funky house sceptics, let me draw your attention to this

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.

very pleasing
indeed! i just wish uptown didn't have a near monopoly on this stuff. great shop but their overseas shipping is crazy expensive and rhythm division seems to have vanished from the web. promising signs from juno download - i hope roska's mp3/wav releases prove to be the tip of the iceberg on that front.

ah! 'unfinished business' has clicked with me now, belatedly. tim was right about it suffering in isolation (though the isolation was probably my own) - sitting down, merely a clammy tap-drip schematical echoplex; out & about, why it sucks in its cheeks and struts like the music in naomi campbell's head! autechre i never knew ye.

nonetheless it is still quite pleasing that their follow-up, or at least the one footloose chooses to play, is a super cheesy west ldn wine bar groover.

also

mr mathz - 'preachers daughter'...!! the tune that has everything

Yeah "Unfinished Business" is a very perspectival tune - yeah when I was listening to this set last I was thinking that the tune makes more sense as "funky" if you train yr ears to the strut of the kickdrums. rtc did you hear Aphrodisiax's "Keep It Moving", which Footloose has played in previous weeks? That's still a bit of a headfuck but subtler and sexier than "Unfinished Business".

"Preacher's Daughter" is great! Such a perverse progression: starts off kinda straightforward vocal house, then the counter-snare comes in, and then that insane "together... together..." breakdown section with the rhythmic explosions and rave riffs and big bassline. Such a WTF moment.

"Whatever The Weather" (the other Aphrodisiax track from this week) strikes me as a very typical Bugz in the Attic kinda affair, although even they might blanch at the organ solo! Which is I guess what you mean by "super cheesy west ldn wine bar groover". I'm not sure if I made it to a wine bar during my trips to London. I went to bars certainly, and one was in West London, but i don't know if it meets the definition of "wine bar" - if it's basically the bar and a corridor with stools and everyone jammed in tight drinking cocktails or shots, it's just a "bar", right?

Anyway Footloose for once goes for a non-perverse transition playing it right after two Bugz remixes.

"Every Step (Arms Remix)" I still love you.

My "Sometimes I Wake Up Early In The Morning To Play My Con-Con-Congo" Facebook Group still only has four members, all of them ILX users... :-( Where is the groundswell of support.

"Every Step (Arms Remix)" I still love you.

2nded! it also sent me back to tawiah's own ep, the way the arms remix frames her voice refracts very well on to her own sparser stuff.

i can never decide whether vocals would be the icing on top of 'unfinished business' and 'mr bean', or would be a bad idea.

Hard to imagine a vocal managing to prettify "Mr Bean", although i guess Lorraine Cato managed a similar feat on my beloved "Pulse X (Vocal Mix)". "Unfinished Business" would probably work with some kinda minimal dancehall-ish vocal. House diva possibly a bad idea.

i think both might work with someone like ny, who wouldn't prettify it so much as, um, icify it? talking of ny i really cannot get enough of her vocal on 'fallin' again' - when she starts riffing on "free" at the end is just, you know, tears unfrosting eyes

that seany b 'lift me up' track needs to appear on the internet/seany b's myspace/anywhere else

words of truth

to paraphrase the bulk of this thread, wine bar is a feeling.

(i did have the exact same reservations as you about using it, actually, but i dont think modernity has furnished us with an equivalent term for the 'whatever the weather' type places, usually populated by funky-minded down-to-earth spanish and indeed, australian type folk. and lots of english too, tbf. but never russian. does anyone know what i'm on about.)

not so big on 'every step'. to me it has a sort of rng pointlessness that only melts away when the breakdown comes and the lady's accent goes overly british (you mooo me, my eyes if they shuh, woaaan stop ur touch etc), whereupon it then just becomes broken beat. which is more palatable for some reason. maybe i just find the sample wearying.

regarding 'unfinished business', i'm sure warrior queen has an opening in her schedge - here's hopin!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

like, the notting hill arts club is not a wine bar. you know exactly what it is though. what is it?

mr mathz' other tune is more classicist and is also extremely good. bit like the 'leader/what goes around' balance - would it be fair to say him and fuzzy logik are the the few who are internalizing funky's divergences rather than just doing their own thing? on a track to track basis, at least.

