funky house sceptics, let me draw your attention to this

" Crazy Cousinz, Roska, Cooly G, Scratcha DVA, Lil' Silva."

earlier in the year you could be forgiven for only concentrating on those guys though. seeing as they WERE the biggest names and most exciting.

now, things have moved on to yknow, jam city.

who else should people be writing about though? i cant say at this point. half the tunes are like arent even made by people 'in' the scene. theyre from other places.

Perempay & Dee? Donae'o? Geeneus? Ill Blu? Just picking the first four who came to mind with actual distinguishing features.

perempays put out maybe ONE tune this year. buss it seems an age ago. donaeo should have gotten more hype, yeah, he made a good album. but hes not seen as 'serious' enough for fact types. geeneus isnt exactly underrappreciated. though he maybe could be more rated for his productions, yeah.

lol all of these people have been written about over the past year, as have a lot of the vocalists and mcs. i mean, the whole heatwave ja/funky post for one thing?

how often (and where) do people even "write seriously" about funky anyway?

Yes but that's not Serious Crit For Serious People About Serious Music though Lex!

(xpost)

how often (and where) do people even "write seriously" about funky anyway?

if these 'serious' muso writers only wanna talk about the stuff that sounds like techno then cool. who gives a fuck. not the ravers. not the artists. not even the djs. seems like even if you wanna praise the cooly g types you cant not talk about the more populist strains of funky anyway. so hey, everyones happy. and funky has its own policing strategies as everyone is aware and this issue really is not one of them from the looks of things.

i don't even know which funky acts tim thinks should be covered by (fact? xlr8r? i have no idea!), or which would prove his point, given that crazy cousinz through to cooly g is a pretty damn wide spectrum already. geeneus has gotten loads of attention. marcus nasty will get loads when his rinse mix drops. ill blu are perhaps underappreciated but they don't have any live rep to speak of.

besides, im fine with the 'auteury' types being singled out, if it means the rest of the scene can bubble along unpertubed. cos WITHIN the scene, these guys that xlr8r and fact etc like arent really as big as donaeo etc.

also, if anyone WAS just writing about Crazy Cousinz, Roska, Cooly G, Scratcha DVA, Lil' Silva, that IS a pretty great range of diff funky styles.

im all for the thoroughly reynoldsy thing of 'must champion the populist songs/artists and belittle the leftfielders' cos the mainstream/serious techno musos are so prone to the opposite, but i think tim is just looking for a fight. something to create some sort of serious critical discourse/axe to grind w/r/t funky.

http://www.dummymag.com/txt-reviews/

Floating Points
Vacuum Boogie
A smooth ride through the cosmos. This is funky at its most refined.

Why is Vacuum Boogie considered 'Funky'? Sounds more like the Mark E/Theo brand of slow-house than Funky.

Don't sound like no funky to me either.

its not.

not sure about this kingdom mix. sounds like something someone down with diplo would do. bassline-y trancey house, lots of R&B vocals/cut ups, post bmore shit, all over the shop.

oh yeah, fact x night slugs @ egg on 23 oct. reaching.

http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/object3/577/122/n138217572263_753.jpg

After listening to the 3 mixes linked/discussed above, I can conclusively say Jam City kills them all. The SFV10 mix is ruined by a repetitive and pointless MC, the Kingdom mix is good but not nearly as engaging as Jam City. Glad to have heard them all though. Thanks for the links.

heartless crew on rinse fri 7-9
sounding good and fun so far

im all for the thoroughly reynoldsy thing of 'must champion the populist songs/artists and belittle the leftfielders' cos the mainstream/serious techno musos are so prone to the opposite, but i think tim is just looking for a fight. something to create some sort of serious critical discourse/axe to grind w/r/t funky.

In some senses yes. I guess I just can't help but let my reactions be clouded by my sense of disappointment there seems to be this roar of indifference w/r/t actually checking out funky and writing about it - okay not "seriously", but, you know perhaps slightly more in depth than just "this track is big". Because I like reading to find out about new music, and I like the sense of excitement I feel when I can share other people's enthusiasm, and I can't go to these raves so it'd be nice to at least get that sense of shared enthusiasm somehow. And it seems that grime was the recipient of a massive, even disproportionate outpouring of writing (purply and otherwise), and I'm not even asking for that, but, y'know, just that maybe some people might give a shit and, like, help me out. But instead I'm mostly reduced to painstakingly assembling my knowledge of the scene by myself, using radio sets and myspace pages and a whole bunch of guesswork, because otherwise the internet is offering me very little assistance.

