Riff Analysis 078 - Artificial Brain "Floating In Delirium"

Ajouté : 2026-05-12

[00:00:13]Hello and welcome to my Hot Topic store.

[00:00:15]Here's a video I've had simmering in the idea stew for a very long time about the riff that got me into artificial brain.

[00:00:30]machine music. Ron wrote something recently about how I'm one of his friends who spends time worrying about whether something is dissonant or not.

[00:00:37]And that really made me remember like, yeah, that's what it's all about.

[00:00:41]Specifically worrying about what dissonant even means. So, here I am finally getting back to it. So, Artificial Brain is one of those bands that's often called dissonant death metal. Here is a quick recap of my hot takes about the whole dissonant death metal label. So yes, famously I have beef with that term on like music theory grounds. So to be nitpicky and to rehash from the Fantifaxis video, which I don't even remember what I said in that, so I doubt you do. Dissonance is not a super precise term in music theory. For one thing, there are several distinct things that it means. So first, there's this idea of sensory dissonance, which is like the physical sensation that we can hear that two notes have sound waves that don't nest very cleanly. Uh this kind of auditory beating effect. So in this sense yes a tritone or a major 7th or a minor 9th are more dissonant than an octave and a fifth is somewhere between these two. So there is this kind of like scale of more to less dissonance. But however a minor second is dissonant if you play at the same time as another note but it's not normally dissonant at all if it's part of a melody.

[00:01:57]So sensory dissonance only gets you so far in terms of like identifying that's dissonant, that's not dissonant. There's also this idea of tension dissonance, which means that something is not necessarily causing auditory roughness, but it is unexpected or feels like it doesn't belong for some reason. So it feels tense because we know that something's going to have to happen to it. And then on top of all that, there's also this idea of syntactic dissonance in common practice music, which is the idea that certain dissonances need to resolve in specific ways to certain consonances, which is also kind of a separate thing. So that's the like nerd music theory that you learn in school kind of answer. The kind of more metal head reason I think dissonant death metal isn't that accurate of a name is that my brothers and sisters, death metal has always been dissonant by whatever metric you want to use. The way that artificial brain is different from cannibal corpse is not that they have more dissonance, which itself is something that I'm not sure how to measure in any meaningful way. It's that they're more atmospheric about it. They let chords ring out more.

[00:03:12]So maybe a more accurate subgenre name would be like cordal death metal or atmospheric death metal or even let's face it blackened death metal. I also think this thing that Colin Marson pointed out in an interview with Charlie Luker about Obscura the um the Gorgots album.

[00:03:29]>> Fast drums, slow guitar. That's that's the that's the biggest difference >> that it has fast drums and relatively slow guitars is also kind of part of the template for the dise sound. But that's not even enough reasons to have beef with this term. And here's the actual reason which took me a while to figure out. But this thing that Adam Kumbach from Juke Gite said in his interview with Charlie Looker kind of crystallized it for me.

[00:03:53]>> It wasn't really about like maximizing dissonance, but just finding some sort of combination of intervals that that I hadn't played before or heard before.

[00:04:04]Finding some sort of new ground.

[00:04:06]>> And that's the thing. Dissonant death metal is a name that feels kind of like when people say that metal is angry music. Like yeah, I thought that when I was in middle school first getting into it and I liked that, but anyone who actually listens to metal knows that there are a million different emotional and expressive colors that metal paints with beyond anger. Yes, there is anger sometimes, maybe even often, but that's not always or even normally the point.

[00:04:30]Same thing with dissonance. Like yes, there's this shock value initially of like, wow, there's some crunchy chords, but the point of this music is that there's all different flavors of unusual harmonies in there with all sorts of nuance. Calling it dissonant death metal feels kind of depressing to me because it's like really that's all you're hearing. The fact that there are some major sevenths in this, but then also at the final metal level, genre names never really make sense. And this critique I have about death disodath being this kind of like flattening way of hearing is maybe implied by the name, but it doesn't actually determine how anyone is hearing this music. And distant death metal or dise is as good a label as any other. And it's gotten to the point where people know what it means. So whatever, that's enough bones to pick with it as a a name. So I'm not hating the specific player necessarily who uses this term, but I am hating the game a little bit and I'm allowed to do that.

[00:05:21]Anyway, here's the first riff. Slow and I'm going to zero in on this idea that there are specific things about note choices in this music beyond just let's maximize dissonance. So there are definitely lots of crunchy intervals.

