Editor’s Note: This post is guest written by Calder Hannan, who is a PhD student in music theory at Columbia University.

One of the most enjoyable things about a lot of metal, for me, is the way that it often forces me to think about and experience time in new and challenging ways. While I and others have written a fair amount about bands that obviously play with rhythm and meter, such as Meshuggah, Dream Theater, Car Bomb, and The Dillinger Escape Plan, I’ve been thinking recently about a song from a less obviously technical or experimental band: “The Atavist’s Meridian,” from Inter Arma’s excellent recent album Sulphur English.

The song is a long 5/8 and 5/4 meditation, and what strikes me about it is the way that the first section simultaneously suggests at least four different ways of grouping and thinking about time:

• The drums present shifting groupings of accents within the 5/8, most often with only the first beat accented but sometimes as 2+3 and occasionally as 3+2 (fig 1)
  
  
• The tremolo picked guitar pattern presents continuous waves of energy that seem to peak in intensity at the downbeat of each measure, but the waves are smooth: they don’t suggest any particular way of subdividing, only a regular, subtle, analogue oscillation (fig 2)
  
  
• The guitars and bass move to a new pitch every sixteen measures of 5/8, marking out a level of motion (the harmonic rhythm) above but related to the much quicker individual measures (fig 3)
  
  
• Finally, the guitars and bass outline an 11-pitch long pattern which is cycled through twice in the first section of the song (fig 4)

Thinking about meter as a series of nested layers like this is nothing new in music theory, but what is interesting for me in this song is that the number of smaller units that make up each larger unit is different for each layer. In most pop and rock music, levels are built on multiples of two smaller units all the way up: a riff might last for two beats, a measure lasts for four, a line of text for four measures, a verse for eight measures, and so on. Here, the guitars’ washing peaks of intensity seem to occupy a different world than the pointilistic, accent-based drum patterns, and the five-ness of the drum patterns does not match the sixteen-ness of the harmonic rhythm and neither match the eleven-ness of the larger pitch pattern (fig 5). In other words, where most pop and rock music can be thought of as being fractal-like, with each level of magnification looking similar to those above and below, in “The Atavist’s Meridian” each level has a completely different feel.

I think that while it might rightly be argued that one can’t truly “hear” an 11-pitch pattern that repeats only after more than two minutes because it is too long to keep track of, there are still important expressive effects of this, even if it is more of a question of “knowing” (from transcribing and analyzing) that these incommensurate patterns exist at higher levels. (( In other words, we may easily recognize that there is some sort of pattern in how the pitches of 1 the guitar riff progress, but it takes a very concerted effort to hear that it lasts for eleven pitches, and perception of this is much less immediate than hearing the persistent 5-beat pattern of the drums. ))

First, I think that the misalignment between types of layers can be thought of as an expression of pain—singer Mike Paparo has said that the album explores dealing with loss and depression, and I find the metaphor of multi-layered internal disagreement or dissonance ((Music theorists use the term “metric dissonance” (which explores parallels between pitch and 2 rhythm) to talk about similar situations, in which metric layers that don’t fit into each other neatly are used simultaneously. The situation here is a little different, because the layers do actually fit into each other (because they happen on such different scales), but I think it is still worthwhile to think about a conceptual metric dissonance between layers of meter at different scales here)) to be an evocative way of thinking about internal pain.

Second, I find that the vast difference of time frame between the levels of repetition (about half a second for each measure of 5/8 and more than two minutes for each cycle of the 11-pitch pattern) draws my attention to size in an appealing way. My local attention feels dwarfed, and the song sounds cavernous when I try to toggle between hearing these different layers. Other aspects of the band’s music certainly contribute to this as well, especially their use of heavy reverb (and perhaps I’m thinking about the title of their equally awesome earlier EP The Cavern), but for me the special nature of the irregular structures of this section contribute even more to Inter Arma’s monstrous, enormous sound.

Bibliography

Capuzzo, Guy. 2018. “Rhythmic Deviance in the Music of Meshuggah.” Music Theory Spectrum 40 (1): 121–37. https://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mty005.

Hannan, Calder. 2017. “Metrical Complexity in Car Bomb’s Lights Out.” Metal In Theory (blog). November 17, 2017. http://metalintheory.com/car-bomb-lights-out/.

———. 2018. “Difficulty as Heaviness: Links between Rhythmic Difficulty and Perceived Heaviness in the Music of Meshuggah and The Dillinger Escape Plan.” Metal Music Studies 4 (3): 433–58. https://doi.org/10.1386/mms.4.3.433_1.

Hudson, Stephen. 2014. “Fragments of Riffs and Small Alterations in Meshuggah’s ‘ObZen.’” Metal In Theory (blog). June 30, 2014. http://metalintheory.com/meshuggah-obzen/.

———. 2016. “Disconnecting Rhythm and Pitch in Meshuggah’s ‘Nostrum.’” Metal In Theory (blog). October 8, 2016. http://metalintheory.com/meshuggah-nostrum/.

Krebs, Harald. 1987. “Some Extensions of the Concepts of Metrical Consonance and Dissonance.” Journal of Music Theory 31 (1): 99–120.

Lucas, Olivia. 2016. “Loudness, Rhythm, and Environment: Analytical Issues in Extreme Metal.” Dissertation, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard.

McCandless, Gregory R. 2013. “Metal as a Gradual Process: Additive Rhythmic Structures in the Music of Dream Theater.” Music Theory Online 19 (2). http://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.13.19.2/mto.13.19.2.mccandless.html.

Osborn, Brad. 2010. “Beats That Commute: Algebraic and Kinesthetic Models for Math-Rock Grooves.” Gamut 3 (1): 43–67. https://trace.tennessee.edu/gamut/vol3/iss1/4/