funky house sceptics, let me draw your attention to this

its shocking how geeneus always gets ignored in these best producer lists. he might have put out less than everyone else but get down low is just>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

tim i think youre being harsh on rankin. he might wait to jump in/on to a track but it just makes his entrance that much more poised. plus i like that slightly blase air he gives off at times. i never thought of it as half hearted though. majestic i do like but i like rankins slightly more restrained 'cool' than majestics raucousness (and i like majestic too).

jme is actually really really good on funky, as far as grime mcs on this thing.

vomit good! and excrement good. everything good. (obviously there comes a brick wall after a while in terms of variations of dirty, disgusting, filthy, smutty, etc modifiers so all kudos to rankin for vaulting to the next level imo.)

and YES 'tribal daydream' is incredible. uk types attempting any kind of righteous pulpit house spoken word still feels very daring and counter to existing prisms of sensibility and such - it's so thrilling and dramatic when it comes off like it does there. cf your major notes 'holy ghost' number also i suppose.

xxp oh god guys why are you all listing old stuff again.

it's as "from the scene" as the karizma/hard house banton/quentin harris tunes that get dropped at every funky night ever...

That's my point! I didn't mean "typical" in a bad way at all. I just meant, isn't it funny how counter-intuitive this process is.

I deliberately didn't include Geeneus because his only funky productions in the past twelve months that I'm aware of are "Crackish"/"Get Low" and the remixes of "Good Life" and "Show Me Love" (neither of which are exactly classic). One great tune in a year does not equal producer of the year.

Re Rankin - I really like him! My point is that he doesn't excel on traditional MC criteria but makes up for it in other ways. Plus his actual bars are fantastic most of the time even if they are almost all overly familiar at this point (then again most MCs' bars would be if i listened to new sets every couple of weeks)

Re "Oassis" / "Bad Man Riddim" etc - distinction between "from the scene" and "of the scene" - both tunes totally fit the latter category.

vomit good! and excrement good. everything good. (obviously there comes a brick wall after a while in terms of variations of dirty, disgusting, filthy, smutty, etc modifiers so all kudos to rankin for vaulting to the next level imo.)

Yeah I thought that's what Rankin' meant but wasn't sure that you weren't deliberately reading him literally as a joke.

and YES 'tribal daydream' is incredible. uk types attempting any kind of righteous pulpit house spoken word still feels very daring and counter to existing prisms of sensibility and such - it's so thrilling and dramatic when it comes off like it does there.

Yes, and the relationship between the vocal and the stern ominousness of the arrangement (those strings!) is really crucial - it feels like such an announcement.

wow, not sure i've even heard anything from devine collective/mad one.

For Fuzzy Logik, I'd also add Pachi with the really sticky/funky synths.

Geeneus also remixed DJ Play, which is quite good.

You've probably heard "House Girls" - it sounds a bit like a sparer version of "Inflation", the xylophone/strings replaced by a timestretched vocal "GIRRRRRLLLLSSS" and little synth patterns and booming post-"Sirens" bass.

Very very predictably I'm enjoying Deep Teknologi's mixes.

http://soundcloud.com/deepteknologi

Think Funky Afro House with some Dubstep in the bass.

And yes, I first heard their name through Cooly G's rave flyers, but didn't bother checking for them till I saw them mentioned in FACT. Which makes it not really Funky, and deserving of its own separate thread probably.

yeah i really enjoyed their fact minimix

btw oneman's remixed rinse 11 and it's pretty awesome - the drop from the martyn remix of efdemin into ms dynamite's "get low" is O_O - not all of it is strictly funky but that just goes to show how meaningless the divisions are anyway

I kind of wish we could combine this thread and the bobbins threads into a sort of rolling dance partisans thread. But I don't really feel like its my place to start it.

There's a lot of really great music out there that isn't really Funky and not really Dubstep that I'd like to talk about, I'm just not looking to antagonize people.

