funky house sceptics, let me draw your attention to this

haaaaa after ribbing blueski upthread OF COURSE the thing i was going mad for should turn out to be an imperceptibly remixed 'samir's theme' on lacrate's label. context i am ur bitch 4ever.

though if footloose really wants to please me he'll have to chuck in like, sarai 'ladies' and 'take it 2 tha house' for the full 2003 flave.

Listening now. Wau Geeneus "As I"! That endlessly rising hook! Fuzzy Logic does the same thing on "Polyfunk" but here it sounds positively Belgian.

Also the way "Take It Low" kicks off in sped-up mode lends a deeply satisfying air of frantic enthusiasm to proceedings.

"Unknown – Samir’s Theme (Arms Remix)"

OMG. Actually apart from reminding me of soca as per, this kinda backs up the idea I had the other day that on an overall, from a distance perspective, funky house most resembles brazilian funk.

some eloquent hopscotch this week. love the way footsie bookends his cheese with the supposedly experimental jobs in this passage:

Roska – Pyramids
Martin Solveig – Madan (Marco Del Horno Remix)
Daddy Funk ft Nicole Tyler – The Disco Killed My Brain
Jon Cutler – It’s Yours (David Penn Remix) (Defected)
Aphrodisiax – Keep It Moving

then twice alternating various dj spen and aphrodisiax tunes, and then 'kissing strangers' with fuzzy logik 'work the love' (which is fantastic, reminds me of manix a bit). you see his point.

surprised he's never played crazy cousinz 'dont u like the way' (3rd track into the mac10 best of vocal funky mix) though - would go a treat with the mc lev and lonyo in particular.

tim otm re geeneus 'as i' - all his funky's been pure class. beggars belief that this is the same guy who made all that tedious grimeboy fodder.

Delinquent ft Kcat – I Got You (Delio D’Cruz Mix)
Diamond ft Kele Le Roc – Nothing (Ragz2Riches)

are turning into real favourites too.

"Delinquent ft Kcat – I Got You (Delio D’Cruz Mix) "

This in particular is dope.

Yeah I always thought Geeneus was overrated when he made grime - except for, like, co-producing "Know We" and... um... he did "Poppadoms" yeah?

yeah. 'poppadoms' also overrated in my book though.

on an overall, from a distance perspective, funky house most resembles brazilian funk.

-- Tim F, Tuesday, 5 August 2008 15:27 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

sort of feel you lose twice as much as you gain with this observation, just by virtue of sailing so close to playing into hater hands. it's probably true i suppose, overall, from a distance, but...

I can't even remember the sound of "Poppadoms" now. Actually it was just "Wizzbit" redux wasn't it. "Wizzbit" was good. I'm loyal to pretty much any and every grime 8-bar used on that first Nasty Crew mix.

Yeah actually I refrained from making the brazilian funk comparison in my blog posts precisely for that reason (Simon R dislikes funk too if I recall, or is indifferent, or whatever). But I think it only plays into hater hands insofar as everyone already sells funk short, much for the same reasons as they would funky house (oh, it's just a familiar beat spiced up with extra percussion).

As far as I'm aware I'm the only person who heard a massive advance in the groove-science of funk in the More Favela Booty Beats comp from late 06/early 07 when compared to that first comp in that series (and those comps are almost the start and the end of my engagement with the genre). When I reviewed it I said I wouldn't be surprised if it set the agenda for interesting groove-based music to come, not expecting to this to happen of course. The idea being that a focus on (relatively) lo-fi bi-polar percussive clutter offered a way of avoiding the diminishing returns angle of intricate post-Timbaland percussion loops (which defined both 2-step and grime in different ways).

its not that important but i don't agree about Geeneus' grime... Old Skool, Old Skool 2, Jam Hot, Jamnite, Shocka are all classics imo, aside from his PAUG productions. obviously at the darker techier end of things but i still love them. i agree though that it is bizarre to hear his transition into Funky, although Yellowtail has definitely got a techy underbelly i feel

i didnt just want to write "i hate baile funk therefore balls to this opinion", you see.

does anyone know what that one with what sounds like a sample of a cd pullback pitched up and down? "weeeeee... we should be together for eternity" - that tune is deep... Marcus Nasty from June at about 11 mins

also anyone know the second tune in to Marcus Nasty from Deja April... "In the name of love". just discovered that i'd never clocked the 1st track of that set! pleasing, that set is a favourite

