non 4/4 dance music

I'm so fucking bored of this, it really IS just all starting to sound like maths to me. Always the same change-points, always the predictable resolves.

Please recommend me some non 4/4 dance music. I guess that will generally have to mean non-western European 'electronic' music cos we don't seem to have moved on from disco over here.

And I mean FUCKING DANCE MUSIC, not "ooh look at me I wrote an 'experimental' dnb/techno/house tune in 3/9" (that no-one will dance to).

tnx in advance

[Statto]

sure, we've posted non 4/4 dnb here before

this is the only one I can find on youtube offhand:

that's in 12/8

but a couple more spring to mind:

ZnO - Firebreak (which is in 7/8)
Alpha Omega - Concerto in 5/4 (I'm assuming that's in 5/4 )

or is that not the sort of stuff you meant?

and i mean fucking dance music, not "ooh look at me i wrote an 'experimental' dnb/techno/house tune in 3/9" (that no-one will dance to).

:d

Can someone also post some pics of square wheels? Im sick of these circular ones...

Can someone also post some pics of square wheels? Im sick of these circular ones...

There's a whole big world out there Droid. People were dancing to music made for dancing long before disco.

Can someone also post some pics of square wheels? Im sick of these circular ones...

There's a whole big world out there Droid. People were dancing to music made for dancing long before disco.

Indeed. People have been dancing to Arabic music for thousands of years.

However, that's not quite what you're after is it Naphta?

Can someone also post some pics of square wheels? Im sick of these circular ones...

There's a whole big world out there Droid. People were dancing to music made for dancing long before disco.

And the first beat ever drummed was probably in 4/4. Form follows function.

Its actually pretty tough to find 'dance' music that isnt primarily in 4/4. 3/4 and 6/8 for waltzes jigs and polkas... some gamelan and Asian stuff generally. Maybe some Turkish stuff - but all folk music (actually - arent a lot of Hossam Ramsay's beats in weird signatures?). Most of the African stuff Ive heard from the last 60 years or so has all been 4/4.

Im sure theres loads of 'world' stuff out there in crazy time signatures. But I dont know if theres much contemporary dance music that isnt 4/4.

[Statto]

and i mean fucking dance music, not "ooh look at me i wrote an 'experimental' dnb/techno/house tune in 3/9" (that no-one will dance to).

:d

you can dance to that Blame tune

ya drongo :P

And the first beat ever drummed was probably in 4/4. Form follows function.

Who knows if it did? But even if so, you might add "and boredom soon follows..."

Im sure theres loads of 'world' stuff out there in crazy time signatures.

This is kind of what I'm getting at. Why is something other than 4/4 'crazy' or 'weird'? I think that just demonstrates the profound musical conservatism of our upbringing. Sure, we know 4/4 'works'. Then again, so does 2-step drum n bass.

Irish traditional dance music =

Traditional dances and tunes include reels (4/4), hornpipes (4/4 with swung eighth notes), and jigs (double and single jigs are in 6/8 time), as well as imported waltzes, mazurkas, polkas, and highlands or barndances (a sort of Irish version of the Scottish strathspey). Jigs come in various other forms for dancing — the slip jig and hop jig are commonly written in 9/8 time, the slide in 12/8.... Polkas are a type of 2/4 tune mostly found in the Sliabh Luachra area, at the border of Cork and Kerry, in the south of Ireland. Another distinctive Munster rhythm is the Slide, like a fast single jig in 12/8 time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_music_...or_dancing

I dont know if theres much contemporary dance music that isnt 4/4.

Yeah, I'm interested in hearing 'contemporary' non 4/4 dance music, from anywhere in the world. I'd kinda hoped that someone would have come across some and could recommend it. But I can use Google and Youtube as well as the next man, so if not, then no worries...

you can dance to that Blame tune

ya drongo :P

I'd like to see YOU try, ya great nelly

Nah, occasional 'experimental' downbeat forays into non 4/4 by dnb'ers etc are of little interest to me here, precisely because they didn't make those tunes for dancing.

Those are 'beats' tunes, not dance tunes. In fact, more to the point, such tunes were made in the certain knowledge that no-one would ever dance to them - because the producers knew that the DJs wouldn't/couldn't mix them into a set of 4/4.