BTW, of the mixes up on their Soundcloud I've heard 4.0 so far.

It starts with some fairly polite house of the South African sort of variety.

Then gets seriously ravey, and then just goes off the deep end. Very muscular stuff.

I kind of wish we could combine this thread and the bobbins threads into a sort of rolling dance partisans thread. But I don't really feel like its my place to start it.

God no. The widening of the scope of the original bobbins thread pretty much ruined it last year. There's enough coming out of funky as it is without having the whole thing diluted by people having the minimal vs deep argument for the nine hundredth time.

Well I've gone and done it, sorry.

Feel free and just let it drop off the page if you like.

I'm fine with that thread as long as we keep talking about actual funky on this thread.

btw oneman's remixed rinse 11 and it's pretty awesome - the drop from the martyn remix of efdemin into ms dynamite's "get low" is O_O - not all of it is strictly funky but that just goes to show how meaningless the divisions are anyway

Sorry but I really disagree with this line of argument. Not the idea of that transition - I'm enjoying the Martyn Fabric mix for similar reasons - but the idea that the divisions are "meaningless" just because you can mix between these two types of tracks and some people like both.

It's like saying that, say, Piracy Funds Terrorism comprehensively rendered the differences between R&B, dancehall, reggaeton and funk carioca meaningless.

Or (to use a slightly less extreme example) that because Bugz In The Attic included a few 2-step tracks on their Fabric mix, there was no real distinction between 2-step and broken beat.

No.

There's a place for eclectic mixes, and there's a place for commitment to a particular idea of a sound or style. I don't want Marcus Nasty to start playing Martyn, not because I have a problem with Martyn because I like Marcus Nasty's sets the way that they are, I simply don't think their vibe would be improved by expanding the breadth. And I don't know why enjoyment of eclecticism (which I'm all for by and large) has to involve an erasure of such forms of specificity.

Can't we celebrate Martyn or OneMan mixes for tying together different strands so successively, or particular producers for walking a stylistic tightrope so remarkably, rather than lazily sublimating any distinctions between sounds and scenes under frankly awful unifying concepts like "UK Bass"?

Anyway, focusing on good vibez:

Amazed at how fabulous Marcus Nasty and Bassboy's "Let's Get Nasty" is, such a brilliant tune for MCs too. This was the tune that I was thinking of when I was comparing Rankin and Majestic's flow, though I have to apologise to Rankin' as I was listening back to a December set and he jumped on it perfectly.

It's like an even funkier version of "Turbulence".

Also I wanted to mention, one thing I really like about both "People Keep Dancing" and "Tribal Day Dream" by Devine Collective is how ambitious they are, esp. from the guys that made "House Girls Pt. 1" - "People Keep Dancing" is like "Party Hard" somewhat only with all these eerie animal sounds and deep synth chords and flickers of horns and really gorgeous rolling percussion, not to mention great (albeit repetitive) vocals. They should release it as a double a-side with "Tribal Day Dream" - that'd be unstoppable.

"We inna jungle / and we out to make money inna bundle / that's why we play our bongos / 'cos there's nothing that we can't handle"

Tim said:
>>It's like saying that, say, Piracy Funds Terrorism comprehensively rendered the differences >>between R&B, dancehall, reggaeton and funk carioca meaningless.

I think that is just plainly wrong Tim and typically curmudgeonly of you. You are overcooking you authenticity argument yet again for polemical purposes. Its more like a DJ playing east coast hip hop, crunk, west coast and a bit of R&B. Oneman's set is all or mostly from the same country which has several interrelated scenes, some of which clearly rank higher than others in your estimation.

There's a difference between saying "these are interrelated scenes" and "the divisions between these scenes are rendered meaningless".

x-post

Yes and then I made a less dramatic comparison using Bugz in the Attic. That Bugz in the Attic is in my top 100 albums of the 00s so it's not like I think that sort of genre eclecticism is a bad thing.

