Miraculous Rhythms
Thursday, August 27th, 2026: Arts, Music & Dance.
Cattle and Cane
In 1983, a young Australian band called The Go-Betweens released a strange song about a familiar experience – the relentlessness of aging, the loss of childhood’s wonder and potential, the melancholy of memory. Despite record company backing and a professional-quality music video, The Go-Betweens’ new song was largely ignored. Hence, it didn’t reach the U.S., where at the time, I was in between versions of my own decade-long musical project, Terra Incognita. But “Cattle and Cane” would’ve aligned perfectly with what I was working on – translating the rhythmic discoveries of the original Terra Incognita into songs.
I met Katie, my songwriting partner, the following year. And we began setting the lyrics we’d both written – also evoking our rural childhoods – to music, using what I’d discovered about rhythm in Terra Incognita. We would’ve loved what The Go-Betweens achieved – lyrics evoking childhood and loss, propelled and elevated by their music to an ecstatic state, akin to the spiritual trance achieved in Sufi music and dance. But I didn’t hear the song until 2021, long after I’d lost touch with Katie. Two years later, she died.
Lyrics evoking childhood and loss are common in popular music, cattle and cane are both exotic species introduced to Australia by British colonists, and the landscape they’ve created is part of the global devastation caused by imperialism and capitalism. What makes “Cattle and Cane” miraculous is its exceptionally rare rhythmic structure, with verse phrases of eleven eighth-note beats alternating with chorus phrases using the more conventional eight beats per phrase. Like Terra Incognita, The Go-Betweens never set out to compose a song in exotic rhythms – it just happened that way – a musical miracle.
And eighteen years after it was released and ignored, “Cattle and Cane” was voted one of the top 30 Australian songs of all time.
All colonial time, that is.
Notes, Beats, Bars, and Time Signatures
In the reductive, mechanistic European tradition, the building blocks of music are rhythm, melody, and harmony. Rhythm is repetition, allowing our bodies to move in time with the music, in intervals that the European tradition calls “bars”, each containing a number of beats. The frequency or speed of those beats determines whether they’re called full notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes. What we think of as a musical phrase can consist of one or more bars. And the number of beats per bar, combined with the kind of beats they are, is referred to as the “time signature”.
Over the centuries, European music came to prioritize melody over rhythm, simplifying the time signatures used in most compositions to two: the standard 4/4 time signature, with four quarter notes per bar, and the less common 3/4 waltz, with three quarter notes per bar.
Listen to your favorite songs, and count the repeating beats by tapping the fingers of one hand on your leg, or a table top. A slow, steady beat is in quarter notes – with four beats per bar written as 4/4. A faster beat is in eighth notes – typically 4/8 or 8/8. Try it while listening to the songs and compositions below – if your fingers find the rhythm, does it bring a smile to your face?
With its focus on melody and harmony, European music neglected the fundamental importance of rhythm, resulting in the now-common spectacle of a concert hall full of seated, immobile listeners. The more ancient traditions of African music make up for that, with their celebration of polyrhythm, the layering of what Europeans would call multiple time signatures, culminating in the incredibly complex and sophisticated music of the rain forest pygmies.
Exotic Time Signatures
Most of our favorite songs are in 4/4 time. Songs in exotic time signatures are extremely rare – I notice and gravitate toward them, but after a lifetime of collecting and creating, they still represent only 0.6 percent of my digital music library – less than 6 out of every 1,000 tracks.
Exotic time signatures are completely absent from some genres, like country music or disco. But they show up regularly in jazz, which became more competitive and cerebral in the postwar era. Listeners born in the 1940s or 1950s will likely remember what must be the world’s most popular tune featuring an exotic time signature – Dave Brubeck’s 1959 classic “Take Five”, a joyous rarity in 5/8 time, with five eighth notes per bar:
Creating Exotic Rhythms
Jazz splintered throughout the 1960s, resulting in new sub-genres in the 1970s, like jazz-rock fusion and Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics. The jazz world demands formal training, chart reading, and instrumental proficiency, and in the late 1970s I briefly worked with a guitarist whose jazz-rock fusion band ran exotic rhythms into the ground. All their songs were written in odd time signatures, and they never performed for an audience – they just sat in the garage hunched over, concentrating on reading the dense charts, determined to meet the challenge.
They were apparently ahead of their time – a new genre called “math rock” emerged in the 1990s and has continued to grow, flaunting exotic time signatures, sometimes in sequence to build evolving compositions. As I noted above, the reductive European interpretation of music is fundamentally mathematical, so it can easily yield mathematical complexity.
But you don’t need training or virtuosity to make or enjoy exotic rhythms. Even amateurs love exotic time signatures because they’re a challenge to learn and intoxicating to sustain. My 1980s San Francisco band, Terra Incognita, began as a random collection of passionate amateurs. And without knowing or planning it, we became a proto-math rock project. During our first month jamming together, we spontaneously improvised a “Take Five” alternative, a country-funk tune in 3/4 time, and one in the really challenging 7/8 time signature, which evolved into my epic, tectonic love song “Seven Continents”:
There are so many ways to write a song! “Seven Continents” began in 1981 as a guitar riff in a jam session. We experimented with it throughout the next year, layering percussion, bass, and fiddle, sometimes in polyrhythm. When I met Katie in 1984, I began commuting between San Francisco and her home in Los Angeles. At night, in my sleeping loft under the massive rafters of our San Francisco loft, using a tiny battery-powered Casio keyboard, I started with the old guitar riff, and wrote lyrics about our long-distance affair, laboriously crafting melodies to fit the rhythm.