Has anyone been recording the last couple weeks?

I've yet to get the 1xtra player to work for me, reading these tracklists and not being able to listen in is getting frustrating.

i would love some kind of vocal element on 'Mr Bean' - doesn't have to be much

what about the 'oh na na na' vocal version by orthodox on the b-side of the mr bean 12"? i don't think i've seen anyone mention it. i like it, but i don't know much about recent dancehall so my standards could be low.

"mr mathz' other tune is more classicist and is also extremely good. bit like the 'leader/what goes around' balance - would it be fair to say him and fuzzy logik are the the few who are internalizing funky's divergences rather than just doing their own thing? on a track to track basis, at least."

Yeah I think this is right - probably Malice too.

I don't exactly have reservations about "wine bar" as a descriptor - although I've primarily seen it used on dissensus so I always initially hear it with an implied dissensian sneer. I'm just trying to visualise precisely what it refers to in my head. I don't think it works this way in Australia really - a "wine bar" here would more likely play something with a stronger veneer of respectability than "funky house" (in the conventional sense of the term) - perhaps Buddha Bar, or if they were going more uptempo they might plump for breakbeat. If I wanted funky house i'd go to either a big commercial club (like the ones in our city's casino complex) or to a hairdressing salon. In fact "hairdresser house" (as opposed to "haircut house") is a term I've used before to describe that kind of sound.

Notting Hill Arts Club isn't "Wine Bar" it's "organic shoes".

posh organic shoes and overly sweet cocktails

wine bar makes me think more of sosho

dunno if people have seen but on his myspace Producer Mario has put up four of his best tracks for free d/l :)

"i can never decide whether vocals would be the icing on top of 'unfinished business' and 'mr bean', or would be a bad idea."

There is a vocal... Apple - Da Real Dutty Dance

The Guardian talks about you lot/funky house:

"Keen readers of music blogs and message boards that discuss the "hardcore continuum" in-depth and reference Foucault when talking about the latest song by Tempa T or some other incidental grime MC will know all about the "funky" scene currently engulfing the underground clubs and pirate radio stations of London. Those of you who have got real life friends and a social life probably won't."

Is the "Apple = Jon E Cash making house" argument run in this article and on Blissblog (presumably the former ripped it from the latter) on point? It doesn't seem quite right to me, but I can't put my finger on why.

Mind you Simon R extended it to Roska which just seems obviously wrong.

The guy that wrote that Guardian piece is also Prancehall btw.

i think Jon E Cash's name is just being used as shorthand for 8-bar. the main points of comparison i think are the abstract use of texture, heavy bass and blocky approach to rhythm / tracks, but these are hardly rare tendencies in grime!

my issue is that this kind of analysis (x is like y times z / x is like y if it tried to be z) is a ridiculously simplistic way of communicating what makes music feel a certain way, its an issue i often have with music writing... too often reductive posing as complete analysis (with value judgement attached), it cannot do justice to emotional or visceral response. its escape from this tendency is one of the reasons i love a lot of Simon Reynolds old writing so much!

to clarify, thats not an argument against writing about music, by any means, just against a very specific but prevalent tendency within it

on reflection over lunch the sentence about doing justice to emotional or visceral response doesn't really have a place there...

http://images.yuku.com/image/gif/f472518e3072d2a49c7ea620de3f7307be12ad5.gif

diseensus poster posts link to 4yr old diseensiest ilx thread ever feat. disssensus mainstays. it's a par.

^ dyslexus.

any new sets about that arent footloose/rinse fm crew btw?

i think i missed something...

lol, I never clicked the link in the Guardian article. I thought it was this thread being linked!

not sure i've been to sosho - pics look comparable to the upstairs bit of east village i guess? perhaps i meant those kinds of places too.