I don't see why it's curmudgeonly of me to note that these are different scenes whose divisions are porous rather than "meaningless".

The fact is that 90% of funky DJs don't play "FACT music" (to use shorthand) and the DJs that do play that music don't play 90% of funky. There's nothing wrong with Martyn or OneMan, both of whom I really like, but pretending that there's no meaningful distinction between their sets and those played by the vast majority of funky DJs - granted, perhaps not funky DJs you listen to - is willful blindness.

And yeah, it's a bit like being wilfully blind to the divisions between east coast rap and southern rap. People saying "oh the divisions between these sounds are meaningless" when talking about sets which are 90% East Coast rap (albeit southern influenced) plus a few carefully selected southern tunes that go well with the former would also be pretty off-the-money in my opinion.

Its not about authenticity. I was just talking upthread about how quintessential of funky it is that the Nick Holder dub of "Oassis" is a hit on the scene. There's no geographical or sociological basis for my distinctions here, it's purely based on who plays what, and the stylistic distinctions that those choices reveal.

Also how long has this track been knocking around? I've been hearing it on various mixes and only just cottoned onto how great it is.

Wanted to go back to and cosign Matt's comment here re Major Notes' "Friend of Mine", it's really creeped up on me too, one of my favourites now.

tim f otm. you can actually make the divisions pretty easily in terms of whats out there so this party line about 'oh the lines dont matter, its all uk bass music' which is what fact and ra seem to promote is actually just an easy way of saying oh well we will cover all the technoy stuff we like and respect and by doing that we dont actually have to spend so much time on such and such whos strictly funky or grime or whatever. im more of a purist though and although i love oneman, i prefer sets which have a bit of identity. and i like the fact marcus nasty doesnt see much in untold or whoever to start playing them (even though i think he did play some ramadanman tune, dont know which one though) as then everything is just a big extremely dull blur. tbh if i dont want to hear one more person or read another journalist talk about how the borders are down, the divisions are blurred, and how its all just so absolutely fantastic (see: the recent issue of the wire with a piece about this, and god knows how many other commentaries). eclecticism/blurring just means exactly that = something indistinct.

actually listening to that fabric elevator music cd, i think its probably time to label this stuff more conclusively. cos a lot of it isnt quite as hard to label as some people would make out.

I do generally agree that the eclecticism thing is getting a bit dry (the recent RA piece is awful), and that generally distinction and tunnel vision are good things, but I also tend to agree with Reynolds that the hardcore continuum's not what it used to be, so the argument that might have worked 5/10/15 years ago about tunnel vision is not necessarily as powerful. Lets face it, funky is not 2step, it hasn't yet achieved the kind of crossover's ukg did, and in fact the post garage world of funky, grime, dubstep and bassline is much much more niche oriented. Tunnel vision used to be great because you could get everything you wanted from one tunnel, and I'm just not sure that is as much the case as it used to be. Whether you agree with reynolds or not that the continuum has degenerated a bit, I don't think you can automatically assume that his other argument against eclecticism which Tim F and Titchy are supporting can function in exactly the same way. Of course this is not to detract from Tim's line that he prefers funky as funky, instead of funky not funky.

My problem with funky-not-funky, especially when dubstep influences and slick loud production come in, is that it all blurs together into a kind of sound that just isn't very distinctive. It sounds bassy and boshing but only really in a way similar to a lot of breaks stuff that's been generally ignored for much of the decade. That recent Bok Bok mix is a case in point, there's a lack of femininity or bounce there and it feels just... not very much fun.

