...but Realm and Toxik are technothrash!
...technospeed? Hah sounds like some futuristic drug.
I don't really care as I've said in the other thread speed is defined in 5 ways or something, anyone can pick and take, all that I keep from it is that the music is going to be FAST.
About death metal and black metal that are faster than speed metal comment: in bpm they are faster, but they don't really feel faster (in fact a lot of droneish black metal might blast all the time but it sounds perfectly still. No propulsion). This happens for a lot of reasons. One is subdivision of beat:
-music nerdtalk-
a beat is not a tempo (though it is played at a tempo). A tempo exists when a source is triggered in even intervals. A beat exists when two (or more) different percussive sounds divide this tempo in even or uneven patterns (which we call eighths, halves, dotted thirtyseconds, what have you). So let's say a snare is one source and a kickdrum is another source.
This is a tempo: (try to imagine someone playing these every half a second): s s s s s s s s
This tempo then would be 120 bpm. This has no propulsion, it is just a meter.
This is a beat: k s k s k s k s (for purposes of simplicity let's say all these hits are eights), same tempo.
This beat would then be a polka beat (or thrash beat in this forum
) playing eighths at 120 bpm. If the hits were halfs it would still be 120 bpm thrash beat playing halves, though for self-apparent reasons (since nothing - in this very basic example- occurs every second 120 bpm tempo strike) this would probably by simplified to 60bpm. A tempo and a beat are useful materials for the musician that wants to communicate a certain effect to another player, they are not set in stone, they are to be interpreted.
So this snare/kickdrum alteration in eigths is a is basic division of a beat at 120 bpm.
'Speed' is a musical effect, a connotation so to say. It isn't as blatant as counting the bpm of a song and saying 'if over 190, it's a speedy song'. Imagine the beat at this tempo being
kkkkkkkkkkkkkk s kkkkkkkkkkkkkkk s so on, all hits being sixteenths.
The tempo might be fast, the beat is subdivided so much that the sense of propulsion is fragmented and you get quite a different 'feel' of it. This would feel like a train rolling through. The doublebass would be pummeling but the snare occurs only every whole, so the thing actually would lumber along and feel slow! (Check Morbid Angel material for proof of this). The song effectively doesn't feel fast though in purely tempo talk, it is!
In empirical terms, a polka beat ( k s k s ) seems faster to the mind than a rock beat or something because the two different sources alternate faster and there's nothing in between them. Density and repetition are the keys. Less density = more speed, repeats occur more often = more speed. However there is a limit to this. A blastbeat (which is basically a polka beat, only so fast that the kick and the snare hits appear to occur almost instantaneously) LOSES in terms of speed in comparison to a polka beat because it's more chaotic, it sounds like an endless roll! The constant subdivision of beat without strong anchors to what the suggested tempo is does this. The blastbeat then is more chaotic than fast, and that suits a lot of death metal and grindcore just fine. Also going from a blastbeat to an even polka beat is one of the more 'ARGGH I WILL KEEELL YOOOU' inducing Heavy Metal tricks ever. It just sounds like pure adrenaline. That's good, but its not focused on speed but the juxtaposition of it against chaos. This is why speed is just a tool for death metal but it is the POINT AND PURPOSE of a speed metal band.
So for a genre such as 'speed metal' (where chaos doesn't seem to belong and precision does) the fastest it would make sense to include would be the thrash beat, also of course the variation of it with doublekicks is allowed, which however sounds a bit 'slower' to the brain though the bpm might be the same, but it sounds more grounded and powerful. This explains why power metal that enjoys that sort of robustness more is constant doublekicks everywhere whereas most 'pure' speed records emphasize the kick- snare contrast to suggest more speed. Blastbeats are out, tempos over 230 or so aren't speed anymore, they just seem like a blur.
-music nerdtalk ends-