But clearly this is a good thing - no way do any of these producers want to be the beneficiaries of well-written, enthusiastic and informed media.

Tinchy even says upthread "no idea how you guys find out who makes what..." and then you all say "oh but are there even any producers worth writing about anyway...?"

There's no connection there, you don't think?

Re DJ Larizzle - yeah to be honest i was still downloading it when I posted the link, I was just assuming it'd be as strong as Vol. 9 and (particularly) Vol. 8, it comes in a bit below those though.

the amount of attention given to grime was, at least in the states, largely about ppl who wanted to like rap without actually listening to rap from their own back yards

the funny thing to me about ppl's large scale ignorance of funky in this country is that, when compared to grime or even 2step, it seems like it would fit in w/ a lot of existing dance scenes -- like, funky anthems dont really sound all that out of place in a set of house or pop music here! except for the ones w/ weird or quirkily british hooks (i.e. "too many men")

but obv the kind of ppl who seem to be taking to funky here are dubstep fans tired of dubstep who want 'beat science'-y nerd shit

It's the same in Australia.

And they all seem to read Fact.

"but obv the kind of ppl who seem to be taking to funky here are dubstep fans tired of dubstep who want 'beat science'-y nerd shit"

I think that kinda describes me, actually. What is wrong with that path to liking Funky? I'm genuinely interested in the reasoning.

<--- also reads Fact, fwiw.

Nothing wrong with it. A lot of these people are my friends, with whom I enjoy talking about music. They seem mostly interested in funky when and to the extent that it starts to resemble the other beat sciencey nerd shit they like, though, as opposed to, say, "Inflation" or "Gabryelle Refix" or "In The Morning" or "Pull It Wheel It" or etc.

Okay, positive vibes. "Jungle" on this Swift Jay website is surprisingly epic:

http://www.isound.com/swift_jay

Love Swift Jay so so much, though this doesn't top "Revenge" or "Toppa 5" or "Tribe" for me (though that's not saying a huge amount).

Wish I'd known that my second favourite diva anthem of the year had been up on youtube all this time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiM5sPSMWSM&feature=related

The use of Roger Rabbit for the visuals is surprisingly successful.

because otherwise the internet is offering me very little assistance

well yeah, "the internet"!

idk. i have stopped really writing on or for the internet. i'm tired of enthusing to little response, and when 90% of internet people default to indie in crunch time why even bother, you know? the thing with uk funky is that it's so in flux and malleable and all-encompassing that it's kinda impossible to put into an internet-friendly summation. which is how i like it.

'funked out' on the jam city mix is very nice.

Ha ha Lex that "it's the internet!" argument is the same thing that infuriates you w/r/t pitchfork though.

Really FACT is just the dance music Pitchfork. I'm more attuned to things about it that annoy me owing to the narcissism of small differences I guess.

(to the extent that, despite writing for Pitchfork, I feel "closer" to FACT in terms of my tastes)

Is there a tracklisting for that DJ Larizzle mix? There's a few tracks on there I really like and can't identify.

And it seems that grime was the recipient of a massive, even disproportionate outpouring of writing (purply and otherwise)

actually i really feel you on this, the whole "why isn't uk funky being picked up on by so many more people" - but my frustration is more to do with its failure to cross over commercially than the amount of internet writing about it. i don't really feel the need to "piece it together", maybe b/c in practice there's no privileging of beat-sciencey shit over any other type - i mean you haven't actually specified what you'd rather fact cover! the ja stuff? poppy vocal stuff? jam city is a total red herring given that his stuff barely belongs in this thread and makes more sense filed alongside or near omar-s or someone.

greenmoney are reasonably underrated remixers i think - their busy signal, twizzle, kid sister, kanye and kid cudi remixers are all A+ or better, and mdc just pointed out this AMAZING yo majesty remix too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZaZwlB4i9M

their brooklynradio.net sets are always on point too.

princess nyah is dropping an ill blu-produced mini-album on 26 oct btw! this is her new single "big boys". not quite as much of a monster as "frontline" but pretty good nonetheless.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKpsBIOXqL4

it irks me far more that "frontline", "in the morning", "do you mind", "falling again" etc weren't huge hits than the lack of reynoldsian discourse over them.

