the pattern generator inside BOCHKA RAPIST+ had a flaw i couldn’t live with. the fills squeezed the sound. the kick in the pattern was no longer the kick i’d made.
so PAT·77 has one job, and the job is a refusal. drop in a finished kick. it goes on a grid with rolls and ghosts, and nothing gets processed. every piece is cut from the same hit. i asked for it plain, the basic look, no decoration.
ghosts were the reason. the sound i’m chasing lives on them. i stopped thinking of a ghost as a quiet second kick. it’s a few milliseconds of the main one, taken from the attack or the body or the tail, nudged off the grid, sometimes reversed so that its tail ends exactly on the beat.
there are two families of ghosts in it now. small cut pieces. and whole quiet copies of the kick that sit behind the main hit, measured from a track where the rolls sound like they’re behind the beat and not in front of it.
in the first version the ghosts were so small they barely clicked, and i couldn’t shape them. that got fixed the same night.