and the modular synth BugBrand. More on the tools at hand at elektron.se and bugbrand.co.uk.
Update (2013.04.25): Subsequent to this post, the musician added more information to the track’s page about the music’s development, including this: “Feedback based patches tend to be stubborn beasts as different things all influence each other in a non linear way, so it was really just trying to steer it in the direction I wanted rather than me actually controlling it.”