The thing that makes me so happy about that Greenmoney remix of Yo Majesty is that it goes part of the way towards fulfilling my long-held wish for a funky remix of Body Language.

Jam City's aesthetic and raw beats style may be closer to Omar-S in terms of beat production, but the rhythms are clearly in the funky camp. You can't just disown it because it doesn't have a pop sheen and some shitty lyrics.

Yeah Greenmoney is great. Princess has spiked her own momentum on account of "Big Boy" being one of the weakest Ill Blu tunes this year. She should do a vocal over "Blu Magic".

I'm not really asking for reynoldsian discourse (I can cover that). My annoyance with FACT is that they purport constantly to be massive fans of UK funky and then only write about it in connection to a very small collection of indie-endorsement-ready artists (incl. Jam City). If even people who hold themselves out as being totally into UK funky can't bring themselves to talk about it, how can you blame the general public for being disinterested?

Here are just some of the other artists people should be talking about Lex (my litmus test is the artist having been responsible for at least four amazing tracks). You'd note that I mention these names all the time so it's not like it's not obvious who I think is a big deal.

Swift Jay
Scotty D/Funk Factory
Ill Blu
D-Malice
Greenmoney
Fuzzy Logick OBV
Dubplate Wonder
Sticky
Sami Sanchez
Funykstepz
Devine Recordings/Madd.One
Footloose
Invasion Records (Footloose/O.B./Tadow)
Miss Fire
DJ Naughty
Major Notes
Ear Dis
M Sadler
Seany B
Hard House Banton (although "Sirens" - a total anomaly for him - does get talked about)
DJ Mystery
Delerious
Emvee
Funky Boy

Then there's producers who haven't done much yet but deserve track write-ups at least:

Mos' Wanted
Moony
Enrique Benitez
Undisputed
Darkus Beat Company
Diamond
etc
etc

The above artists range all over the shop, but in particular they often fall into that middle stratum of making big bangers for raves and radio sets that lend themselves neither to (failed) chart crossover nor indiefication.

The thing about indiefication is that it even distorts the work of the artist who does benefit. You'd think from FACT etc that Roska's biggest and best track this year is his remix of Untold, which is actually one of his weakest efforts. In fact his biggest is "Wonderful Day", while his best are his remixes of Darkus Beat Company's "Promises" and Hard House Banton's "Reign" and his track on the Fantastic 4 EP. But, y'know, none of those are a remix of a feted dubstep artist.

Matt I've tried to do a tracklist for the DJ Larizzle mix. Listened to it in full this time and liked it a lot more, unfortunately many of my favourite bits I can't identify:

Major Note$ - Friend Of Mine
Geeneus - Crackish
Sticky & Ms Dynamite - Bad Gyal
??? - ???
Natalie Walker - All Up On Me
Bassjackers & Apster - Klambu
Ill Blu - Blu Magic
Roska - Wonderful Day
Crazy Cousinz - ???
??? - ??? (love this one but forgotten what it is)
??? - ??? (sounds like Fuzzy Logik's "The Way You Move" though)
Apple - Chantes? Can never keep these separate
Donaeo - Flap Your Wings (great!!)
??? - ??? (Lil' Silva probably)
Beyonce - Sweet Dreams (Major Note$ Remix) - excellent!
Perempay & Dee - Buss It
??? - ??? (like this a lot)
Kyla - Daydreaming (Crazy Cousinz - sounds like a dub though?)
D-Malice - AMAZING *NEW* GABRYELLE REFIX? Third version! Maybe a remix?
Kimona & Crazy Cousinz - Do You Right
??? - ???
??? - ???
??? - ???
Geeneus - Make Me
Hot Steppa ft. Dogtanium & Riskgo, Gracious K, Cheekie et. al. - ???, maybe "Let's Take This High" (Fantastic!)
Black Russian - Soul Gypsy
??? - ??? (LIFECHANGINGLY EXCELLENT! check those xylophones! "I didn't come to the rave to look for love/I CAME TO DANCE!")
??? - ???
??? - ???
Sticky - Juremiah Riddim
Undisputed - Sunglasses
Jeremiah - Birthday (Donaeo Remix)
??? - ??? (great!)
Crazy Cousinz - Always Be Mine
Apple - Siegalizer or whatever it is
Lil Silva - Funky vs Pulse
??? - ??? (big)
Lil' Silva - Different
D-Malice - Gabryelle Refix (the original)
Aaron Carl - Oasis (Nick Holder Dub)
Ultra Nate - Love's The Only Drug
Apple - Siegalizer or whatever