Also as people have been saying time and time again on this thread, funky is ridiculously eclectic *as it is*. My problem with a lot of the Jam City-esque mixes is that they dispense with the eclecticism in favour of a kind of monochrome womping.

tbh i dont really care so much for a lot of what guys like bok bok and whoever seem to be deeply into. not even greena or untold or whoever (like i need anyone clumsily/goofily revisiting old wiley beats). maybe its too subtle for me, but its all just so BLAND. and monochrome. and grey. all so well put together and nicely smoothed over but nothing that really jumps out at you, which is its biggest crime. its all so fucking NICE. these guys are in many ways just like a new sort of idm, its just that the borders are a bit more blurred and everyones sort of working with each other, on a certain level, its just that where before the 'mainstream'/proper inside of these nuum scenes didnt really need any push or attention from the idmers or 'eclectic' home listening guys, now they do.

i even find that martyn fabric mix a bit dull - all very artfully done but god it just seems so samey.

actually i suppose the thing that makes them idm-not-idm is that theyre kinda dancey arent they. not just about lovely melodies for listening on headphones at home or whatever (though afx and them had dance tunes too if course). i dont want to just slot them into the nu idm thing though, thats prob a bit lazy. really though this stuff just fits into house or techno. post dubstep shmubstep. its just techno/house. yawn.

Titchy said:
>> i even find that martyn fabric mix a bit dull - all very artfully done but god it just seems so samey.

Apart from the fact it doesnt have any vocal tunes, which i can understand some people might miss, its certainly no more samey than any funky mix.

perhaps samey is the wrong word then. i suppose i find it all too understated. maybe im just into trad techno-textured stuff. i dont think funky sets by say, marcus are samey though, theres such a variety of diff styles in all the rhythms he plays.

*just not into

I don't think Marcus' sets are samey either. Just think, whether you are into the Martyn one or not, samey wouldn't really be the apt diss. A bit too euro in places is my problem with it.

Obv there are quite a few people who think that you can't "everything that you want" from funky qua funky, and instead prefer the idea of funky as an one tool in a tool box. But whereas the line I've seen put out to explain this is that eclecticism is the go, really it's better to think of this as one big genre etc,I tend to think "maybe this person just isn't that into funky."

Which is fine, you know. And it makes sense that - given dubstep and funky and grime and bassline all do share certain similarities - that the kind of person who is/was quite into dubstep and what has emerged from it would also like at least some funky (and some bassline and etc.), and enjoy DJ sets and productions that meld these influences into some kind of coherent vibe - usually a kind of dark, percussive serious-but-fun thing, though of course there's room for a lot of diversity in that space.

But equally there must be lots of people who don't want or need to conceive of funky in this fashion, who feel that it sounds best and most itself in the context of DJ sets like Marcus Nasty's, in the form of productions like those of Devine Collective or Funkystepz or Donaeo or Fuzzy Logick or Naughty Raver or Scotty D - else there wouldn't be a scene, I wouldn't be able to count literally hundreds of funky tracks I loved last year. For me, and for what I have to assume are many listeners like me, funky is enough of a world by itself, it has the same depth that UK Garage had (and I followed garage as closely as I do funky now from late 1999 onwards, and in terms of depth-of-affection and the number/quality of great tracks I see them as about equal), and sounds great when mixed with itself - this being less about some notion of tunnel vision and more about what feels right.

Turning this issue into a question about "the continuum" gets this entirely backwards - ultimately everyone's just trying to justify liking the music they happen to like, so they twist and turn this notion the continuum to suit that. I think, Jon, you think I'm a curmudgeonly purist in part because my position on "the continuum" is that it only makes sense with respect to a particular population (i.e. based around London radio, MCs, etc.) - but this is not an insistence on the superior quality of the music made by that population; rather, I think that making its meaning any less restrictive turns it into something too meaningless and waftingly qualitative, like pipecock's notions of soul. Contrary to that, I think whether something = part of "the continuum" has little if anything to do with whether it's good music. Similarly, if a particular instance of eclecticism is good or bad, it has nothing to do with whether "the continuum has degenerated."

