Caribou

It’s strange to highlight a musician as putting out one of the best dj mixes of the year but Dan Snaith aka Caribou has been cutting his teeth on the dancefloor for a few years now. If you’ve listened to his latest album Swim you know that he’s been slowly gravitating towards liquid dance infused tracks since “Niobe“, the final and most forward thinking tune on Andorra. This mix displays him in full dance floor mode as he fluidly combines classic Mr Fingers acid house, New York loft soundscapes, Afro-Latin jams, Detroit techno and one of the most creative combinations I’ve heard all year: the mix of a perennial No Wave track with an ethnic recording of an Egyptian wedding. Beautiful. The man is in fine form on this one.

Caribou Mix courtesy of Allez Allez

Dante Carfagna

Dante Carfagna is a record collector extraordinaire. A name that not many people have heard but for those folks in the know he is a first rate archivist, taste maker and the premier go to source on all things funk, soul, psychedelic, ethnic, and folk music related. This mix that he put together for DJ Shadow’s new online radio program shows him in a very specific zone. This is, as Dante calls it,  desperate sounds, and really, there is no other way to put it. All the tracks on display fall under the rubric of “loner folk.” For those who haven’t heard of the genre, think Nick Drake’s long lost folk cousins scattered throughout the globe, at certain times even more melancholic and closer to the bone than Drake himself. There is no irony here, no distance, no posturing, just pure heart shattering soul. Proceed with caution.

Up On a Downer Mix courtesy of Shadow Radio

Tom Doc Delay

Doc Delay put out one of the best mixes of 2009, REM Sleep 2. It has the feel of a break-up mix, which makes sense, since I heard from around the way that he put it together as he was going through a break up himself; although, whether that’s true is anyone’s guess. It really isn’t a mix per se, but moreso exhibits the qualities of listening to a concept album, a story of a person’s life and a statement on the ephemeral nature of love. It’s full of psychedelic ballads and dirges – similar to a certain compilation from Stones Throw Records released earlier this year — but curated with a more personal touch. I highly recommend picking it up as it has just been slated for official release in November 2010.

Recently Delay dropped a mix with a different angle in mind: a wild and winding ride through the varying zones of galactic funk, one that tethers nicely to the future funk and cosmic consciousness articles we have been publishing here at Hydra. The photo above — a lowrider gliding through space — is probably the best way to sum up this funky cosmic ride through the galaxy. Delay is a dj’s dj, and his mixes are in every way brought together with presentation in mind as well as replay value. The blends are first rate, the samples and effects are never superfluous, and as always, the track selection is tirelessly thought over. Summer isn’t over yet.

Galactic Convertible Mix

Beto Soundway Records

This mix comes courtesy of Roberto Gyemant, the man behind the excellent Panama Compilations on Soundway Records. All the selections are Panamanian, but that does not mean they are monochromatic in sound. In fact, it’s probably the most diverse mix from this list. Panama as a seaport community had people from all over the globe contribute to its musical culture and the music reflects it. The mix is a combination of Latin styles from cumbia, latin funk, psychedelic fuzz jams, calypso, and tropical sounds that show shades of influences from all over the globe. An instant classic.

Beto’s Panama DJ Mix courtesy of Soundway

I also highly recommend checking out the second installment of this dj mix which focuses more on rare Colombian costena and cumbia.

Beto Mix of Rare Colombian Music

Veronica Vasicka

Veronica Vasicka is the founder of Minimal Wave, a small NYC imprint that has been instrumental in showcasing hitherto unknown DIY electronic music acts from the late 1970s and 80s. Minimal Wave as a genre has seen a huge resurgence all over the globe; the aforementioned Stones Throw giant released an excellent compilation compiled by Ms. Vasicka and Peanut Butter Wolf — highly recommended. When you first hear a minimal wave/synth tune it makes you think of new wave, but it’s a little different; it’s like an artier, more minimal take on Depeche Mode with swathes of post-punk and industrial thrown in for good measure. It’s raw, sometimes funky, sometimes cold, otherworldly music that dips you in analog heaven and fever dream bliss.

Veronica Vasicka Minimal Wave MIX

Luigi Russolo at his Russolophone (1930)

In 1913, a young Italian painter wrote an impassioned letter of admiration to composer Balilla Pratella after being witness to a performance of his symphony at the Costanzi Theatre in Rome: “While I was listening to the orchestral performance of your overwhelming Futurist music, there came to my mind the idea of a new art, one that only you can create: the Art of Noises, a logical consequence of your marvelous innovations.”

The artist’s name was Luigi Russolo and what he envisioned for the future of sound on that day set the template for modern music.