Truly Brilliant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbI3XTcGXE8

Likewise:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrt0fndc9AI&feature=related

ANOTHER MASSIVE ILL BLU RIDDIM:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaoDP4_6hn8&feature=player_profilepage

OMG that Ill Blu track is astonishing - just the sheer shameless audacity of taking every massive bombastic banger trick in the book and laying them all on top of one another with a trowel.

BRING BACK THE ROBOT DANCE
BRING BACK THE RUNNING MAN

Haha Tim I just went for a long walk with the DJ Larizzle mix and a copy of your tracklisting and sadly you don't know any of my favourites! Namely:

- the one with the spacey Radiophonic Workshop wibble noises, just after Bad Gyal

- whatever it is after Daydreaming with the big low end Russian symphonic strings

- that track immediately before Juremiah Riddim with the xylophones (not the one you went mad for)

- the big "put down your gun... Congro drum" tune

Lex: also, i like the fact that the jumeirah riddim is so called...because sticky made it in a jumeirah hotel room.

by the way, I believe Lex accurately confirmed the correct spelling of the seen-every-possible-variant JUMEIRAH riddim.

"Tinchy even says upthread "no idea how you guys find out who makes what..." and then you all say "oh but are there even any producers worth writing about anyway...?"

it is hard to find out though. i mean, i know how i used to find out grime tunes, cos youd hear them on sets, then check out clips on ukrs or wherever or in the shops and go 'oh thats what that is!' but with funky theres fuck all to buy in the shops that hasnt already been there for about 5 months. and i hate going to ukfunky.com (though i should prob change this). shd prob spend more time on juno or something going through each and every mp3 snippet.

i like that its so hard to find out about funky though, despite the net apparently making it so easy to find out about everything. its quite satisfying. the reason people arent jumping on it is cos its almost 'too' urban/black/cheesy etc. you could say that about grime too of course but grime had aggression which indie fans can kinda get behind and a 'voice of urban youth!' angle which journos liked, but funky is less interesting to write about. which in a way, is what makes it even better. people dont see that its anything special. when raves start getting locked off or someone gets stabbed/killed etc, media people will prob start caring. i cant remember if it was exactly like this for ukg but i dont think many people really cared about that in the dance media or paid much attention until it started to really blow and got on their radar. thats when they HAVE to pay attention and cant ignore it. til then, no chance. youll just get a few reviews in the observer. fact types are never gonna be comfortable writing about its 'straighter' side without distancing disclaimers cos of their indie/techno hang ups. i personally wouldnt have it any other way. its good for the scene.

fact/ra/dissensus poster boy kode 9 on funky:

You can fiddle around on top of musical structures as much as you want – and I'm referring here to what people are calling “wonky” and “future garage” – but where real collective rhythmic innovation in the last 15, 20 years, whatever, comes from for me is from the pirate radio of London. So you can smudge synths on top, you can fuck up the beat a little bit, you can IDM the beat a little bit [this refers to “intelligent dance music” - a branch of 90s electronica that lost touch with the dancefloor in its pursuit of ever-more intricate structures], you can fuck things up, but where the real grassroots collective movement comes from – that's collective innovation, and not just people fucking things about – seems to be through pirate radio culture in London, and right now that's coming through funky.