What annoys me is this attempt to objectivise funky's perceived inadequacy. The two most common critical arguments I see with respect to this music are "funky is insufficient on its own" and of course the post-XLR8R line, such as when URB say " Overall, it’s been tough to gauge a concrete grasp of what’s artistically and creatively fruitful in the genre of UK Funky. However, certain DJs and producers are giving the genre a backbone along with the pop cheese. Producers like Roska (or Mentor Roska, as he’s affectionally referred to), Cooly G, and Geeneus have all been pivotal in the shake-up of UK Funky, providing intrigue, depth, and necessary weight to a genre dominated by percussion and diva vocals."

Given the failure of any such writings to ever demonstrate anything beyond the most cursory familiarity with the genre I can't help but feel people are turning a subjective "I didn't feel this was worth investigating further" into an objective "there's actually nothing to see here, folks."

Which strikes me as much more curmudgeonly than me offering the occasional sideways jab at the same tendencies.

Or perhaps what's even more depressing is that the most politely framed jabs on my part will immediately call forth people telling me how wrong and unfair I am, never mind the (again, literally) hundreds of enthusiastic tl;dr recommendations of tracks I've made here, the vast majority being greeted with the sound of tumbleweed and crickets.

Whereas - and I don't mean this to be snide Jon, it's more of an exhortation for participation - I don't think you've ever even mentioned a funky track you like on this thread aside from Hard House Banton and Kode9.

Possibly I exaggerated, but I reckon I have individually recommended at least 100+ tracks on this thread by this point.

i think the crickets might be b/c so many of the tracks you mention are only found in the middle of some 4-hr rinse set. seriously if it's not available as an mp3 you can't expect anyone to track it down. i'd pretty much never heard of the devine collective until just now. idk it seems like you're the one policing the funky boundary a bit too heavily here ("proper" funky???) and reducing it to "stuff marcus nasty plays", and pretty much misrepresenting every artist who makes what you call "fact magazine music".

Seriously if you wait for funky tracks to emerge as standalone mp3s then you're missing out on 95% of what's good.

But here's "House Girls Part One", a massive anthem for over a year now. And not just with Marcus Nasty - with Mak10, with Crazy Cousinz, with Majesty, with Roska, with Ill Blu, with Hard House Banton, with Shox, with Dapper, with Il-Mana...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POe6EjRA0wI

thx! am in montreal right now but will listen when i get back.

i mean, i just don't have the time to listen to 4-hr sets, or indeed the inclination to listen to anything at the shockingly poor bitrate rinse sets are uploaded at.

and in naming crazy cousinz, roska, ill blu, illmana and hard house banton you've named producers who are lynchpins of funky-inclined "fact magazine music" sets!

i mean, i don't get where your impression that those producers are being unfairly dismissed or maligned comes from, even that urb para you quoted isn't actively negative (and tbh i've never heard of urb so can't really care about whatever they say).

rinse sets sound better if you play them on a proper system (i sometimes burn them on to cd).

house girls is MASSSSIVE. never knew who it was by til just now though lol.

oh shit "house girls" is amazing yes, can't get enough of that organ sound - am sure i've heard it out before actually. probably at night slugs, in fact

night slugs = home of fact funky.

Ha ha well aside from roska and 2 out of a billion Hard House Banton tracks, I'd note that pretty much none of those DJ sets that emerge as downloadable internet MP3s in fact do have all the vocal funky tunes these guys play when you see them live.

I mean you can't seriously tell me that the Smoke Less Fuels sets or FACT sets would keep you up to date with tunes like "Friend of Mine" or "Kiss", to name the two biggest vocal anthems at the moment. That's not a criticism, but let's not pretend there's no difference there.

In the same way that I wouldn't expect any of the above DJs except Roska to play "Nike", as great as it is.

The very fact that everyone immediately recognises "House Girls" but have no idea who Devine Collective are kinda proves my point! You'd immediately recognise "Tribal Conga" too, trust me.