I'm a bit baffled by all the talk about this stuff like it's some typically London thing - D'n'B, UK Garage, Grime, proper home-grown genres allright, but exactly this kind of syncopated soca-fied funky house has been played everywhere in France, Spain, Holland, Portugal, Brazil for years now. I mean, how different is Bongo Jam from something like Curtir? That UK producers are now importing this sound from their Mediterranean holidays probably was inevitable (the age-old route) and I'm not trying to sound all "respect the originators" but I'm genuinely interested if (and why) you guys think this is more noteworthy than all the non-UK funky house out there?

but as with UK garage, it is (the beginnings of) a homegrown sound which has its roots in one which was imported... if you check the likes of Marcus Nasty or Mak 10 you can hear the emergence of a very distinctively new flavour and approach. Crazi Couzins are a bad reference point to draw conclusions from i think, because they walk the line so finely between convention, pop appeal and the uk vibe... people like Roska, Producer Mario, General Malice, Little Silver, Hard House Banton etc are making music unlike anything i've heard previously. but its also exciting because at the moment you have these weird avant-garde pieces of house sitting at one end of a spectrum stretching to more conventional stuff, all of which is treated completely differently on radio / in clubs, with mcs toasting, pull-ups, aggressive mixing etc.

also, everyone knows that UK music is avant-garde nuum-pushing ish whereas that stuff is cheesy euro-crap. Duh. Anglophones FTW.

"does anyone know what that one with what sounds like a sample of a cd pullback pitched up and down? "weeeeee... we should be together for eternity" - that tune is deep... Marcus Nasty from June at about 11 mins"

This is "Speechless" by Mystery.

Yeah Siegbran I'd say it depends on the tracks - "UK funky house" stretches from conventional funky house through to stuff that really isn't house at all (e.g. Dub Boy's "Funky Underground" or Little Silver's "Seasons"). "Bongo Jam" is a bit like the single edit version of "Sweet Like Chocolate" in this regard - it's a (great) track where the specific sonic differences of the scene as a whole are not particularly noticeable. But at least 2-step had its beat as a central defining quality - with UK funky house there's no single strategy of deviation from house per se, but a variety of such strategies. It's really only by listening to, say, a whole Footloose set, that you get a sense of the overall scene aesthetic.

where is footloose set

You can stream 'em on the 1xtra site. Don't know about a download though...

Here's an RA stream link:

rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/1xtra/footloose.ra

for the past 3 weeks the archive audio for Footloose's 1XTRA shows hasn't been working for me: 'Audio stream is unavailable at this time' (same result from RA link above). other shows (e.g. Cameo) are working fine though. possibly a glitch with BBC's new iPlayer - on BBC's forums there's mention of possible problems for overseas listeners with some shows (why this one?!!!).

if not for r|t|c I wouldn't have been able to hear the shows (except live) - thanks! (new one please anyone?) also thanks Tim for bringing the vibe!

This is "Speechless" by Mystery.

cheers Tim! any idea about the other one i mention? sounds more US maybe but still something about it says UK i feel

with UK funky house there's no single strategy of deviation from house per se, but a variety of such strategies.

yeh this is true. the coming years will be very interesting in this regard, to see which deviations become dominant. but it also reinforces how worthwhile it is to savour what is happening right now!

Yeah I don't know that one! It's quite broken beat-ish as well isn't it, the bit where it cuts to just the bass and syncopated beat is insane. That sounds very UK to me - perhaps sampling a US tune though.

Love Shantie's riffing on the title over the top. In my head I always remember him saying "We'll tell 'em that we did it in the name of love!" - like he, Marcus and Rankin' have been arrested for high treason or something. But whenever I listen to that set i realise that this is purely a figment of my imagination.

Of course my favourite Shantie bit on that set (for reasons that should be obvious) is when he's talking about how lucky you are to be hearing the set and that if you're taping it "Don't give it out!... In fact what am I talkin' about?? SEND IT TO AUSTRALIA!"

Yeah I don't know that one! It's quite broken beat-ish as well isn't it, the bit where it cuts to just the bass and syncopated beat is insane. That sounds very UK to me - perhaps sampling a US tune though.

yeh thats what i figured, cos the vocal im pretty sure is from an older US track, i swear i remember it from some chicago deep house set or something, but the beats and general aesthetic imply new UK or a surprisingly coincidental likeness

Love Shantie's riffing on the title over the top. In my head I always remember him saying "We'll tell 'em that we did it in the name of love!" - like he, Marcus and Rankin' have been arrested for high treason or something. But whenever I listen to that set i realise that this is purely a figment of my imagination.