I mean rhythmically: not so much tonally, there's not so much that's interesting going on in the actual sounds you get in funky, nothing interesting at all. Garage, two-step had far more that was interesting when it came to sound design than funky has yet got, but percussively it's where it's happening. Much more exciting than someone splattering hip-hop up or glitching dubstep up, know what I mean? So for me that's where the collective innovation is coming from rather than the specifically formal innovation, which is what people do more parasitically off of a musical movement once it's established.

Yeah titchy I wasn't criticizing you - it simply is easier to keep up with figures like Jam City and Julio Bashmore (isn't he just Claude Von Stroke redux though?) - ha I've already received two emails from IRL friends saying "oh wow you were right funky is good, check out this jam city mix I found out about on fact!"

I guess one thing I'm almost mourning is the absence of The Face (though isn't it set to come back in some capacity)? The Face wrote really well and regularly about 2-step garage, and more generally seemed to have this intuitive grasp that things didn't have to get all indie to be worth covering - maybe my memory is making it out to be better than it was though, I dunno. I remember though reading a really enthusiastic short piece about Sparks & Kie (of "Fly Bi" / "Double Impact" fame) in The Face and even at the time thinking "yeah, no other magazine would ever take these guys seriously, they don't have the requisite whiff of importance and iconoclasm."

This was while all the other magazines were embarrassing themselves by bigging up "breakbeat garage"/"breakstep".

Kode9 always reads as spot on, though you'd think from these kinds of quotes that he never played dubstep or wonky.

youd also think hyperdub would be releasing a shitload of funky from the way hes been talking about it. tho im glad kode 9 gave 'future garage' (im guessing he means brackles and that lot) a bit of a kicking.

the only style mags i think are left now are dazed and confused and ID but they seem to have cut their music content down. but yeah, the face, sky, sleaze nation etc filled a real gap in the music media that isnt really there now... sites like dont watch that and super super i think are kinda in that same sort of vein but i dont check them out all that often tbh - i have enough net distractions.

quite liked that alicia secrets mighty mo remix marcus nasty played the other week though it could do with a proper full on re-rub, ie less of the originals slightly MOR piano.

I used to quite like all of those but I think The Face was the central one with respect to all this kind of stuff. Or maybe it's just that stealing old copies of The Face of my older sister when I was a lot younger was so important to my musical development.

In funky news, I finally checked out Roska's 100% Roska Productions mix for Rinse from about a month back. On the one hand it confirms that Roska c. 2000 mostly just cruises at this level of "really well produced but not exciting", however his remix of La Cartier/Fuzzy Logick's "Call Me" is simply MASSIVE - got that excellent feel of rapid curling and uncurling that characterises his best work.

BUT massive lols at him getting Jamie George to revocal "Wonderful Day" as a whiny complaint about other producers biting Roska's style (a la Missy's "Beat Bitin'").

xpost don't know that track - which show was it?

not last wed but the one before. he opened with it i think.

i kinda lost interest in him a while back so i might have missed out on some key tunes but roskas pretty boring tbh. those 1st and 2nd eps were good (the 1st one esp) but since then hes either tried to stick to this somewhat tasteful middle ground while failing to really come up with any great variations on his original theme (he seems one of these guys that has one good idea and repatterns it over and over again, but in his case its not really being re-milked in any esp inspiring way) or tried to sound more like 'proper' house.

I think after declaring allegiance to "proper" house (and against grime) at the beginning of the year he's gradually started returning to some proper syncopation - hence the quality of his remixes of "Reign" and "Call Me". He's even now done a grime tune or remix, though it's not great. And obv he's picking up on ideas from dubstep now.

But yeah a lot of the other stuff is very tasteful, not necc. in a "middle ground" sense, though often that too - but as much just that it feels like you can see him thinking (as judges are wont to say on Idol) - everything feels quite nuanced and aware of past styles and interestingly arranged, without having that intuitive compulsion of his original tunes.

I suspect that the reason his remixes of other funky tunes (see also "Quicktime", "The Print") are so good is that he can cannibalize the energy and hooks of the original tune and then just insert his (still) special brand of beat science.

He strikes me as the funky equivalent of Wookie (as much owing to those basslines as anything else) (and of course leaving aside Wookie's own funky tune) with both the positive and negative connotations that entails.

'Our Father' is still one of my favourite tunes this year (well, top 30). the Wookie thing occurred to me too.