Russolo was one of the early Futurists to become a close friend and ally of Marinetti--the man behind the now famous Futurist Manifesto that was published in Le Figaro on February 20, 1909.  Ironically, Russolo is the one who ended up embodying the manifesto of “destroying the cult of the past” more fully than many of the other Futurists. Where much of Futurist painting and sculpture relied on past techniques to articulate modern life, Russolo sought to radically break with the past by devising new methods of sound expression.

Character From "Parade" A Collaboration with Satie, Cocteau, Picasso

Noise = a non-harmonious or discordant group of sounds. That is the essential, most agreed upon definition, but for Russolo it also meant “found sound,” or any sound not necessarily coaxed out of a traditional instrument. Although Russolo was not the first to execute “found sound” in practice — the first “found sound” performance was an art experiment conceived by Jean Cocteau with design by Pablo Picasso and music by Erik Satie — Russolo was the first one to articulate the idea of “found sound.” There is no doubt that Cocteau and co. read Russolo’s thoughts on the matter quoted below as inspiration for their experimental ballet.

It cannot be objected that noise is only loud and disagreeable to the ear. It seems to me useless to enumerate all the subtle and delicate noises that produce pleasing sensations. To be convinced of the surprising variety of noises, one need only think of the rumbling of thunder, the whistling of the wind, the roaring of a waterfall, the gurgling of a brook, the rustling of leaves, the trotting of a horse into the distance, the rattling jolt of a cart on the road, and of the full, solemn, and white breath of a city at night. Think of all the noises made by wild and domestic animals, and of all those that a man can make, without either speaking or singing. Let us cross a large modern capital with our ears more sensitive than our eyes. We will delight in distinguishing the eddying of water, of air or gas in metal pipes, the muttering of motors that breathe and pulse with an indisputable animality, the throbbing of valves, the bustle of pistons, the shrieks of mechanical saws, the starting of trams on the tracks, the cracking of whips, the flap-ping of awnings and flags. We will amuse ourselves by orchestrating together in our imagination the din of rolling shop shutters, the varied hubbub of train stations, iron works, thread mills, printing presses, electrical plants, and subways.

- Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises (1913)

For Russolo, noise carries a two-fold meaning: the discordant atonality of machines and also natural non-traditional sounds. Animals, cars, waterfalls, jet engines, trains -- the cacophony of coitus and the shrieking of a child crying — all these fall within the rubric of noise. What supplied the necessary tools for Russolo’s innovation was the rise of mechanical industrialization — both its noises and the technological ability to harness those sounds via mechanical means.

To introduce everyday sounds — both natural and mechanical — into music composition seems like a simple, straightforward idea to the modern mind, but at the time The Art of Noises was published, it struck people as ludicrously absurd. Who would want to listen to the noise of the street and the ambient sound of the home? What could be more musically stale and tedious than a repetition — no matter how well structured — of the sounds we hear daily in our lives?

Even the most forward-thinking musical artists were skeptical. Stravinsky in his late life recalled being witness to a presentation of Russolo’s music. “Five phonographs standing on five tables in a large and otherwise empty room emitted digestive noises, static, etc.,” he said. “I pretended to be enthusiastic and told [the Futurists] that the sets of five phonographs with such music, mass-produced, would surely sell like Steinway grand pianos.” Stravinsky was mocking in his tone, and he was partially correct; Russolo’s instruments never sold well. However, where he erred was in his judgment that Russolo’s techniques would never catch on.

When Russolo in 1913 decided to apply his concepts to his compositions — while simultaneously creating new instruments to accommodate his vision — he single-handedly changed the course of music and art history. The adoption of everyday noise as an aesthetic choice in composition demarcates the clear line between the past and future of 20th century music. In many ways the intellectual rupture that Russolo created with his ideas has only one equivalent analogy in the history of 20th century art: Marcel Duchamp’s unveiling of his “Fountain.”

One of the more significant aspects about Russolo was his absolute commitment to detail and meticulous attention to the form and structure of his abstractions. His was not an incoherent jumble of ideas but a fully systematic and dialectical approach to sound. Below is an excerpt from The Art of Noises that highlights this aptitude.

Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men. For many centuries life went by in silence, or at most in muted tones. The strongest noises which interrupted this silence were not intense or prolonged or varied. If we overlook such exceptional movements as earthquakes, hurricanes, storms, avalanches and waterfalls, nature is silent. Amidst this dearth of noises, the first sounds that man drew from a pieced reed or stretched string were regarded with amazement as new and marvelous things.

Primitive races attributed sound to the gods; it was considered sacred and reserved for priests, who used it to enrich the mystery of their rites. And so was born the concept of sound as a thing in itself, distinct and independent of life, and the result was music, a fantastic world superimposed on the real one, an inviolable and sacred world. It is easy to understand how such a concept of music resulted inevitable in the hindering of its progress by comparison with the other arts. The Greeks themselves, with their musical theories calculated mathematically by Pythagoras and according to which only a few consonant intervals could be used, limited the field of music considerably, rendering harmony, of which they were unaware, impossible.