But the new love song included below, “A Night To Remember” (shared a few months ago on the six-song EP Miles We’ll Never See Again) emerged quickly and spontaneously. Writing lines on note paper, I strummed my guitar in a rhythm that matched the lyrical phrases, and discovered after the fact that it was in 5/8 time. Like “Cattle and Cane”, it was an organic miracle, and had nothing to do with math.
Give Them a Chance
Music enhances our lives in so many different ways, and exotic rhythms can help with most of them. The math of “time signatures” may sound daunting to our minds, but rhythms appeal directly to our bodies, and some unusual time signatures can actually be good for relaxing, meditating, or daydreaming. Speed them up a little, and as “Cattle and Cane” proved, they can energize and motivate us, for working or dancing. Both our minds and our bodies thrive when facing a challenge – that’s inspired musicians from Dave Brubeck in 1959 to Leep in 2024. And finally, changes in rhythm can take us on a musical journey, distracting us from our worries, surprising us and making us wonder what’s next, as shown at the end of this Dispatch.
You never really know whether you like something until you’ve had a chance to live with it and learn from it. I add music to my library if something about it interests or challenges me at first listen. I download it, add it to playlists, and only after weeks of listening do I begin to fully appreciate it. As The Go-Betweens learned with “Cattle and Cane”, it can take years – or even decades – for listeners to recognize your achievement.
Chilling Out
Brazilian popular music is notorious for complex arrangements in odd time signatures – I can only take it in small doses. But Marinero’s Brazilian-inspired “love song to San Francisco” in 7/8 time, from 2021, was catchy enough on first listen that I downloaded it, and it stood the test of time:
In high school during the late 1960s, I stumbled upon two psychedelic albums by quirky British bluesman John Mayall. I became obsessed with them, and unlike most music of the 1960s they endured on my playlists to this day. But it wasn’t until recently that I discovered this trippy but technically proficient jazz composition in 6/8, which was apparently only recorded live, in 1969:
British band The Stranglers approached punk rock as a pub band from the 1970s. But in 1981, frustrated by their plebeian image, they released this elegant novelty, and it became a minor pop hit. It begins with an intro phrase of two bars in 3/8 and one bar in 7/8, before settling into 6/8 time:
When I began working with Katie Rauh in 1984, I brought my experience with odd time signatures from the early Terra Incognita, but she was a musical novice. Somehow, together, we spontaneously translated her lyrics for “Plastic Snow” into the extremely unusual sequence of verses in 4/4 time and choruses in 3/4 time, and it clicked perfectly:
Motivating
In the late 1990s, Brazilian electronic composer Amon Tobin offered his own energizing, mesmerizing 5/8 alternative to Brubeck’s “Take Five”:
Holy Wire could only be from Brooklyn – a bearded white hipster with a tremulous voice and academic diction. But my attention was caught by how he establishes the beat with a 5/8 synth riff in this track from 2024, then overlays his vocal phrasing polyrhythmically in 8/8 time. And then he changes it up and cries out in pain, and I can overlook the cliches:
Like Stan Getz, Cal Tjader was a pioneer in the fusion of jazz with international music. This hypnotic Middle-Eastern-influenced composition from 1963 uses the 6/8 time signature:
And finally, here’s my recent, upbeat ode to fleeting love, my answer to Brubeck’s “Take Five”, in 5/8 time:
Embracing the Challenge
Another in the 6/8 time signature, released in 1998 by the British indie band Snowpony. I heard and downloaded this just before COVID and my house fire:
Jah Wobble was bassist for John Lydon’s groundbreaking post-punk act Public Image Limited in the late 1970s. Wobble followed that up with various international music collaborations, the most recent with his son, yielding this seductive groove in 7/8 time released just last year:
Stereolab was one of those emerging 1990s electronic bands that I was too stressed out to pay attention to at the time. And now, they’re mostly too cerebral for me. But they did produce some catchy grooves and hooks – the intro for this alternates between 10/8 time and 6/8 time, with the main theme settling into 10/8:
This American indie band formed in Philadelphia in 2014 – my list is trending contemporary. This piece from 2018, somehow both mathematical and dreamy, uses perhaps the weirdest time signature yet, 11/4:
Turns out math rock has cross-fertilized Emo – here’s an Emo song in 12/8 time, featuring a singing drummer, released in 2024 by this young trio from Berlin:
Making a Journey
During the first year in our San Francisco loft, my roommate and “adopted sister” Tiare started dating Mark Isham, trumpet player in pianist Art Lande’s jazz fusion band Rubisa Patrol. I met the band, and Isham dropped in on one of our big loft parties, but within the year he was off touring with Van Morrison, and eventually became one of the most successful soundtrack composers in Hollywood. This track from Rubisa Patrol’s 1977 album features the rare 9/8 time signature:
My last offering is the climax of a 2010 album by the math rock band Rooftops, from Bellingham, Washington. It’s truly an epic composition, evolving dramatically between time signatures, from 10/8 to 6/8, to 4/4, to 18/8, to 8/8, and finally to 6/8:
Thanks for the erudite and grooving musical stroll. I cried watching plastic snow.
Deep love
Pean