Arrythmic music

Kinda like "Spread Eagle Beagle" (Melvins). Or "Pyramid Song"!!!

Biota. There is some kind of pulse most of the time, but they really try their best to hide it. Can be very queasy, but if surrealism is your mode, they're the greatest band in history.

the shaggs

Jay-Z / Memphis Bleek, "Hey Papi". AWESOME.

A lot of Tony Williams/Ron Carter tracks...they always know exactly where the main pulse is, but they do all those spontaneous superimpositions with the time (like on the Plugged Nickel recordings where they'll play half a song using the quarter note triplet as a main pulse).

Can't think of a lot of non-jazz (or non-electronic) tracks that use free rhythms...I suppose that would kind of defeat the point of rock, hiphop, dance, etc.

Is anything non 4/4 considered arrhythmic? I think of arrhythmia in the cardiac sense: a deviation from a previously established rhythm (potentially fatal). I can't think of any examples save for poor musicianship, but this seems like it would be irritatingly manipulative in a piece of music. Do you mean non-rhythmic? Even beyond Milford Graves and such, I hear rhythms in the dynamics of noise; even in pure drone your internal, circadian clocks will probably imply a rhythm (pure silence even -- is this John Cage's point?). Rhythm is inescapable, just like the hippies say. There are mutant strains of fruitfly with circadian clock (biorhythmic) defects, I wonder if they respond differently to different kinds of music than normal fruitflies?

they're really into emo

808 State Lopez

Some good music that sounds arrhythmic is just differently rhythmic (I mean that in a really pragmatic sense:) - fuck I just realised I can't use that invented punctuation thanks to EMOTICONS - The Shaggs have a steady pulse that they stick to but often the players don't listen to each other. African music that sound rhythmically complex consists of layered tempos that are very strictly related. IDM gives migraines because the pulses are electrical and fall exactly on the beat. Human deviations from the actual pulse are quite regular in themselves and can be aesthetically pleasing. For example, humans beating 3-4 will tend to go 1-2-2+2/3 rather than 1-2-3. Well I heard that anyway.

Um, "Pyramid Song" is in 4. Specifically, it's in an oddly- divided 12/8. Also, "Lopez" has an extremely strong rhythmic pulse going on; the fact that it's in 5/4 doesn't make it arhythmic.

There is some stuff on The KLF's Chill Out which is arhythmic, but a lot of things have some underlying pulse. As Kris says, it's extraordinarily difficult to divorce rhythm from sound.

the only show i ever saw that was truly "arrhythmic" was Neil Haggerty at Tonic.