Comprised of Nicolaaas Oogjes, Andrew Noble, Adrian Vecino, Mitch McGregor,
Daphne Camf, Kieran O’Shea, Cayn Borthwick, Becky Sui Zhen, the Melbourne, Australia-based octet NO ZU have developed a reputation in Australia for a sound the consists of elements of no wave, funk, house, African and indigenous percussion — and as you’ll hear on “Spirit Beat,” the first single off Afterlife, the follow up to their acclaimed 2012 release, Life, the single manages to sound as though it were released in early 1980s as old school, hip-hop-leaning breakbeats, sinuous bass lines, sultry female vocals and pitched down male vocals chanting in call and response, shimmering synths and warm blasts of horns are paired together in a way that channels Tom Tom Club, early house music and synth funk in a way that feels dimly familiar yet alien — and yet oh so dance floor worthy.
Tag: funk
Over the almost 6 year history of this site, Dam-Funk has not only seen his profile grow both nationally and internationally for a sound that channels Parliament Funkadelic, 80s synth-based funk and R&B, Parliament Funkadelic-inspired G Funk and for collaborations with Slave’s Steve Arrington and Snoop Dogg in their funk project 7 Days of Funk, but he’s also become a JOVM mainstay artist, who I’ve written about on a number of occasions.
Last year was a rather prolific year for one of Stones Throw Records better known artists as Dam-Funk released a 4 song instrumental EP STFU that he wrote and recorded while on tour opening for Todd Rundgren. His long-awaited solo effort, Invite the Light was one of my favorite albums last year — and I’m looking forward to the sophomore 7 Days of Funk album. But in the meantime, In the meantime, Stones Throw Records and Dam-Funk released album single “O.B.E.” on vinyl with the B side single “Special Friends,” a track that pairs shimmering layers of cascading synth stabs, squiggly and funky bass with handclap led percussion. Sonically, the song will further cement Dam-Funk’s reputation for crafting silky smooth and danceable funk that channels the synth funk that I remember listening to when I was a child.
Istanbul, Turkey-based multi-instrumentalist and producer Gunes Alpman first won the attention of the blogosphere and this site in 2011 with his then-solo recording project Alpman, which was heavily influenced by 60s psychedelia, funk, surf rock, cinematic scores and 60s recording techniques in a sound that he has publicly described as “spychedelic.”
Last year, Alpman recruited Umut Çetin, Ali Somay and Baran Göksu to assist in fleshing out his sound as his backing band, The Midnight Walkers and have been writing, recording and performing across Turkey. His latest single “After Work,” is the second release of a monthly release series, pairs propulsive percussion, handclaps, twinkling synths and a throbbing bass line in a song that not only may arguably be the funkiest single he’s released to date, but also a single that sounds as though it’s indebted to 70s and 80s funk, complete with a dusty, analog-like sound and a cinematic flair. Interestingly, listening to this single reminds me of Shawn Lee and Tim “Love” Lee‘s funky, analog era-sounding collaboration New York Trouble/Electric Progression.
New Video: Check Out the Roll Bounce-Inspired Video for Chicago-based Soul act The Main Squeeze’s New Single “Angelus”
Over the past couple of years, the Chicago-based neo-soul and funk quintet The Main Squeeze have become something got a mainstay act on this site as I’ve written about them on a handful of occasions. The quintet originally […]
Comprised of Massama Dogo (lead vocals, guitar), Clayton Englar (sax), Megan Nortrup (sax), Scott Aronson (bass), Franck Martins (lead guitar). and Aaron Gibian (percussion and drums), the Washington, DC-based sextet Elikeh has developed a reputation for material that sonically has been classified as Afropop, as it draws influence from Western Africa — frequently meshing traditional Togolese rhythms with rock, funk, jazz with lyrics that deal with global themes and personal journeys.
Dogo, the band’s leader was born in Togo and while in the African nation, he played and sang in several local bands, including a local band also named Elikeh, with whom he released one album, Nyade in 2007. Several years later, Dogo relocated to Washington, DC met the current lineup and then wrote, recorded and released their 2010 Stateside debut, Adje! Adje! The sextet’s 2012 release Between 2 Worlds featured renowned Malian guitarist Vieux Farka Toure and Further and Dark Star Orchestra‘s John Kadlecik received international attention in World Music circles.
As the story goes, the band was considering calling it quits, finishing out the songs they had booked and moving on to other creative endeavors. During a band meeting in which the members of the band were going to discuss their future and splitting up, the band’s guitarist Frank Martins kept playing the entire time. He came up with a musical idea, someone else would join in, another band member would join in and then everyone began jamming — until they developed a song. One of the sax players had recorded the jam session and while listening to that session, the members of the band realized that their break up talk was premature. “We’re all excited about the band now,” Dogo mentioned in press notes. “It’s lucky the guitarist didn’t want to put down his instrument. The EP saved us.”
That jam session inspired “The Conversation,” which appears on the Washington, DC-based sextet’s recently released Kondona, an EP that gets it title from ” a ceremony they hold every five years in the northern part of my country,” Dogo explains. “It’s an initiation, a way to welcome the young men into the adult part of the community. It seemed right for what had happened to us, although we still have a long way to go.”
The EP’s first single the aforementioned “The Conversation” manages to possess clear elements of Afrobeat and sounds partially influenced by Fela Kuti (in particular Afrodesiac/Open and Close and Expensive Shit/He Miss Road-era Fela) and contemporary American Afrobeat bands, including fellow DC area band The Funk Ark, NYC’s Ikebe Shakedown and others,
as the song begins with an introductory section with soaring organ chords throughout before establishing the tight, percussive groove that holds the entire song together, and allows for each section and each instrumentalist to show off their immense chops — and conversing with each other throughout the length of the song. Of course, each region of the world specializes in subtle variations of the genre so that Togolese Afrobeat won’t be exactly the same as American Afrobeat or Nigerian Afrobeat — and in the case of Elikeh, the band’s sound possesses subtle elements of highlife, the genre that influenced Fela, thanks to its upbeat feel. But interestingly enough there’s subtle elements of pop and other African traditional sounds, which helps to set them apart from a very crowded DC Afrobeat scene. And yet somehow, from listening to this single it’s surprising to me that they’re not much larger than what they currently are; hopefully, the blogosphere can get it right.
Comprised of long-time friends and collaborators, the Sydney, Australia-born, Los Angeles-based multi-instrumentalist production duo Intergalactix have a long-held reputation behind the scenes producing material for a number of renowned artists including Jason Mraz, