Where were you in '13?: "Pyrex Nights" by Zomby
Where were you in '13?: "Pyrex Nights" by Zomby
Drumming Upstream 28
Welcome to Drumming Upstream! I’m learning how to play every song I’ve ever Liked on Spotify on drums and writing about each song as I go. When I’ve learned them all I will delete my Spotify account in a blaze of glory. Only 451 songs to go!
This week I learned “Pyrex Nights”, a collaboration between Zomby & Last Japan, two electronic producers originally from London, UK. Since Zomby gets the top billing, and generally has the higher profile, I’ll be focusing most of my critical attention on him. Neither producer will show up in this series again. In fact, if I had paid better attention, Zomby might not have shown up in this series at all. As I was writing this entry I learned that Zomby, born Justin Mounds, was accused of violent sexual assault in 2018. Had I known about this prior to the start of Drumming Upstream I doubt “Pyrex Nights” would have lasted long on my Liked list. Sadly, I’ve already poured several hundred words into this entry so there’s no turning back now. Luckily, none of those words have been kind to Zomby. The guy seems like a real tool.
Now, let’s get cooking with “Pyrex Nights”.
Side A
“Pyrex Nights”
By Zomby
With Love
Released on June 17th, 2013
Liked on August 16th, 2015
Early in the interminable 165 minute duration of British director Christopher Nolan’s 2012 blockbuster The Dark Knight Rises, actor Tom Hardy (also British), playing the Communist superhero Bane, mumbles to a capitalist adversary that “no one cared who I was until I put on the mask”. If Nolan and Hardy’s countrymen could make this line out through Nolan’s bombastic sound design and Hardy’s sublimely inexplicable Sean Connery impression, I imagine that a fair number of them, mostly the sort interested in making danceable electronic music, leapt to their feet in the theater to shout “here here!”, and “bravo!” among other jolly old British-isms of approval.
You see, in the early 2010s the sound waves were awash with producers and performers hidden behind masks and pseudonyms. These anonymous musicians weren’t just common, they were celebrated, sometimes with enough volume to be coaxed out of the shadows and into the spotlight1. Perhaps the culture could feel the anonymous age of the internet giving way to the endless oversharing, free roaming personal data, and para-sociality of the modern day and elevated these faceless heroes preemptively. Maybe the press & public just couldn’t get enough Burial2 and were willing to huff anything in arm’s reach for even a hint of the same high. This would in part explain why so many of the masked selectors clogging up the blog feed were from across the pond.
Zomby, a London producer armed with a collection of bespoke Guy Fawkes masks and an encyclopedic memory of UK dance music, rode this wave straight across the Atlantic. Born Justin Mounds, Zomby landed in New York City ready to capitalize on a number of concurrent trends. Zomby was anonymous, and his choice of disguise hinted at the icongraphy of an even edgier kind of Anonymity popular in those days with Americans unhappy about the recession. Zomby produced tracks that drew from a specifically English tradition of electronic music, mixing together Jungle, Garage, 2-Step, and Grime, all styles popular with American hipsters looking for counter programing during the EDM boom. And though his music drew from the recent past, Zomby himself was a creature of the present. Much like last entry’s star, Zomby is a member of Generation Twitter. In fact, Zomby is the first artist featured in this series who I knew for his tweets before hearing a note of his music. I’m not sure how honorable a distinction that is.
In my network of young and musically inclined New Yorkers and geographically diverse but perpetually online music bloggers, a Zomby tweet slipping into my feed was a near daily inevitably. The guy was always around, making brash proclamations about designer fashion and dance music. “It’s sweet,” Zomby told Pitchfork in 2013 with optimism unimaginable even two years later “because now my online representation is just a very easily maintained box for me to type some shit in.” This low effort strategy succeeded at getting the internet’s attention. It had less luck in Zomby’s music.
“Pyrex Nights” is the seventh track on the second disc of With Love3, Zomby’s first album since moving from London to New York, his second for the label 4AD, and third overall. It is a collaboration with Last Japan, a London producer whose music has left nary a toenail of a digital footprint outside of a lone mixtape and a handful of ad placements. Both Zomby and Last Japan's music has served as the background to runway shows, fashion advertisements, and Vice documentaries. It won't take long into With Love's 80 minute runtime to figure out why its pairing with marketing and fashion works. At first listen Zomby’s music sounds sleek, futuristic, and tastefully minimal. It evokes the criminal danger of grime and trap music that edgy fashion labels and youth-oriented media companies find so tantalizing, but treats those sounds with a cold, impersonal remove that makes it an easier fit in “classier” environs. The pairing also works because once you peel back that stylish surface, there is next to no actual content in Zomby’s music.
With Love is 33 tracks long, the longest of which barely breaks four minutes. Each track typically consists of a loop made up of two sections. In turn, these two sections are typically variations on one idea per track. Many of the tracks reuse the same digital instruments, and some, like “Pyrex Nights”, share melodic fragments with other tracks. Tracks don’t conclude on With Love, they just stop at the end of a loop and make way for the next track unceremoniously. The tracks are arranged on each disc in alphabetical order. Titles are short, often a single word with the shallow profundity of a men’s cologne line.
