Here are five songs I liked that are defined by their beats (or by the conspicuous absence of beats).
- "Hoss featuring the PERKONS HD-01", Generative Jane
This one is a wild ride, starting with a blast of strange FM noises and then immediately dropping hard into a gradually-mutating industrial dance beat. This is the kind of music you'd show opening credits to, probably over establishing shots of a futuristic city, or possibly people riding futuristic motorcycles at great speed to no particular obvious destination.
- "Puppet Master", ZyeKali
This rocking chaos-&-strings jam was made with the Pocket Operator handheld sampler and a hand-modded "Chaos NAND" (seems to be an Atari Punk Console variant). Instead of using the Pocket Operator's sequencer, the musician plays the PO and Chaos NAND by hand, then samples the sampler, layering eight performances on top of each other. I think the colored Launchpad grid is starting and stopping the other video clips.
This is a neat mix of a classical 90s Drum & Bass beat with modern modular-synthesizer sound design; it starts with 2 minutes of random-notes ambient, then drops an Amen and a lovely chonky bass and keeps evolving in interesting new directions for the entire 15 minute runtime. (Those without long attention spans may wanna quit around minute 7.)
Cosmos is an "asymmetric looper"— a loop pedal whose loops are of varying lengths and so can drift in phase against each other. Here it's fed with tiny sound fragments (with such sources as a small plastic frog, whose shape is sonified by rubbing it against the Enner's case and spring reverb) to build up an all-enveloping ambient soundscape partway between the sound of a rainpipe and a horror movie score.
- "Lysergenesis", Lauri Paisley
Paisley in the early 80s was VP of the "International Electronic Music Association", which I've never heard of; this was the final song on a cassette album, "Real-to-Reel", she released in 1983. Not so much a soundscape as an ambient ocean you plunge into and possibly drown, this is probably just about the most progressive electronic music you're going to find in 1983; 15 minutes of synths following a weird internal logic.
I'm not completely sure but I think "lysergenesis" in biology is when a thing is created by dissolving another thing and allowing the contents to spill out independently.