Lex are you really saying you can't see how describing Scratcha DVA/Cooly G/Roska as adding a "necessary weight" to the scene is a slight???

yeah, but it's fairly mild and non-specific - incredibly lazy of course but it's hardly singling out [insert "proper" funky producer here] as a lightweight.

also half the djs you favour over "fact music" have actually djed at night slugs so... [i don't know how to do that shrug emoticon that jordan always does :( ]

Sure, and I never said the borders aren't porous, but there's a difference between asking "isn't Roska still a funky DJ when he plays at Night Slugs?" (answer: of course) and saying "there's no meaningful division between Martyn and Geneeus' funky tracks"

yeah, but it's fairly mild and non-specific - incredibly lazy of course but it's hardly singling out [insert "proper" funky producer here] as a lightweight.

That's because no-one who ever adopts this position ever actually listens long or hard enough to find out who might be lightweight.

it's like how minimal skeptics used to say "oh yeah, villalobos is great, but everyone else just sounds like insects copulating under a microscope, it's all the same." And if you asked them they could never say who exactly fit into the "all the same" category.

Also Lex I would have thought you'd be all over Screama's funky productions by now given his producer tag sample is a woman saying "Complex Simplicity!"

"Obv there are quite a few people who think that you can't "everything that you want" from funky qua funky, and instead prefer the idea of funky as an one tool in a tool box. But whereas the line I've seen put out to explain this is that eclecticism is the go, really it's better to think of this as one big genre etc,I tend to think "maybe this person just isn't that into funky."

@Tim: Well, beyond the fact that you might need to accept that not everyone loves funky in its entirety and as wholeheartedly as you, “getting everything you want from funky” is very dependent on what you want. If you're a writer who lives in Australia, then naturally what you want is to hear music that excites you more than pretty much all other genres. However if you're a producer or DJ in London, your needs aren't the same. Core pillars of the nuum are ownership and the power to change yet if you're Untold or Shortstuff, "owning" or properly participating in UK funky is less of an option than if you're Marcus Nasty or Supa D, because there are cultural barriers that inhibit or at least slow down this dialog, ie if you're not from the ends, you're not from the ends, and the ends invented and owns UK funky.

Much of this 130 funky-inspired music of oneman, bok bok, me n dusk, kode9, needs to be seen in this context, and I think its healthy that there's a musical dialog going on, primarily through Rinse, and yet also inevitable that it will be two parallel paths rather than one big whole, due to the nature of the backgrounds of the two groups.

The pros and cons of mono-genre purism v multi-genre eclectism depend massively on the health and breadth of the genres at a given time. Much of the discussion around funky-influenced ex-dubsteppers like oneman should be far more of a reflection of the state of dubstep now (narrow in breadth and universally noisy and rigid) than the state of UK funky. You may want to say that "unifying concepts like "UK Bass"' are "frankly awful" but I would at least commend people having learnt that sonic and creative diversity in a scene - which you now commend in funky but is broadly lost in dubstep - is healthy. Using a term "UK bass" has advantages because it seeks to define as little as possible, leaving room for creativity, while not attempting to be a genre of any kind.

@titchy: "eclecticism/blurring just means exactly that = something indistinct."

Not necessarily. The devil's in the details on this one. The pros and cons of "eclecticism/blurring" depend massively on the state and the sonic distances between the genres that you're blurring at a given time. Eclecticism rightly has a bad name because at worst sets are erratic and incoherent. but at the other extreme lies monochrome purist sets, where you're not sure if the DJ has changed the record yet or even if he even has more than one in his box. So I would argue that eclecticism between related styles can sometimes produce very interesting mutations, especially when you consider the relationship between DJing and production (DJ finds new blend, producer re-engineers unrelated elements to form new mutation, DJ plays that, mixes it with third record....). Both eclecticism and purism can be done very well and very badly – and I think people should be judged upon the results they produce, not the methods they use to get there.

Finally Tim, you need to let that XLR8R feature go. I was asked to do it, turned it down and sent them your name. I don’t know why you didn’t end up writing it but it’s clearly ignorant and over-reaches itself, rise above it fella!