The Middle Ages, with the development and modification of the Greek tetra chordal system, with the Gregorian chant and popular songs, enriched the art of music, but continued to consider sound in its development in time, a restricted notion, but one which lasted many centuries, and which still can be found in the Flemish contrapuntalists’ most complicated polyphonies.

The chord did not exist, the development of the various parts was not subordinated to the chord that these parts put together could produce; the conception of the parts was horizontal not vertical. The desire, search, and taste for a simultaneous union of different sounds, that is for the chord (complex sound), were gradually made manifest, passing from the consonant perfect chord with a few passing dissonances, to the complicated and persistent dissonances that characterize contemporary music.

At first the art of music sought purity, limpidity and sweetness of sound. Then different sounds were amalgamated, care being taken, however, to caress the ear with gentle harmonies. Today music, as it becomes continually more complicated, strives to amalgamate the most dissonant, strange and harsh sounds. In this way we come ever closer to noise-sound.

Although sound effects and found sounds were a crucial step forward for Russolo and for the history of music itself, he chose not to stop there. He endeavored to create an orchestra of fully mechanical instruments that could be tuned and manipulated to recreate the sound of turbine engines, locomotives, or any other industrial innovation that had reached the ears of the masses in the early part of the 20th century. Intonarumori was the name that he assigned to this family of instruments; they resembled a large audio speaker system with phonographs on the inside with a crank for manipulation. They were a sight to behold, but it was the sounds that emitted from them that was unlike anything anyone had ever conceived.

Luigi Russolo (left) and his assistant Ugo Piatti with their Intonarumori.

After completing his noise generators, Russolo and his painter ally Ugo Piatti staged the first concert. Riots broke out at most of the performances, as they had for the unveiling of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.  The differences, however, between Stravinsky and Russolo lie in their approaches to sound as something either to be recovered or discovered. As Jonathon Keats notes:

Stravinsky sought to recover the pre-classical origin of music by experimenting with “primitive” rhythms; Russolo strove to launch a post-classical future by experimenting with “mechanical” timbres. Stravinsky was certainly the better composer, yet Russolo was actually the greater innovator. Recognizing the distinctive soundscape of his era, he gave formal structure to ambient harmonics. Introducing machines into the music hall, he made mechanical noises into music.

Russolo carried within him all the rage and panache of the Futurists’ dictum “to sing the love of danger,” and this was borne out during these raucous performances. In fact, a curious detail that I came across in my research was this quote taken from an observer at one of these happenings.

At the beginning of the third piece, an extraordinary thing happens: Marinetti, Boccioni, Armando Mazzi, and Piatti vanish from the stage, emerge from the empty orchestra pit, run across it, and hurl themselves among the seats, assaulting the many pastists, now drunk with the rage of tradition and imbecility, with blows, slaps, and cudgels.

The first recorded documentation of stage diving had actually occurred in 1919, more than 50 years before punk rock’ s arrival on the cultural stage.

It would take decades for Russolo’s futurist vision to reach the favor of most academics, but by the 1950s many of the techniques that he had sketched out in his treatise were being deployed by the avant garde composers and electronic music pioneers of the era. In spite of the fact that most composers ignored or dismissed Russolo along the way, there were a few acolytes who saw in his ideas something to mine for their own compositions. In the 1920s Arseny Avraamov‘s Symphony of Factory Sirens used navy whistles, car horns, and machine guns. George Antheil created Ballet Mecanique, a work that used jet propellers as its centrifugal force:

Nonetheless, it wasn’t until John Cage came along that the full import and power of Russolo’s theorems found their spiritual home. Cage, like Russolo, did not differentiate between “noise” and “music,” and this key commonality allowed Cage to forge the direction of noise as an aesthetic feature of composition. Indeed, it can be said that Cage’s famous 4’33′ — a performance at Black Mountain College where for 4 minutes and 33 seconds he did not play a single note — is the beginning of noise music in its postmodern application. By compelling the audience to question the notion of whether silence in the absolute sense exists, he transformed music into something that is beyond notes or notation. As Cage puts it: “there is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.”

This key idea became a fixture in the work of Henry Cowell and Karlheinz Stockhausen, along with free jazz luminaries La Monte Young and Derek Bailey.  What they created were radical compositions that went on to become the major influential forces on the minimalism of Terry Riley and the creators of the Kraut Rock movement. Faust, one of the more experimental Kraut bands, used found sound and noise as a pivotal facet of their musical development, as shown in this video, in which they use cement mixers and the interior sounds of a barn to generate music:

While there are many pure noise acts — from the Aktionist Larm-Konzerts in the 60s to Industrial Records in the 70s, all the way into the early 80s with Germany’s Neubauten and Japanoise in the 90s — this article is not about noise as purism, but noise and found sound as a musico-historical document.