Of course my favourite Shantie bit on that set (for reasons that should be obvious) is when he's talking about how lucky you are to be hearing the set and that if you're taping it "Don't give it out!... In fact what am I talkin' about?? SEND IT TO AUSTRALIA!"

haha! he is a really good MC i think, really vibesy. downloaded a Mak 10 set recently and it was interesting to hear how much more aggressively the MC dominated proceedings. makes for a really good contrast though

i just bought a Babyface Jay & Mystery 12 from 2002 from a bargain bin, quite interesting... one side quite rolling 'soca-beat' garage, a bit like an understated 'Decoy', which is quite decent, but the other is a really horrific moody breakbeaty thing! crazy

hey deej i dont know if you saw but rtc had linked to some footloose shows just up there ^^^

http://www.dealbreaker.com/images/entries/McDonalds%20I

http://www.colts.com/images/news_photos/communitydynamic/im_lovin_it_NEW_logo.jpg

UK funky house stretches from conventional funky house through to stuff that really isn't house at all

Of course, but that's true everywhere - all over the world funky house has become a mish-mash of reggaeton, salsa, soca, jamaican toasting, tribal, electrohouse, etc. And much as I like those 1extra radio shows, apart from the occasional bassline-tune and British-accented MCs I don't really hear much that's fundamentally different from what's happening elsewhere (yet). Local flavour yes, new paradigm no.

But I guess it's another one of those "you would have to be there to understand" scenes then.

tim f isnt from 'there'

where are these other places where this stuff is coming together? id love to hear stuff outside london doing similar things, this is just the most accessible

crazy cousinz remix of 'july' is hot

Well you had the whole Africanism project a few years ago (mostly French) which added lots of african and carribean music to the mix, Dr. Kucho in Spain, local dudes from here like Olav Basoski, Billy The Klit, Chuckie, Afrojack, DJ Hardwell, Sidney Samson, Roog, Laidback Luke, Rishi Romero, Vato Gonzales (some mixtapes for download there).

Siegbran I know Africanism stuff and if that's what you mean it sounds totally different! Not in a bad way, but it's not nearly as, um, wot do you call it... URBAN!?

I mean, I would argue that actual pop-minded Bob Sinclar is closer to UK funky house than the Africanism stuff is. And I have always been a relative defender of stuff like "Rock This Party".

But I will check out Vato Gonzales. Downloading his mixtape now.

I do think you're right that UK funky house is very much in the vein of other "melting pot" scenes (this is one of Reynolds' objections to it - adopting the argument that (to paraphrase) all the melting pot does is mix familiar flavours without creating or discovering a new flavour).

There is, as such, what i would call a plausible deniability to any claims to innovation - even where new things are being done, because they're achieved through convergences between the sonic tactics of multiple styles (rather than a linear process of intensification largely internal to the style - as you got in early-to-mid nineties jungle) you can always point to other convergences in other melting pot scenes that approximate a similar feeling.

A strict modernist take will thus find any such claims to innovations to be either false or potentially true but tenuous and partial only.

My very much post-UK Garage relationship to "funky house" is based on my conviction that the value of UK Garage was not solely its modernist qualities (beats you ain't never heard before) but its multivalency, the way in which different sonic and stylistic components entered into a really productive and largely non-heirarchical relationship with one another so as to become something more than and entirely different from the sum of their parts. The relationship between the sonic components, reference points and influences that made up UK Garage and the overall finished product is something akin to that between individual stars and the constellation that they form when taken together. The irreducibility of this constellation to the influence of any particular star can be seen in the fact that, when the music's moment past, it didn't just go down the sink quality-wise but actually disappeared to all intents and purposes (c.f. drum & bass) - only so long as these stars were articulated together was the music visible and viable - from 2002 onwards all those stars got drawn into different constellations.

I think that UK funky house shows increasing evidence of modernism if you know where to look, but this isn't the primary attraction for me: it's rather the way in which it echoes UK garage in its production of a constellation (albeit a different one) where the arrangement of the (familiar) individual components is what takes on supreme importance. The same components arranged differently would not produce the same result.

One key quality of this arrangement being an ever-so-slightly greater ambivalence to "house" as a constraining factor (though it's less ambivalent than many, say, dissensians might like it to be) - UK funky house cannot decide whether to articulate its components fully in terms of "house", whereas I think most other comparable "melting pot" house scenes have a much a heavier dose of house stock, which ties everything together into a vibe whose ultimate uniformity belies the diversity of the source material. (arguably this ambivalence is directly related to a flirting with the "urban" qualities are note above: it's the tug-of-war between these two qualities that really defines the sense of equipoise you get in this music).

