Manta by Antix Music
Antix is one of my favourite acts who really would earn the label “progressive”, because they brought new sounds and ideas with every new album they made. How hard the labeling of this music style is you can see already, if you take a look at psyshop, where the whole album is marked with “Progressive Trance”. Dejan from analogik writes: “You’ve developed your sound a bit over the years – from the quite deep, progressive trance sound to the tech house sound nowadays.” Antix themselve taged this piece with “TECHNO/PROGRESSIVE/TECHHOUSE/INDIE DANCE” at soundcloud, where they fortunately uploaded this great piece of music (So you can follow both – the music and my writings 
).
Manta is the second track on their album Cavalier from 2010, which has been released on the label Iboga. All compositions on Cavalier are mixed together, but are available as single mp3 tracks also, if you want to play the full track in your own mix or … well … just want to listen to the whole single piece, which is 7:44 in case of Manta. The title Manta points to a manta ray, which is displayed on the Antix Manta EP and has been released in September 2011. Whether the title has to do somthing with the music, like a lot of titles have, should be clarified.
Intro
Almost unnecessary to mention is that this piece has a four-four time. The speed is 125 beats per minute from the start to the end and has 242 bars. The tonal centre is A. It starts with a 32 bars intro. Right from the start you can find this bass pattern (Should I mention that repetition is THE main design medium of any kind of electronic dance music and is realized by repeating patterns? ).
Bass Pattern 1
During the first 32 bars the rhythm-pattern is filled up part by part. At the beginning you can year a hi-hat hit every quarter and a white-noise sound snare on 2 and 4 (as usual, but they vary length of the sound). The snare will be accompanied by a finger snap. A shuffling sixteenth hi-hat beat will be faded in. A third hi-hat and the bass drum fulfill the rythm.
Rythm Pattern 1
From bar 8 one can hear a fading in synthetic string tone on b, which creates a harmonic tension, because of the major second intervall (a-b). This supports the whole progression in the intro part. From the first bar and repeated nearly every four bars a small motiv with a percussive synth sound with a long reverb are is presented.
Percussive Synth
Maybe this motiv derives from a more easy one, because I guess to hear a change from A to E tone throught the whole intro with a calm synth pad with an additional filter cut curve, which produces a tone to function as a new rhymical accent.
Filter Curve Synth Pad
So, the first climax at bar 30 accompanied by a processed vocal sample (“every road” o.s.l.t.) is dissolved by a chromatic downgrade of the b (-> ais ->a) and a 2 bar break of the rhythm.
Part I
A really tricky progression here just can be found, if you start counting bars. Then you get aware that these guys are thinking further.