The Beatles used found sound copiously throughout their psychedelic phase, with “Revolution 9” as the prime articulation of Russolo-Cage-ian techniques at work. It is a song filled with interspliced conversations of John and George talking, Yoko Ono getting naked, screaming, and nonsensical dialogue over tape loops and backwards effects, along with snippets of Sibelius, Schumann, and Beethoven at varying speeds and overdubbed for enhanced effect on the listener; in essence, “Revolution 9″ is one of the first examples of sampling in popular music. What started with Russolo and follows the historical arc into the Beatles is now common for rock musicians — that is, to make sound out of virtually anything: doors slamming, crackling glass, water dripping from a faucet. The limits of what can be made into music is now at the intersection of imagination and the phenomenal world.

Any where you seem to look for him in contemporary music, Russolo’s shadow lurks. Found sound and noise is a central element of most modern electronic and sample-based music — hip hop, techno, and its offshoots. What he wrote in the The Art of Noises, quoting a letter from Marinetti, resembles someone describing their first encounter with drum n bass, dubstep or Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music — a sonic symphony built from a hydra of industrial noise and warfare:

“every 5 seconds siege cannons gutting space with a chord ZANG-TUMB_TUUUMB mutiny of 500 echos smashing scattering it to infinity. In the center of this hateful ZANG-TUMB_TUUUMB area 50 square kilometers leaping bursts lacerations fists rapid fire batteries. Violence ferocity regularity this deep bass scanning the strange shrill frantic crowds of the battle Fury breathless ears eyes nostrils open! load! fire! what a joy to hear to smell completely taratatata of the machine guns screaming a breathlessness under the stings slaps traak-traak whips pic-pac-pum-tumb weirdness leaps 200 meters range Far far in back of the orchestra pools muddying huffing goaded oxen wagons pluff-plaff horse action flic flac zing zing shaaack laughing whinnies the tiinkling jiiingling tramping 3 Bulgarian battalions marching croooc-craaac [slowly]…”

What made Russolo such a visionary and yet, at the same time, such a compositional failure is the fact that his innovations came at a time when the technology simply could not catch up with what he could conceive. He was that rare artist for whom the enemy was not imagination, but time itself.

Channel 101‘s “Yacht Rock” internet video series has permanently altered our relationship with “smooth music,” that stuff on adult contemporary radio some of us probably gagged at--or secretly gorged on--as kids. The phrase “yacht rock” almost tells you everything you need to know about the genre. It’s the kind of music one imagines yacht owners like to listen to while sailing, sipping champagne, having a good time. Soft rock from the 70s and 80s that is totally, unapologetically heartfelt. Yacht rock doesn’t seem like it should be appealing, and yacht, it is. And it’s no longer a guilty pleasure.

The show “Yacht Rock,” created by J. D. Ryznar and Hunter D. Stair, is a fictionalized account of how seminal yacht rock anthems such as “What a Fool Believes,” “Rosanna,” and “Keep the Fire” came to be. The cast includes key players Michael McDonald (the husky-voiced baritone of Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers), Kenny Loggins, Christopher Cross (who wrote the yacht rock anthem, “Sailing”), and the great pop duo Hall & Oates. Behind a backdrop of yachts, flaming cocktails, and dramatic sunsets, our heroes strive to write and sing the smoothest music ever.

In the first episode, Michael McDonald (played by J.D. Ryznar) is sitting in a corner, despondent because he is one bad song away from being kicked off of the Doobie Brothers. His old friend Kenny Loggins (Hunter Stair), better-faring, comes to his aid and says: “When a friend is drowning in a sea of sadness, you don’t just toss him a life vest. You swim the life vest to him.” McDonald initially resists Loggins’ help and says: “I’m an artist. I can’t write hit songs.” After some heart to heart, they decide to visit fellow sadness-wader Jim Messina, who has recently been kicked off of Loggins & Messina. He is drinking alone in an alley. “This is going to be me, I know it!” McDonald laments. Luckily for McDonald, during this impassioned speech, he happens upon the fateful words, “That’s what a fool believes!” Immediately, Loggins & McDonald exchange knowing, epiphanic grins. A quick montage shows the two artists writing “What a Fool Believes,” a song that will launch McDonald back to the top of the charts.

