Immersed in deep, deep sound

For the past few days I’ve been listening again and again to an unknown track. As it’s on my ipod shuffle, I hadn’t heard it before and I have no idea who it is by, or what it is called… but it’s been grabbing, grabbing and demanding my attention. It won’t let me go. Why?

A description: it starts off with some vaguely dubby UKG-esque echoey rhythmic synth chords in the mid range. Hihat and other percussive sounds build a higher-pitched rhythmic backdrop. Vaguely samba-esque? The percussion then drops and out two big, low-mid range synth chords and an off-beat low bass (sounding once per bar) begin alternating every 8 beats. Very much LTJ Buken/early Logical Progression series style. Percussion rejoins. Very vibey, mellow. First couple of minutes.

Then the percussion drops out again and a big ol’ fat bass drum kicks in with an even deeper syncopated bass – deep house style. Nice The hihat and other percussion rejoins in classic offbeat house rhythm. In fact this starts to sound like quite early 90s Banco de Gaia. It’s impossible not to be dancing by this point.

Finally sampled male and female vocals cut in and out, again UKG-style. Every now and then some vocal-esque synth chords are overlaid.

And so it goes on in its wonderful, utterly addictive and compelling way.

Why is this so addictive?!

The syncopation between the bass drum and bass line w/ the offbeaty dubby overlay makes me jump around. It gives me that expanding from lower chest-downwards emotional warm tingle hollowness that music with big slow moving chords often does.

But why?

Murray Shafer, in The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, suggests that low-pitched sounds with a high volume are experienced as touch – through the skin – as much as they are heard, through the ears. He also claims that modern electronic music makes much greater use of lower frequencies which are by nature harder to localise in space. As a result, listening to, say, dance music on a decent stereo leads to an effect of feeling immersed in sound:

“The listener finds himself at the center of the sound; he is massaged by it, flooded by it” (Shafer)

This effect being even stronger when listening on headphones, with the sound seemingly coming from within ones head. Listening with headphones, according to Shafer, causes the ‘acoustic horizon’ to shrink, with the outside (sonic) world excluded. The listener becomes the world, enjoined with the sounds of the music that constitute that sonic world.

So how does this link with this particular track? Well… the more I listen to it, the more I’m struck by the mid-low range of the chords, the deepness of the bass drum, the even deeper bass line, the lack of many mid-high range frequencies at all. The higher-pitched dubbby chords and cut up vocals seem to bounce along on top of this deep sea of sound. ‘Immersive’ is the correct word – this is music which caresses and holds the body. It isn’t coming at you from anywhere. It surrounds and envelops. The boundaries of your body blur with the music – your skin doesn’t separate you from the world (of the music) outside. Rather you feel the music (if listened to at an appropriately loud volume) inside your body – it passes right through your skin to be heard inside, in your organs. And even at very loud volumes this track is not harsh on the ear – there are no grating high frequencies – no guitars, no real ’singing’ to hurt the ear drum. Consequently, you can listen to this very loud

Immersion, an experience like being held in water, deep regular rhythmic sounds, no sense of separateness, blurred boundaries, broken up vocals heard indistinctly…. it all sounds very womb-like doesn’t it…

Anyways, it’s good, this track….

[update: turns out the track is 'Skidoos' by Akufen. Thanks Matt ]