Funky/London/UK House

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Tim F

Well-known member
BareBones, unfortunately HHB is PARTICULARLY bad when it comes to playing about a million dubs and being indifferent to the prospect of ever releasing them. Really you gotta listen to his radio shows or sets by him and Dubplate Wonder (ocassionally billed as the duo "d&b" - which is a bit confusing I reckon...).

That said, his style is very different to "Reign" or "Sirens" mostly - more on an ultra polite, ultra crisp percussive vocal house tip. I talk about this a bit in my blog post on Dubplate Wonder.

I have a radio set from... about April I think? And I think I have one from later or maybe I only heard it somehow. The earlier one I can upload at some point. It's not as good as his sets with DW from the end of 2008 though.

With Sticky you want:

- Jumeirah Riddim (you can buy "Look Pon Mi" with Natalie Storm off junodownload)
- Fugitive Riddim (Lady Chann's "Your Eye Too Fast" and Maxwell D's "Text Text Text" are easy to find for free
- "Jack It Up" by... I forget now
- Ms Dynamite's "Bad Gyal" - I assume this was at least released as an MP3 or vinyl?

Ill Blu has too many amazing tunes to mention but my favourites are:

Shystie - Pull It (Ill Blu Remix) - available on ukfunky.com
Ill Blu - Time To Get Nasty - as above
321 - Bring It Back (Ill Blu Remix) - junodownload.com
Ms Nyah - Hooligans - not sure, supposed to be on an EP by her
Ill Blu - Blu Magic - avail on junodownload.com with Marcus Nasty dubplate tags at the beginning

in 2009 Lil Silva's done:
- Tribal Land - AMAZING tune, actually emerged late 2008 I think
- I'm The Man
- about ten more whose names I don't know

D-Malice's tunes I can't remember the name of off the top of my head but will double check at home.
 
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BareBones

wheezy
cheers tim, i've got a lot of these already (jumeirah/fugitive bits, shystie one etc), just thought there might be somewhere other than juno or ukfunky to buy stuff that i'm missing out on. not sure i've heard tribal land / i'm the man, will have a look. that's a shame about hhb, reign is still my favourite tune of his, wish he'd release some more stuff on that kind of vibe. I don't get the time to listen to many mixes at the moment so a regular column from you would be great.
 
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Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
luka said:
by the way benny was touched that you took the piss... im nicer than you lot think i am
dont hate none of you
just a pisss taker
if you cant see that you deserve to be offended
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Ha ha, it ok man, you're a funny bloke, not afraid to say what you really think on a gut instinct level. Its refreshing.

That Live 101.5FM clip you posted is well vibey too, cheers for that.

@Tim: You are an absolute legend and if you got a fact column I'd be over the moon. Best music writer around, no question.
 
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tom lea

Well-known member
not trying to have the last word or whatever, but why is alex / bok bok being put forward by some of you as some sort of opposition to the brand of funky you'd like to see pushed more? he's booked mac 10 at the egg, d-malice twice, he's booked ill blu, he's booked lil silva. that's brought them to the attention of more people than any post on here by luka's going to do.
 
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Tim F

Well-known member
Tom I wonder if I'm just boring everyone at this stage and should not respond, but since you raise the issue:

I don't think anyone would claim that Bok Bok is working against funky or anything, obviously Night Slugs pushes funky about as hard as any not-out'n'out-funky night could.

Beyond that I don't have a strong opinion about Night Slugs as a night (because I've never been obv) though I'm yet to find a DJ mix from Bok Bok that I've really loved.

I'm into some L-Vis/Bok Bok tunes but not others; leaving aside quality and focusing on style, they range from being totally "funky" (e.g. the remix of "Bongo Jam" - and not just because of what it's remixing) to something quite different - I've noticed a lot of these producers get their syncopated-house feel with three ordinary kicks on the bar followed by two kicks just before and after (respectively) where the fourth kick would be, not sure if this has a name as an effect, but it gives the music a kind of broken beat X electro-house feel which is a bit distinct from other rhythmic templates in funky - this plus the generally overdriven, thick synth'n'bass production style just really marks a lot of their stuff out is quite distinct, it would sit oddly in a normal funky set just as Mosca's stuff would.

And it makes sense that it would be that side of things that they would be pushing primarily, hence their first release being Mosca and not Fuzzy Logick or Funkystepz or whoever.

It feels like its own thing to me, overlapping with parts of funky of course, just as (as I've said before) Stanton Warriors overlapped with UK Garage but were not out'n'out UK Garage except on an occasional track-by-track basis.

The pernicious aspect of ignoring this distance, of simply collapsing it and claiming Mosca and Bok Bok and etc. as "funky artists", is that it ignores the different dynamics at work in the music while still usually celebrating these artists' tunes at their least funky and for their least funky qualities - "Nike" is a lush, inventive, densely-produced widescreen epic deserving of the praise it's getting. But when critics are treating it as a "funky" track, praising it for qualities that really push it more into dubstep territory (and in this context these are great qualities don't get me wrong!), combined with not writing about much funky (apart from "funkstep" artists - whether the term is used or not) otherwise... I think this pretty much inevitably results in readers developing a skewed understanding of what funky is.