In addition to the insane plot and costume choices, “Yacht Rock” is overlaid with a hilarious faux-16mm film grain that imbues each scene, mustache, Hawaiian shirt, and Topsider with a kind of vintage kitsch credibility that is almost synonymous with the whole “smooth” sound of yacht rock. It’s consistent, nostalgic, emotive, totally cheezy. We love it because it’s old and flawed. Enough time has passed so that the earnestness of a lyric like “I cried when I wrote this song” (“Deacon Blues” by Steely Dan) can be appreciated with less irony and more genuine feeling.

There is not a bad installment in the 12-episode series. In Episode 7 McDonald is kidnapped by Warren G and Nate Dogg. Smoking together in some basement room/recording studio they remix McDonald’s 1982 hit “I Keep Forgettin’ (Everytime You’re Near)” into the 1994 hit “Regulate.” In Episode 11, tropical-island-escapist-music-cheeseburger-guru Jimmy Buffet and his Parrot Heads kidnap Loggins, and out of that saga comes the song “Footloose.”

J.D. Ryznar tells New York Press, “Turning people on to Steely Dan is the hardest thing in the world, but I think we achieved it on our show. It makes people laugh and then they go and listen to Steely Dan and they can’t stop because it’s amazing.”

While Michael McDonald acknowledges that the show feels a bit like “a stalker who’s never met you,” there is an “intuitive” truth to what the creators portray. “They somehow hit on something,” he says. The facts may not be all there but the crises and struggles are real. In the finale, McDonald finds that his worst fear from Episode 1 has come true: it is 1985 and he is officially an irrelevant artist, excluded from the “We Are the One” Aid for Africa charity single. His beard is totally white; the more relevant rock artists somehow mistake him for Santa Claus. How will he rise back to the top and show up the younger rockers? Can he do it? Will McDonald come out on top? Save an outer-galactic planet from a treacherous black hole? Avenge the beloved Koko? One only hopes that the cliffhanger ending suggests that there will be more episodes to come.

Richard Adams Locke, a poet and journalist living in New York City, was tracked down as the culprit. Locke, who was said to be a descendant of the other Locke, never admitted to the public that he’d authored the article, though he mused on the “lunarians” among his friends with such persistence that they finally pinned him as the author and revealed their conclusion to the press. Pressed to reveal what they knew about the facts and the fictions of the work, Benjamin Day, publisher of the Sun, refused to admit even the possibility that the story had been a hoax. The scientific community was in an uproar. A student remembered the commotion the article had sparked at Yale University:

Yale College was alive with staunch supporters. The literati--students and professors, doctors in divinity and law--and all the rest of the reading community, looked daily for the arrival of the New York mail with unexampled avidity and implicit faith. Have you seen the accounts of Sir John Herschel’s wonderful discoveries? Have you read the Sun? Have you heard of the news of the man in the Moon? These were the questions that met you every where. It was the absorbing topic of the day. Nobody expressed or entertained a doubt as to the truth of the story.

When all was said and done, Day was able to pronounce that his newspaper, which was hardly known before the publication of the serial, now “possessed the largest circulation of any newspaper in the world: 19, 360.” The Sun‘s popularity remained, but with nobody to support or deny the controversial article, interest for the issue waned and nearly everyone forgot about the people on the Moon. Nearly, but not all.

One young writer in Baltimore was particularly peeved that this “moon-hoax-y” tale, as fantastic as it was rudimentary in its “ratiocination,” had absorbed the world while his own Lunarian hoax, more “original” in its “application of scientific principles,” published three weeks earlier in the Southern Literary Messenger, had been utterly ignored. The 26-year old Edgar Allan Poe wrote that:

Indeed, however rich the imagination displayed in [Locke's] ingenious fiction, it wanted much of the force which might have been given it by a more scrupulous attention to facts and to general analogy. That the public were misled, even for an instant, merely proves the gross ignorance which is so generally prevalent upon subjects of an astronomical nature.

His article, titled “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfall,” describes a trip to the moon in a balloon--attending with detail to the engineering of the flying machine and the analysis of the space trajectory to Earth’s ancient satellite.

August again, 185 years later, another Dr. has surfaced to tell us that he has made contact with our neighbor planets and is preparing a grand dissertation on their personalities and peculiarities. In an interview in this month’s issue of Vibe Magazine, Dr. Dre says:

An instrumental album is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I have the ideas for it. I want to call it The Planets. I don’t even know if I should be saying this, but fuck it. [Laughs.] It’s just my interpretation of what each planet sounds like. I’m gonna go off on that. Just all instrumental. I’ve been studying the planets and learning the personalities of each planet. I’ve been doing this for about two years now just in my spare time so to speak. I wanna do it in surround sound. It’ll have to be in surround sound for Saturn to work.

