I’m talking about Marcel Dettman’s ‘Argon’ (clip below). It’s the only track on the album that features such kind of sound, but I’m very curious as to how do I achieve something like this. Is it compression? If so, what kind of? Anybody has any ideas?
It’s a combination of transient shaping, good samples, and meticulous eqing. Just experiment until you get close.
transient shaping… hmm, gotta get myself fumiliar with that. 
It`s just distortion with reverb nothing meticulous about it imo. Reverb is 90% of that sound, pretty crude work if you ask me.
edit: put gate after distortion, before reverb.
it’s not so much about the gate, it’s that overall quality of the mix, there’s clearly some kind of compression going on, and I wanna figure out how to make a mix like that.
Similar type of compression can be heard in a fusion band here (especially drums):
It’s very… round, distinctively scooped up, that’s the only way I can describe it.
If you`re refering to the snap of the drums maybe try running a parallel signal with:
a bit of distortion (or maybe even little bitcrush) ->
gate it till it gets sharp ->
steep bandpass filter with quite high resonance(sweep it across to find the sweet spot)->
compression (play around with attack/release to get it snappy)->
reverb.
Also you can try putting bandpass filter before distortion.
Depends on the material but sometimes its enough just to use multiband compression to smash the mids + reverb. Probably its a good idea to process hihats separately…that`s what I would try, it might work or not, very dependent on the material. The main thing is to find that sweet spot with bandpass filter imo, experiment also with changing the places of the effects in the chain.
thanks for suggestions! gonna try working it right now.
The drums in your second link sound over-compressed, probably using an expensive multi-band plugin or even more expensive outboard unit. I’ve gotten similar sound with a ratio somewhere between 3:1 and 5:1, a fast attack, and a moderate release. The threshold depends on the amplitude of your incoming signal, so you’ll have to play with that. Renoise’s native compressor and bus compressor aren’t necessarily correct on the compression ratios, though. I’d recommend picking up the free Tokyo Dawn Records or TDR Feedback Compressor II. It might be Windows VST only, though.
The first link sounds like a combination of very careful waveshaping distortion, which may or may not be the transient shaping Elsekiss mentioned, very precise control on the reverb send level and gating, and very precise EQ, all routed through much more subtle compression than the first video.