EVERY GENRE PROJECT - July 14 - Colour Bass

Genre of the Day - Colour Bass

Album of the Day - Hypersynthetic by Akira Complex (2018)

Color (or colour if you’re partial to this dramatic SNL skit) is an integral part of music, though we often focus on simply the sonic experience rather than its imagined and painted out visual components. Music and color often go hand-in-hand, as music performances around the world often emphasize more color than in day-to-day life, and some people are lucky enough to possess synesthesia including such sonic tinkerers as Lorde, Stevie Wonder, and Pharrell. Even those of us sadly among the ranks of the 99.9995% of people without synesthesia often imagine visual scenes playing out while listening to music. Color captures the mood and tone of songs, distilled in part through album packaging to the vibrant oranges representing Tyler, the Creator’s new shades of Flower Boy, the kaleidoscopic vibrancy of Björk’s Post, or Charli XCX’s abrasive green.

Today’s genre is part of the outgrowth of dubstep since its rise to prominence as producers have taken the genre’s production ideologies further by discovering new elements in the sound’s periodic table and fusing them together with the magic of computer-assisted alchemy and ever-developing plug-ins. Though with a little bit of scorn, this naysayer put it best by describing it as a tactic of ‘coloring’ the sound of a synth bass and putting it through a pitch map that changes its harmonics and dynamics, painting it a unique tonal shade. 

Colour bass (I guess we’ll stick with the British spelling here, I feel like the u indeed adds some extra color) is both a niche production technique as well as a style that’s grown out of it in its own right. We’re diving a bit into the wild, wacky, prismatic world of digital audio workstation production assistants and plug-ins, so get your storage ready if you’d like to embark on their creative journey alongside them. Chime, a producer who coined the term in 2016, notes colour bass as bridging the gap between dark, wubbing aggression and melodic vibrancy in dubstep, this whimsical disposition inclined towards more euphoric drops. He credits the Zynaptiq Pitchmap as being a major tool in pigmenting his synths with its precision and breadth, all visually represented via color. It makes sense that the fusion of color and electricity that is so often employed in the setting of EDM venues would translate into the sonic manipulation strategies of an electronic-wizardry genre. 

Today’s album, though short at only six tracks, reminds us that the sound and the sights of the world around us are simply waves, and any music is a chance to experience a sonic rainbow. “Boot Sequence” illustrates colour bass’ signature buzzy width; to me, it came across as a dark orange with sun flare-orange bursts of light. The urgency of “Ether Strike” seems to burst with a rich scarlet red. The title track thrashes and jumps with its balance of hard bass and transcendent melodies released in the drop, and “Come to Me” illustrates instrumentation influence from J-pop with the meticulously arranged harmonics of its glassy chord textures. Colour bass brings us into the world of synthetes for an album’s length, and reminds us of music’s unparalleled capacity to fill our minds with beautiful visions.