His interpretation? It’ll have to be in surround sound for Saturn to work? Did we ever know our elder and original jazz space-traveler to require “surround sound for Saturn to work?” I am tempted by Dre’s pronouncement, although, despite his enthusiasm for the subject, I must remain deeply disbelieving. Chronic 2001--replete with the D.P.G.C. sound but somehow caught between Nate Dogg’s .44 and a Florentine Gardens clubby sound--was already a step away from the more extraterrestrial, Funkadelic-backed grooves of the original Chronic, 1992. His next big project, Detox, has been in the works since then. Are we now to believe that, in his spare time, he will be transmitting the celestial music of the spheres?

This Dr., born Andre Romelle Young, might do otherwise to gain greater “plausibility in the details of the voyage itself.” Has he, for instance, considered the appearance of things below when looking from above--that the Earth remains a concavity until a certain distance from it is reached? And that, once we reach that height, the celestial roads pull away from the inward globe into a separation from the isolated spheroid that is analogous to an egg being shaped out of the entire field of vision? “Fuck it. [Laughs.] It’s just my interpretation of what each planet sounds like.“

No, Dr., this hoax will not have a second life. Travel to the heliocentric worlds is no longer so easily fictionalized. Not when we have had reliable transmission from them and from galaxies far beyond this one. Still, we await the Dr.’s results.

Hear Ra and His Astro Galactic Infinity Arkestra’s “Journey to Saturn”

]]> http://www.thehydramag.com/2010/08/05/reflecting-historic-on-dr-dres-great-planet-hoax/feed/ 0 http://www.thehydramag.com/2010/08/04/more-future-of-funk/ http://www.thehydramag.com/2010/08/04/more-future-of-funk/#comments Wed, 04 Aug 2010 19:40:23 +0000 Michael Krimper http://www.thehydramag.com/?p=6014

Last week Dam Funk featured an unlikely mix on Mary Ann Hobbs’ excellent BBC Radio1 show. The Los Angeles deejay and multi-instrumentalist is known for spinning obscure early 80s boogie and R&B vinyl, or playing original material from an ever growing personal catalogue, but this time Dam showcased some contemporaries, exploring what he called “the [...]]]>

Last week Dam Funk featured an unlikely mix on Mary Ann Hobbs’ excellent BBC Radio1 show. The Los Angeles deejay and multi-instrumentalist is known for spinning obscure early 80s boogie and R&B vinyl, or playing original material from an ever growing personal catalogue, but this time Dam showcased some contemporaries, exploring what he called “the future sounds of modern funk.” You could call the mix a companion piece to my article on future funk published just days beforehand. What timing?

The modern funk mix is cut from a 90-minute live set in Croatia, and features a broad range of producers inclined towards the sounds of machine music set to a groove, melodic and bounce-heavy. Ms. Hobbs alluded that the full uncut mix might see the light of day on the Internet sometime in the coming week. Some of my favorites come from Teeko, a San Francisco producer/deejay and core member of the future funk group FAME, which just dropped a free digital compilation last year called Truthpics (it’s got these great interview sequences too). Here’s a short interlude from King Tee:

Sadly, Ms. Hobbs recently announced that September 9th will be her last show on the BBC. In the past five years Ms. Hobbs has helped both define and curate particular strains of future electronic sounds from across the globe: She nearly single-handedly broke dubstep out to the far reaches of the underground electronic music community (or even Pitchfork!) and also put the shine on Los Angeles’ post hip-hop beat scene. Her skills as a selector, expertly honed for risk-taking and challenges, succeeded in achieving what any deejay could dream for: to build listeners’ taste for a dynamic musical style still in its evolving stages. I imagine her last month of shows will be quite inspiring.

Funk was born from the sludge, the grainy mud of the earth. It festered in the primordial soup until the spirit of life sucked itself into its own existence, and grew into form, and that form changed under the cycles of the sun and moon and stars. In the late 1960s, in the midst of the space race and race riots, the godfather of soul James Brown tapped into the essence of the funk — channeling its vital madness with wild guitar riffs and frantic horn blasts carried by a grooving percussive back-beat — and forever touched America and changed the world. Body and groove were united. The funk has since changed in shape and appearance, once nearly forgotten and then revived in the backbone of hip-hop, but now the possibility of a future funk is making itself clear.

Sly Stone picked up on the funk and took it higher, warping its incessant groove with a mind-altering consciousness; a smoky mirror giving a humid glimpse into our blood and guts. Then the funk went unhinged, as George Clinton invented the bass rumbling bounce and discovered the mothership connection, expanding the internalized global consciousness to the outer reaches of space. Bootsie Collins drenched the funk in the hot slime of sex. Prince, Rick James, and Cameo funneled that sexuality through the prism of an anti-gravity field. Zapp and Roger used machines to seduce: They synthesized melodies and degenerated the human voice into a entrancing robotic hiss. Cybotron and Afrikaa Bambaataa stripped the sound down to a bass-rattling pulse, one powered strictly by its day-glo electric momentum. But that was just the early 1980s, and it has somehow led to today’s search for a future funk. What happened then and now? Where did the funk go? Who done killed the funk?

