Music: Non-blues, non-swing, and non-rock music based on rhythm

Ouroboros

There is no armour against Fate
Feb 3, 2008
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In the art music realm:

I would suggest looking into European 'dance' forms. Stravinsky's ballets The Firebird and, in particular, The Rite Of Spring would be good places to start. Stravinsky pulled from Russian folk tradition and introduced irregular accents, complex rhythmic layering, and expansion/contraction of rhythmic cells among other aspects.

Bela Bartók's string quartets were already recommended and that is another good suggestion. The use of asymmetrical rhythmic groups is common in his folk influenced works. You could also check out his Romanian Folk Dances, Three Hungarian Folk Songs, and Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.

A more modernist approach can be seen in the works of Stockhausen. He came up with an approach called 'Unified Time Structuring' through which the relationship between rhythms and pitched noise was explored. In his piece Kontakte, Stockhausen recorded pulses of sound in irregular rhythms and then looped them. Then by adjusting the speed at which these loops were played he could generate a pitch from each unique rhythm.

In heavy music:

Check out Obscura by Gorguts. In the writing process for this album, the band deliberately set out to avoid using the 'Slayer' beat, which had become nearly ubiquitous within the death metal genre at that time. So the drum parts on the album are composed only of blastbeats and slower, more abstract patterns. Also, each individual riff is accompanied by its own drum beat, so the songs function as collages of looping musical cells rather than a series of riffs with a backbeat/time-keeping aspect.

Perhaps Antediluvian's λόγος LP may be worth a look as well. Of particular interest to me is Mars Sekhmet's utterly chaotic, tumultuous drumming. Her unique, unrestrained playing style imbues the already gnarled and jagged compositions with a level of fervor rarely heard.
 
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