THE GENRE PROJECT - January 13 - Halftime

Genre of the Day - Halftime

Album of the Day - Outer Edges by Noisia (2016)

Today’s genre was surprisingly another relatively niche dance subgenre, although really sonically also a complete left turn from yesterday. No, this is not Super Bowl halftime music, but the meaning behind the genre’s name is actually very straightforward. Halftime music is an offshoot of drum and bass differentiated by BPMs hovering around half of d'n'b’s (80-85 BPM) with more Neurofunk sensibilities and unusual rhythms. It emerged in the 2010s, making it yet another recently derived genre like hi-tech psytrance. When you’re consuming a narrower range of music, it can sometimes feel as if all ground has been covered—synthesizer technology isn’t leaping and bounding like it was each year decades ago, after all, yet at the same time delving into today’s genre was a needed reminder that music remains perpetual motion, and we will continue to keep speeding up, chopping up, and pushing the outer edges (haha) of what machines can give us musically. 

Today’s album is by a group called Noisia hailing from the Netherlands (what is it with the western European mind and these quirked up, unhinged genres?), who essentially pioneered the sound of halftime by working Neurofunk into a half-tempo setting. Across a sprawling 18 tracks lasting almost an hour, they create an experience honestly much better than I was anticipating. I say this because for some reason I’ve just never been really able to appreciate the sound of dubstep at least in the cut-and-dry bits of it that have filtered into the mainstream, but this album is so much more.

The first few tracks immediately banged, with hard, sneering, even foreboding electronic pads pushing up against dizzying vignettes of drum’n’bass percussion (I don’t know if these tracks are even halftime or if halftime still just sounds super fast). I was worried because for me as a listener the album skidded to a halt a bit on Vigilantes with its incessant chanting and basic dubstep beat, but it quickly picked up and didn’t waver in quality for the rest of the 58 minutes. Between the hard-hitting more percussive cuts like the whiplash tempo shifts of Straight Hook, the trio probes new soundscapes on tracks that function as great interludes like Surfaceless and Miniatured and instrumental moments like the gorgeous gothic chord progression and strings at the end of Into Dust. This album, and the genre of halftime in general, is intriguing because of the way it is able to mix experimentation with drum patterns with intricately layered soundscapes. Across the album, there’s an internal dynamism to each song that makes it a varied, engaging listen. It’s funny because I don’t think this is an album I would’ve been able to appreciate even two weeks ago before starting this project, but one lesson I’m gradually gleaning is that music enjoyment really comes from exposure more than anything else.