it seems to me that 'funky house' is as much a style of djing as it is a style of production, to the degree that lots of these remixes are pretty simply rhythmic template changes that arent very substantive otherwise, at least in ways that would signify TOTALLY NEW GENRE - so just listening to 'track 2' on the on-site player @ vato's website it sounds like something that would easily be incorporated here

regardless, nothing like this gets any play in chicago ... i check a pretty wide variety of house music venues but this stuff is pretty nonexistent. Anything w/ a soca rhythm or whatever ... the only shit 'hipsters' are on is that annoying nurave/juke/crunk/bmore amalgamation, and otherwise its pretty much straight up HOUSE, nothing that sounds remotely like this w/ the diff rhythmic styles, soca/reggaeton rhythm

(i mean a pretty damn wide variety of house, it is chicago after all, but nothing w/ toasting or tropical syncopated non-house drums at all)

seani b 'lift me up', another vintage nasty crew style carnival tank

so hot btw

whenever dudes would say "carnival" about a grime song i think i almost always hated it but this has a lot more rhythmic grace than grime which i think is why im a lot more attracted to it on the whole

Ha ha on Blissblog SR complained that maybe for the first time the next Notting Hill Carnival will actually sound like a Rio Carnival - I had been thinking of the same possibility in my head only as a really positive thing!

Listening to that Vato mix now -sounds great! Okay Siegbran I can sort of see your point. Vahid has to hear this: it's like Jess & Crabbe come back to life!

The main point of difference I'd mention - apart from the use of MCs in UK funky house - is perhaps the 8-bar structure of a lot of the grimier tunes, which I think gives the music a more palsied stop-start quality, whereas this Vato mix for all its superficial similarities is pushing more of an endless beat or verse-chorus structure. Still, pretty amazing - thanks for the tip!

One thing I particularly like about that Vato mix is how it seems to liberate the potential I hear in Fedde De Grand's production style, that strong sense that it could get really ants-in-yr-pants compulsive if it dropped the repressive electro-house baggage (he actually manages this on his Ida Corr collab-o "Let Me Think About It", which could fit onto Vato's mix pretty easily).

um, major lol @ "vato gonzalez" being born Björn Franken

being bjorn

I'm really enjoying his mix though! Ironically, though, not really in the same way that I enjoy UK funky - sorry siegbran (but thanks for the link).

It reminds me a lot of Moonbootica's DJ Sounds Good mix - eclectic, percussive electro-pop-house, only with Fedde's influence taking the place of, um, Ewan Pearson I guess was the reference point for Moonbootica at the time. Plus added latino-caribbean influences definitely. But the music is fun due to its reliable facility with a good riff and excellent layering and general post-boompty bounciness - the counter-rhythms really do feel like window-dressing surround the basic house thump, much in the way sceptics claim UK funky works. This is not a bad thing though - nothing wrong with a good house groove!

Correct, guys like Vato are coming from the electro house side but that's only one aspect of it, you also have DJs like Chuckie who come from the caribbean party scene - ten years ago that was all soca and hiphop with some UK garage imports thrown in, now those guys are also into electro house and baile funk and basline and everything else that works and those sets have much less of a 'house groove' vibe. Local Moroccan-born MCs and R&B singers here have also discovered that guesting on these 'dirty house' records is more lucrative than trying to sound like local clones of Jeezy and R Kelly, which is also an interesting development. Obviously every scene is different, the Spanish guys have more reggaeton and salsa, the French more african-sounding stuff (yes most of the Africanism project is dire tribal but there's some good stuff to) and, heh, tektonik, Italians seem to be into that Balkan beats thing. I don't claim to be a full expert on all this (I don't go clubbing as much as I used to) and I think the UK scene probably has more potential if only for its proven ability but I really see this more as one big pan-European movement - the reaction against the quite sonically uniform and segregated house, trance and techno scenes of the years before. A truly populist version of the whole Soulwax/Playgroup 'eclectic DJing' phenomenon too.

Coming home to a new Footloose set is about the only thing making my current cold bearable.

I'm in London really briefly for a business trip and want to go see some UK funky on friday - does anyone know a good source of info about what's on? Only thing I've spotted so far is something called "House Arrest" at club E3 with MA1, but I'm sure there must be more...

i am eagerly anticipating the explosion of this into the uk charts - and with it actual mp3s of tracks becoming available - when people get back from napa. i would also love to know how people find the time to listen to all these sets, but they are amazing, thanks for uploading them everyone who has. am intending to go to a funky rave soon, was going to go to one in dagenham at the weekend but a friend was putting on a rival night down the road from my flat

Was that the one on sat with Kyla and Crazi Cousinz? I wanted to go to that, but fly off too soon. Anyway I'm certain "do you mind" will crush the charts when it gets its release on Ministry this month...

very pleasing

Fantastic! That has to be one of my absolute favourites at the moment.