And the reason I'm pretty pedantic on this point is that I just see evidence of this constantly. I recommended the FACT Mosca minimix to a friend today (thinking he'd probably like it and he said, "oh yeah, i've already checked that out, I'm really into THIS kind of UK funky." When I asked what he meant he started talking about high production values, deepness etc. His perspective was basically that funky had bad production values and Mosca etc. were improving on it. Which is not even wrong, exactly - it's an opinion, however much I might think it's ill-founded - but he's not gonna appreciate why other UK funky might not sound like Mosca, what value there might be in that being the case, because he has never been given any sense of what funky actually is, except in passing. For him funky is a reference point raised in profiles of artists like Mosca, its primary function as a tool for freewheeling artists to draw on. Mosca himself would be very sensitive to these issues; audiences discovering this stuff for the first time, unsurprisingly, are not.

This kind of thing frustrates me much in the same way that people belatedly telling me I was right about UK Garage - "The Stanton Sessions is really great!!" - frustrated me back in 2001/2002, never mind that I was a big Stanton Warriors fan.

None of this is Bok Bok or Mosca's fault any more than that was Stanton Warriors' fault and I don't begrudge them any success - but I feel protective towards UK Funky and I don't like seeing the constant further entrenchment of a "frame" for the music which privileges only artists operating at the genre's fringes.
 
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mms

sometimes
not sure if uk funky needs protection from whatever it needs protecting from.

although i'm not that keen on alot of the post dubstep - funky stuff, thats come out of the guys who started off in dubstep, at it's worst it seems to be a sum of it's parts in a sense, rave bit here, jit track bit here, dancehall bit, lots of synths, some diva voices, it doesn't seem to have much that distinguishes it as more than a collection of reorganised tropes, and over time that can get a bit tiring, some of it is obviously good though.
 
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Blackdown

nexKeysound
Tim F said:
And it makes sense that it would be that side of things that they would be pushing primarily, hence their first release being Mosca and not Fuzzy Logick or Funkystepz or whoever.
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not being funny but sometimes there's a tendency here focus so strongly on rhetoric over the minor details like the practicalities of actually releasing some music. some of these funky and grime guys are very hard to find, dont know or give a fuck about labels they dont know and so either want an financially unsustainable amount of money for their release or dont want to work together at all, either by saying so or by acting so. now this is often what gives some of these guys their appeal but i'm just saying its only a like-for-like comparison if you're not the one making the phone call.
 
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gumdrops

Well-known member
most of it is bland. interesting... but bland. that ramadanman cd for the most recent dubstep allstars was a great mix for example but it all seemed quite samey after a while. too much of a (tasteful) muchness.
 
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gragy10

Veteran Lurker
Blackdown said:
not being funny but sometimes there's a tendency here focus so strongly on rhetoric over the minor details like the practicalities of actually releasing some music. some of these funky and grime guys are very hard to find, dont know or give a fuck about labels they dont know and so either want an financially unsustainable amount of money for their release or dont want to work together at all, either by saying so or by acting so. now this is often what gives some of these guys their appeal but i'm just saying its only a like-for-like comparison if you're not the one making the phone call.
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This is a pretty important point - i think people are way more clued up to the realities of putting out a record now than a few years back but it's way more complicatedf than 'i love your tune, you wanna sign it to our new label'
 
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Ory

warp drive
Tim F said:
I've noticed a lot of these producers get their syncopated-house feel with three ordinary kicks on the bar followed by two kicks just before and after (respectively) where the fourth kick would be
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i think that generally comes from b-more. if i'm understanding your description right.
 
hint

hint

party record with a siren
Ory said:
i think that generally comes from b-more. if i'm understanding your description right.
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It's certainly one of the B-More staples, but it was being used in good old-fashioned house originally:

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value=""></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

Van Helden in 1994.
 
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mms

sometimes
hint said:
It's certainly one of the B-More staples, but it was being used in good old-fashioned house originally:

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value=""></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

Van Helden in 1994.
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yes there was a whole sub genre of tracks that were experimenting with latin breaks too, alot used that rhythm.


<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value=""></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
 
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Tim F

Well-known member
Blackdown said:
not being funny but sometimes there's a tendency here focus so strongly on rhetoric over the minor details like the practicalities of actually releasing some music. some of these funky and grime guys are very hard to find, dont know or give a fuck about labels they dont know and so either want an financially unsustainable amount of money for their release or dont want to work together at all, either by saying so or by acting so. now this is often what gives some of these guys their appeal but i'm just saying its only a like-for-like comparison if you're not the one making the phone call.
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Point taken Martin - as I've said I'm not remotely critical of the release policy of Night Slugs (making harsh judgments based on one release would be a bit presumptuous at any rate).
 
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