This song has been my focus for a few days now. The entire track is driven by a few dreamy pads and the rest is a drum track so amazingly driving and intricate, that I've been breaking it down in an attempt to reason out what makes it so great.

One technique he definitely uses is shifting the start positions of the snare and bass hits towards the middle and end of the note to make it faster and more frenetic. Lot's of panning is used, (as always) as well as occasional distortion applied to the kicks. the pitch of the kicks changes in such a way that it serves as a melodic under-tone to the track. Around 1:15 he reverses the snare hits and applies a 1/16 delay effect on the hit immediately following that. There is definitely some bit-crunching going on sporadically throughout the whole track.

One of my favorite parts is at 1:58. The abrupt effect on the drums followed by the bleeping sound trailing the drum track with reverb applied. Aso, listen to the drum pattern that starts around 2:45.

My main fascination stems from my own attempts at trying to make a drum track this dynamic and exciting. His ability to overlay so many drum patterns and so many effects on top of each other is incredible. My own attempts usually end in something way to incoherent and/or muddy sounding.

Here's the song:

What are your thoughts?