Song of the Day #315 - DJ Paypal - Dose (ft. DJ Earl + DJ Taye)

Foottranscendence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1m1P2eknrk

This one's kinda funny. This is the first release from adult swim's 2016 singles project... they've been doing this since 2012, and every year has some really good stuff (it gave us the godly "Between Friends", for example), so I was pretty excited to listen to this. I listened to it once, then got all caught up in aforementioned emotional rollercoasters and sorta forgot about it. And it wasn't that I remembered the song directly, but that I kept thinking about Chrono Trigger, and wanting to listen to this song "Avalon" by sasakure.UK, and that's all good cause those are good things and it's good to think about them, but I had no idea why they were suddenly coming to mind, and that was bugging me.

But as soon as I heard this song again - I dunno what made me think of it - I realized immediately. It's the synths! The synths at the start! They're the exact same as in "Avalon", and in a bunch of places in the Chrono Trigger sound track! The bass too! I think even one of the rhythms is the same as a specific spot in Chrono Trigger... I can't quite think of where, but I almost don't want to find out... it's kinda nice sometimes when you have these indistinct connections, it creates a sort of "blurry ideal" in your mind. It's definitely the same though... I'm not crazy, right? I asked a few friends and they seemed to understand where I was coming from. Maybe they were humouring me.

Anyways, that alone would have been enough to make this song something special for me, but everything else pushes it into this zone of absolute footwork transcendence. Although the genre seems meme-simple at first, there's a really unique feeling that can well up from somewhere unexpectedly deep... it isn't quite the feeling of "I want to dance", but maybe it is close... wanting to do some impossible action, wanting to exert some muscle you don't actually have. It's an anticipatory feeling, one borne of the structure of the song, which you can imagine operating well in a club-type setting.

So you have this beautiful intro, with a pretty complex pattern, and then a long breakdown with much simpler patterns, and a minute or so in we get the reintroduction of that melodically/rhythmically/tonally complex driving line that characterizes the genre, but it's only for a second. And then, at 2 minutes in, that's when I feel it really strongly, this urge to dance in some new dimension. Something about the exoticism the sound, the unpredictability of the pattern, the relentlessness of its evolution... it feels like something similarly unprecedented might burst forth from you. And then, after a few more explorations along these lines, we return to the simplest pattern, heard in the intro. The way it holds out for a few seconds more this time before returning us to the lush forest of those mysterious Chrono Trigger synths... ahh, that is a genius move of structuring... It's really beautiful, I think, the combination of these serene forest sounds, almost holy, and the rampaging footwork rhythm... feels like an analogy for something, but I dunno what.