Tracks, fragments, and placeholders. Not songs, melodies, and names. I have spent enough late nights in bedrooms with carpeted floors and foam covered walls occupied by bros of varied number and sobriety around a computer open to a Digital Audio Workstation to know what’s going on here. I know a folder labelled “bounces” on a desktop when I hear it. Zomby sold us a bunch of unfinished demos and called it an album. I don’t say this with the benefit of hindsight, critics at the time pointed out that With Love felt half-baked. So many critics pointed this out in fact that in Fact magazine Tom Lea began his review complaining about how many other reviews called the album unfinished, before admitting that he “crave[d] more variety in the snare sounds and key”. Multiple reviews use the term “self-sabotage”, Consequence going so far as to call it typical of Zomby to sell his material short this way.
Where critics differed was whether this untimely removal from the oven meant anything deeper. Reviews both positive and negative spooled out significance from With Love’s mess of loose ends. Andrew Gaerig argued in Pitchfork that Zomby is “capable of beauty and great affect but too stoned or disinterested to fully commit”, staking the album’s quality on its material’s potential and air of cool. Tiny Mixtapes’ Nick Henderson on the other hand made a credible case that Zomby’s allusions to spirituality in his track titles signaled an attempt to transcend context into pure aesthetics, concluding that removing context robbed the styles Zomby employed of their real world vitality.
Henderson doesn’t mention “Pyrex Nights” in his review, but it is a good example of what he’s getting at. The track finds Zomby expanding out of his UK centric vocabulary into the world of trap music. Around the time of With Love’s release, trap music was shifting from a popular regional style of hip-hop from the American south to a global EDM trend, thanks in part to producers like TNGHT4. Then living on American soil, it is no surprise that Zomby would try his hand at the style. To his credit, "Pyrex Nights" delivers on the basic joy of the genre, arranging icy minor key melodies and sizzling hi-hats over bowel-re-arranging bass drops. Still, the suggestion of a British accent hovers at the track's edges. Something about the way the drums frame the downbeat feels more accommodating to the twitchy flow of a Grime MC than an Atlanta drawl. This makes "Pyrex Nights" a genuine historical curiosity. Here's a British producer living in America, setting the stage for UK drill while living in a city where only a decade later Americanized drill would boom out of every passing car. Zomby is hardly an essential part of that dialogue, but he is a part of it nonetheless.
“Pyrex Nights” lacks the spiritual angle of other tracks on With Love, unless you count entrepreneurial spirit. The track’s title, in keeping with its musical influences, evokes the image of drug dealers up late cooking cocaine with household appliances. Even without a rapper spelling out the stakes over top, “Pyrex Nights” does a decent job of capturing the adrenaline rush of a high risk, high reward hustle. This is likely why I Liked the track while out on a long run in Chicago. Though it’s no “Delorian Dynamite” (see DU #7), With Love made for a decent running soundtrack. As one of the rare moments where something measurably happens on the record, the drop on “Pyrex Nights” was a highlight of that late summer run in Pilsen. The drop may have been enough to motivate me across the finish line, but the jolt it provides “Pyrex Nights” dries up long before Zomby cuts the loop off.
If dedication to the grind is a vague enough theme to apply to jogging and drug dealing alike, it may also be vague enough to blur the line between hustling and scamming. When asked by Pitchfork in 2013 about releasing dance music through 4AD, a label more commonly associated with indie rock, Zomby replied “I don’t have to adhere to any dance or electronic structures. I can compose anything and pass it off, and they’ll listen to it.” The rest of the quote is sincerely appreciative of the creative freedom 4AD affords him, but this bit struck me as telling. “I can compose anything and pass it off, and they’ll listen to it” is not the kind of thing you say when you respect your audience. Zomby knew the right clothes to wear and the right musical references, spoke about these credentials with the authoritative bluster endemic to Twitter and wisely otherwise kept out of sight, giving his audience the confidence to fill in the rest of the picture themselves.
Turns out that a reputation is not as easily maintained as typing words in a box. A decade after With Love’s moment in the sun, Zomby has none of his former cache. Twitter is now the domain and plaything of dorks, and Zomby is the subject of rumors of music theft5 and unprofessionalism at best and an alleged sex criminal at worst. In this light it is easier to see “Pyrex Nights” for what it really is; a hack cashing in on a trendy style with a cheap imitation of the real deal. But surely if it ended up on my Liked list it must have some redeeming qualities, right?
Right??