[00:05:54]This first chord is basically a major 7th and then a minor 7th on top of that which gets this 016 sound which I'll talk about in a sec. And it's kind of even more destabilizing because it's not super helpful I don't think to try to label these as like jazz chords. I mean you could. This chord has B, D, C sharp, and G sharp, which makes it some sort of absurd B minor major 7th, 13th or something, or like a G# sharp diminish with a major 7th. But music theory has a better solution, and that's to use some of the techniques people use to analyze and compose aal music. More on the question of a tonality also at the end of this video. The way that I have of thinking about these chords and harmony goes back to an idea I've been kicking around for a long time since I think the third ever video on this channel, which in turn is an idea that I got from this article by Harrisburg Burger that basically says that momentto- moment intervals are normally more important in death metal harmony than overall scales or chords. I'm going to use that to talk about the chords in this riff. So, this first chord has the classic dissodath/mathcore sound, the 016 set class in it.

[00:07:08]It has a trionee and a major 7th above a single note which is one very specific type of quintessentially dissonant sound. You get the 016 from kind of compressing all the notes and inverting them if needed, putting them into the same octave and putting the smallest intervals at the bottom. So, it's this kind of abstract way of thinking about pitch, which helps find relations between sounds that are outside of this like common practice triadic tonal framework. But the chords in the second measure have a completely different character. There's a power chord and then what I'm going to call a fifth C4th C chord, which sounds more spacious.

[00:07:51]So stacking fourths and or fifths depending on how you how you think about it. And the chord in the third measure is this more clustery sound with C#, D, E, and F all kind of in the same sority, which is another very different sound.

[00:08:11]So here's this progression without distortion and with the texture simplified.

[00:08:40]So yeah, one level of what I'm thinking about with this is the interval content of the chords without really caring about what the roots of the chords are or how they relate to triads or to a scale. scale or necessarily even to each other other than just like what kind of ingredients are in each specific chord.

[00:08:54]Everything normally goes by really fast in this music and it is cool to just listen to it as like a high-powered cybernetic rhythm and texture machine, but I think it's really earopening to start paying attention to all the little different flavors these intervals have.

[00:09:07]For me, it felt like suddenly listening in color to start tuning into all these nice nuances between chords. The other way to think about harmony in this type of riff that I think is useful is to pay attention to voice leading. So in this first riff, there's this nice little baseline that goes from B to C sharp and back. Uh if we only pay attention to the notes on the lowest string.

[00:09:46]There's also this nice like suspension resolution thing happening across the bar line in the third and fourth measures if you know to listen for it, which almost even sounds kind of like a bizarre credential 64 chord given where it happens in the measure.

[00:10:05]In a later riff, there's also a longer chromatic voice leaning line in the upper voice in these arpeggios, uh, which this upper voice sits on G# sharp for a long time. It jumps up the octave, still on G# sharp, and then finally resolves up to A in the last chord.

[00:10:43]which I think makes this really nice contrast to the static open string pedals in some of these chords and the shifting perfect fifths at the bottom of all of them.

[00:10:57]Heat.

[00:11:16]Heat.

[00:11:28]I think these little voiceleading lines, which in some of their songs sound more like fully fleshed out melodies, can sound like breadcrumb trails through the fog. They're little things that are actually singable, unlike the crunchy and angular chords that they emerge from. And because of that, I find my ear drawn to them. And when I can start to hear them and isolate them in the crazy texture, I feel this deeper connection to the riff. I think artificial brain in particular is really good at doing this, making these orally graspable through lines in these angular dense riffs. So yeah, there's some barely analysis kind of music appreciation type stuff for hearing these riffs better and not being stuck in the it's all just dissonant.

[00:12:08]Haha, nice way of hearing these riffs that I imagine when I hear the genre label dissonant death metal. Here's the first few riffs of this song for fun.

[00:12:41]Heat. Heat.

[00:13:01]Heat.

[00:13:10]Heat.

[00:13:35]Post tunnel theory is nice for talking about music that doesn't feel like it has a tonal center of gravity, which is true in a lot of artificial brains music. In other words, it gives us some ideas for describing sounds that slip through the cracks of all the names that we have for chords and scales. And for times like these when it's not that easy to tell which way is up harmonically speaking. For the real nerds though, here is a little postcript about how I see this music as different from 20th century art music that things like set classes and interval vectors were designed for. Basically, I think that the fact that this music is riff based makes a big difference. In Shonberg and company's music, you'll basically never hear something repeated verbatim. While in DisoDeath, you almost always hear each riff at least two to four times right away, and then often it'll come back more than once in a song. This freezes the harmony into sounding more like bizarre chord progressions rather than a constantly shifting stream of equally distributed pitches. I think it's also kind of the stumbling block of trying to use hardcore postonal theory on disso death because there's actually typically a lot fewer notes than there are in like Shonberg and Company's music but also this repetitiveness gives you kind of a better chance maybe of actually hearing these cool differences between chords and these voiceleading things. I guess my question for all my disso heads is uh I don't know what do you listen for in these riffs? Are you listening to harmony at all? Is that like on your radar or is it just like blast be fun? I don't know. See you.

[00:15:32]Hey, hey, hey.