A dynamic and pulsating style of music, so fertile for nearly two decades, fell into the all-so-unhappy cheese that plagued, nay strangled, so many other pop-culture movements of the post-war modern era. Cheese, corn, camp: a strange triple C group all too often spelled the demise of many a ripe aesthetic trajectory in form, sentiment, and purpose.

But what makes an aesthetic category cheesy? One sort of cheese is surely made out of naive, poorly executed concepts, emotions, and general structure, such as, oh, let’s say Celine Dion. But another sort of cheese, one far more interesting and complex, arises from those sentiments and styles which might seem rigid and old, no longer inspiring, dulled of their life force, adulterated, utterly generic because they’ve been played out.

The story of cheese is in fact a dramatic war waged between individuality and the modern social forces of normalization. To even begin to break down a theory of cheesiness — surprising that it seems no adventurous thinker, as far as I know, has touched it thus far — would first require a detailed account of both late capitalism and identity. Only then might we analyze in detail how the systems of meaning inherent to aesthetic innovation change in relation to the market system mass-producing and distributing a standardized copy of that very aesthetic innovation.

And so, what becomes of the funk, that fertile groove and cosmic reverberation, when the cancer of the spectacle washes it in a pale, phantasmagoric matrix? Well, on the one hand it becomes cheesy, just like anything else. On the other hand, the funk stays true and untouchably raw. The funk nimbly avoids the sterilizing effects of product packaging. You can’t fake the funk. Yes, the funk is in search of the fundamental core, and inspired fiction, of that all too tricky ideal: authenticity.

Still, we might lose the groove, and we did in the some of the that late-70s rhinestone disco, or that early 80s frightening R&B. There was corny funk, all too much of it, programmed with duplicitous formulas — repeated in mind numbing frequencies — of pre-set melodies and banal rhythms. Yet another cheese, that soft and rubbery yellow American brand, far removed from its funky ancestors, rubbed its bleached poison all over the name of funk. Not everyone could get down like Dextern Wansel on Mars, or Mandre on a solar flight, but they wanted to pretend. And so the concept was lost, and the name soiled, buried in the cavernous and cluttered annals of the modern mind.

Yet the funk never completely disappeared from the resources of ingenuity. In the late 80s, hip-hop producers began sampling funk break-beats dated from the the funky soul 1967 -- 1975 heyday, and have continued to structure the percussive swing of hip-hop beats with the backbone of funk’s raw groove well to this day. The aesthetics of the hip-hop beat — one of recycled recorded sounds and reinvented roles for samples clips repeated on loop — spawned a whole new social practice of archiving. A new culture of crate diggers, both collectors and enthusiasts, grew obsessed with finding and archiving dusty, lost vinyl from a previous generation. It became quite rigorous too.

This sort of nostalgic, yet forward-thinking methodology was new in the realm of pop music innovation. Young producers used the genres from their parent’s generation — those that became formulated and yes, cheesy — to reconstruct new sounds, emotions, and concepts. Even the great music was reinvigorated. In “Talkin’ All That Jazz” Stetsasonic raps, “Tell the truth/ James Brown was old/ until Eric B. and Rakim/ came out with ‘I Got Soul.’”

It’s almost as if these producers began, nearly 20 years later, where the previous musicians had left off. Those funk sounds, once dulled down by over-saturated commercial mediation, became fresh again and pregnant with a wave of creative potential. The early hip-hop generation didn’t grow up during the golden age of the funk era, but they listened and absorbed at home as children. They grew familiar with the sounds without enduring the same forces of marketing as their parents. Maybe that opened up enough free space for them to imagine the music differently. I would bet that much of the retro-talk today in pop culture is a similar phenomenon — one far more interesting than we care to admit.

We often lament that subcultures do not have enough time to evolve in our media-saturated social world. The nascent creative movements get exploited and cut off during their inchoate stages of development, before they have the chance to mature as art forms. But in a way, hip-hoppers discovered a roundabout method to overturn the pervasive sterilizing forces of the media machine, and reinvigorate soiled aesthetic categories for a new generation. So, it was the rebirth of the funk.

But I’m getting a bit carried away on speculative theories of cheese and ruminations on the spatio-temporal trajectories which might shape today’s pop culture: This article was supposed to be about the future of funk (I hope the purists will allow me such an indulgence).