Side B
“Pyrex Nights”
Produced by Zomby & Last Japan
70 BPM
Time Signature: 4/4
I’ve joked to myself while listening to With Love as research for this entry that everything good about this track must be the contributions of Last Japan. I haven’t been able to find any documentation of who did what on “Pyrex Nights” but the track does feature a few notable differences from the rest of the record that hint at another producer’s hand. Namely, “Pyrex Night” is made up three distinct sections instead of the usual two. Here’s how the form breaks down:
Intro (8 measures)
Drop 1 (16 measures)
Verse 1 (8 measures)
Drop 2 (16 measures)
Verse 2 (8 measures)
From a melodic perspective there’s nothing to distinguish the intro and verse. Both sections are based on the same vaguely “eastern” sounding melody on a digital harp. What makes them distinct is the drums.
Unlike most of the tracks on With Love that lay out their whole arrangement at first opportunity, Last Japan and Zomby show some restraint on “Pyrex Nights”. The intro features only one of the track’s multiple layers of percussion. When the drop arrives with its alarm-bell melody and wobbling bass line the two producers build this hi-hat ostinato into a full groove. The first additions are kick and snare, placed in a fairly conventional back beat. Then at the end of each measure the duo throw in a group of six triplets on a wood block sound, cutting directly against the straight 16th note feel of the rest of the groove. Every four measures this triplet figure is replaced by a martial drum fill that always reminds me of the theme from the movie Terminator 2: Judgement Day. And finally every eight measures they add another fill on top of the Terminator one, this time stretching a figure on the snare drum over the whole measure.
The verse eases up on the fills, cutting the wood block and replacing the Terminator fill with a quick trio of triplets on the snare, but doubles down on the groove itself, Filling in gaps of the track’s central hi-hat pattern are even more hi-hats. Listen closely, and you can tell that these new hats are from a different digital kit than the ones serving as the track’s backbone. They’re also just slightly out of time with the snare fills, which leads me to suspect that the beat is the work of two producers building on top of each other.
Memorizing the way these different layers of percussion intersect took the majority of my practice time for this entry, but “Pyrex Nights” also presented a purely physical challenge. As I described in DU #15 , one of the major challenges for this project is learning how to emulate the hyper-fast hi-hat patterns of modern hip-hop. So far, I’ve been able to keep up using only single strokes, but the hi-hat ostinato at the heart of “Pyrex Nights” proved too fast for that. To recreate the bursts of notes in the ostinato I had to work on my press rolls. Press rolls are usually used on the snare drum so that the individual strokes of the roll disappear into a single continuous buzz. Hi-hats, which are made of metal, have way less give than the plastic heads of snare drums. My press rolls had to be exactly right or they’d die on impact. Eventually with practice I got my rolls sturdy enough play the intro and drop comfortably. The verse groove, which requires a switch from single strokes to press rolls in less than a 16th note, still gave me too much trouble to play note-perfect. Instead I replaced the press rolls with splashes that worked to the same timbral effect. Judge for yourself:
Lacking any of the Margiela or Rick Owens that Zomby typically tweeted about, I went with a Uniqlo windbreaker for this performance. I’ve received more than one comment about looking British while wearing it before, especially when I have the zipper zipped to the top. I doubt my generally pasty appearance does much in my favor in this regard.
So “Pyrex Nights” is a complicated piece of drumming to learn that will force you to improve your press rolls. Is there anything else positive that I can say about it? Find out next on the Drumming Upstream Leaderboard.
DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD
When I first started working on this entry, before a stray Rate Your Music comment led me to google “Zomby allegations”, I figured that “Pyrex Nights” would sit near the bottom of the Leaderboard but above “Vessels” (DU #23) and “Weightless” (DU #9). “Pyrex Nights” does more for me on a purely lizard brain level than those two sleeping pills. Absent any real life context it is a decent if forgettable piece of 2010s electronic music ephemera. However it cannot escape context. It will always be the work of a sub-par hack who put more time into looking the part of a mysterious artist than being an actually good artist, let alone a good person. So instead, “Pyrex Nights” heads straight to the bottom of the leaderboard. Good riddance.
These last few entries have involved more research than normal, which is why they’ve arrived in your inbox with less haste than at least I would like. The next entry by contrast will feature almost no research because there is almost no research material available. Unlike Zomby, the next act come by their mystery honestly. Until then, have a nice week.
The Weeknd will show up later in Drumming Upstream. If his original mixtapes had been on Spotify prior to their rerelease as Trilogy, he’d probably have already appeared a few times.
An entire Burial EP will show up in Drumming Upstream. Shout me out in the comments if you think you can guess which one.
This is the forth double album that I’ve covered this year in Drumming Upstream, following Songs in the Key of Life, The River, and Summertime ‘06. There’s another one coming down the pipes pretty soon. Something I’ll have to look into for my end of year wrap up.
I really wish I were writing about TNGHT instead of this bozo. I could have talked about making the choice to see TNGHT live at Pitchfork festival instead of R Kelly. Good move, 23 year old Ian. Although really the choice between standing in a crowd of hipsters semi-ironically celebrating the music of an aging serial rapist versus dancing with cute girls to the loudest drums on earth was a no brainer.
EDITOR’S NOTE: A reader pointed me to this article in Fact Magazine that substantiates these rumors.