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 about the Antix music style in an interview: “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.

Scene I

A very nice harmonic progression can be found here, if you start counting bars. Then you get aware that composition means more than sound and groove to these guys. After 24 bars the bass leaves the tonal centre for 4 bars F. After this the bass returns to the tonal centre, but just for half of the time – for 12 bars. A four bar interplay from F to A follows.

Scene I

The 56 bars lasting Scene I (I borrowed the expression “scene” from Ableton Live, because this puts it in a nutshell. See glossary.)

What is it all about? It started in the year 2000 with an album from Atmos called “Headcleaner” which was one of the foundation stones of a new subgenre style often called “Progressive Trance”, but should be called in fact “Progressive Psy Trance”, as a nice guy from psyshop explained to me. In an article on the Iboga webpage one can read “Fascinated by the progressive side of psy trance …”, which underlines his statement. However this style and further fusions with house and techno elements really moves me to the present day, so that I`m convinced one should take a closer look at it. With “closer look” I mean to study this kind of music with the tools of musicology – musical analysis – to clearify e.g. what does the addition “progressive” really means (if there is a meaning) and what are the specifics in this kind of music.

While analysing each track, I will try to put my focus on the main (sound) elements, the form and other specialities, which  make the piece for me outstanding. Of course I will try to find out something regarding the technical equipment, which has been used to produce the music.

Don`t be afraid. This won`t be a stiff scientific essay. Pure subjective opinions and comments are going to pave the way .