Los Angeles multi-instrumentalist and singer Dam-Funk is a good point of orientation. His solo debut, last year’s 5-LP Toachizown, is a hypnotic throw-back to the sweat of Prince and the bounce of Zapp. But it’s also the sort of funk record that couldn’t have happened without the entrancing psychedelia of house or the trunk rattling bass of hip-hop (Dam-Funk in fact played keys on some G-Funk tracks of the early 90s).

It’s a new wave of funk (click on that one). And while Dam-Funk might be attracted to vintage drum machines and analog synth keyboards, or even keytars, some other producers around the globe are funkifying with a powerful digital machine that is transforming the music of today: the computer.

French producer and dusty-crate digger Onra dropped an excellent full-length Long Distance, earlier this summer. It’s a beat-driven excursion into easy glide boogie bounce and liquidic spaceship grooves — sophisticated and lustful.  There’s also this alien-like creature voicing his desire to hear future funk on “My Comet” at the beginning of the record; I must be onto something, right?

Oh, and that other French producer, Debruit is skittering funk on some jittery acid-trip electric wavelengths. I’m quite thankful for his EP, Let’s Post-Funk, to give a bit more credence to my speculations on the future of funk.

There’s also those producers dubbed under the category of Wonky or Purple, or whatever, in the UK; cats like Joker, Mike Slott, and Zomby, who are bringing gurgled synth sounds to new levels of intoxication. Not to mention that they design some sub-bass fit to knock the ribcage out of the place.

Still, plenty musicians forgo digital focus and tamper with the craft of analog equipment. B.Bravo and Nite Jewel are saturating the funk with both the passion and must that it oh so craves. Some musicians use all the tools available: Big Boi of Outkast and Janelle Monae just released respective excellent full-lengths thoroughly covered in the florescent grit of digitally fused synth-blasted funk. A bit of Sun-Ra channeled through their twisted Atlien minds for sure. What about the Gorillaz in this year’s phenomenal Plastic Beach? Oh, there’s too much, I didn’t even mention how UK producer Floating Points has concocted a decidedly electronic approach to galactic boogie-down grooves. Lanquidity all forever.

I might mention how James Brown inspired Fela Kuti to create the world-town fusion sound of Afrobeat in Lagos, Nigeria throughout the 1970s. And these days Afrobeat has spawned programmed poly-percussive offspring rhythms throughout Africa, and into Europe (UK Funky anyone?), reflecting in direct parallel how reggae set the foundation for dub in Jamaica. Some of the most exciting electronic music tends to come from amateurs who don’t quite know what sounds the technology is supposed to make. Eventually a song like L-Vis 1990′s “United Groove” drops, and then suddenly the light changes over the zigzag musical networks across time and space and people and genre, and all the connections make sense. I’m still calling it funk.

And maybe, we’ll pick up on the pieces of futuristic funk already left behind. Kraftwerk and Model 500 discovered years ago the feeling capacities and powers of machine-generated music. Maybe Daft Punk had something to do with today’s access to that distant psycho-physical territory. And as more of our emotions and daily practices are mediated by computers, we’ll need sounds, patterns, and stylized forms produced from them to both articulate newly shaped desires and draw the electric framework of our dreams. Maybe we’ll even carve out a future for ourselves. Looking back, we’re long overdue to write an alternative history of machines with soul. Machines so raw and earthy that they reel with the stench of the funk. I can hear the faint rumbling of the mothership overhead. We’ve waited for its return all too long.

[Addendum: More Sounds from Future Funk]

But this article is not about the whales and their songs. It is about the song of the sun. It was recently discovered that the turbulent currents of heat and light which flow like plasma over the sun’s surface form giant magnetic loops that make a kind of music. These coronal loops, some of them over 180,000 miles long (responsible for solar flares), periodically oscillate, making a sound similar to the plucking of a string. Researchers at the University of Sheffield write:

These giant coronal loops have also been observed to undergo periodic (oscillatory) motion, which can be thought of as someone plucking a guitar string (transversal oscillations) or blowing the wind-pipe instrument (longitudinal oscillations). With the length and thickness of the string fixed, the pitch of the note is determined by the tension of the string and the tone is made up of the harmonics of the modes of oscillation.

Studying the music of the sun will allow solarists to better understand the star’s magnetic atmosphere, studying seismological shifts in much the same way that geologists study earthquakes. Sun scientists at the University give a fourteen-second recording of a coronal loop:

Click Here to Play the Coronal Loop

When the sun’s oscillating flares flicker into a ring of silence behind the interrupter moon, it is possible that the inveterate composer of our family of whales will feel the hush and raise a song. If so, its progeny will invariably carry the song onward. Maybe it will be called something like the “Sun Song.”