Only Suv ever tried to introduce new time signatures into for the dnb dancefloor by releasing an EP with a couple of 3/4 tunes on there - but no-one followed his lead.

And the first beat ever drummed was probably in 4/4. Form follows function.

Who knows if it did? But even if so, you might add "and boredom soon follows..."

Sure. But theres obviously some profound reason why people like 4/4 and why it has endured.

Sure. But theres obviously some profound reason why people like 4/4 and why it has endured.

As with 2-step drum n bass

[Statto]

Only Suv ever tried to introduce new time signatures into for the dnb dancefloor by releasing an EP with a couple of 3/4 tunes on there - but no-one followed his lead.

including you

Only Suv ever tried to introduce new time signatures into for the dnb dancefloor by releasing an EP with a couple of 3/4 tunes on there - but no-one followed his lead.

including you

Indeed. I don't know anything about time signatures other than the 4/4 I've had drilled into me since I first started listening to dance music. But the idea of non 4/4 dance music excites me. That's why I'm trying to find out more about it.

Sure. But theres obviously some profound reason why people like 4/4 and why it has endured.

As with 2-step drum n bass

I meant more in relation to how the brain process music - similarly with how it processes language. There may be certain universal 'units' of rhythm which are more easily absorbed.

“This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession,” says via e-mail that when listeners encounter complex time signatures such as 9/8 or 12/8 in the music of Beethoven, Chopin and others, they tend to break them down into more familiar, assimilable bundles of three or four.

“It may be partly innate and partly a process of enculturation,” Mr. Levitin continues. “In Indian music, the listener may have to hold in mind time signatures that only work themselves out over several minutes. Clearly, the brain can be trained to do this, but such training probably needs to occur early.”

Recent studies have begun to demonstrate how humans’ perception of rhythm is a deep-seated neural response. As reported in the magazine New Scientist, researchers at Budapest’s Institute for Psychology and the University of Amsterdam found that even sleeping infants have a sense of rhythm, as measured by electrical activity in their brains in response to calibrated drum recordings.

The finding wouldn’t surprise Frederick Turner, a poet-scholar at the University of Texas at Dallas. He has discovered two things about poetry that have important implications for music: First, every culture does it. Second, every culture does it more or less the same way — in lines that follow universal metrical patterns.

Along with German brain researcher Ernst Poppel, Mr. Turner says the human brain takes aural information in roughly three-second chunks. If a line of poetry extends too far outside of that window, it will spill onto a second line and become a couplet, he says.

Even more intriguingly, Mr. Turner says the pattern extends to other mammals — in the intervals of whale songs, for instance.

Poetry is a “beautiful and dangerous cocktail” that affects both sides of the brain — the left, which logically organizes grammar, and the right, which recognizes melody.

A political speech, a protest chant, a song, a poem — each depends to some extent on this “cocktail” of rhythmic perception.

In “This Is Your Brain on Music,” Mr. Levitin adduces a simple, functional explanation for why we favor the 4/4 meter: It matches our evenly numbered footfalls in the act of marching or dancing.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009.../?page=all

But as Naphtron pointed out, jigs and waltzes and all sorts of other 3/4 or 3/8 dances haven't exactly been marginal, historically speaking.

to that btw

Although TBF most jigs except slip jigs you essentially dance to as if they were in bars of 4/4 -
DI da dee DI da dee DI da dee DI da dee with the melody conveniently falling into blocks of eight bars of two sets of triplets, which is effectively four sets of two beats.

Waltzing has been fairly massive at times, and is a distinctly asymmetric measure, although it was also essentially a 'learnt' dance - I don't think people naturally break out in a waltz in the same way you can sort of instinctively flail around to 4/4 beats.

Waltzing has been fairly massive at times

"Out to the Viennese crew! Brocking out in the Austro-Hungarian empire! Big up the Hapsburg dynasty - your time!"

Although TBF most jigs except slip jigs you essentially dance to as if they were in bars of 4/4 -
DI da dee DI da dee DI da dee DI da dee with the melody conveniently falling into blocks of eight bars of two sets of triplets, which is effectively four sets of two beats.

"Out to the Viennese crew! Brocking out in the Austro-Hungarian empire! Big up the Hapsburg dynasty - your time!"

[noisemonkey]

to that btw

grea tune, but it's still 4/4.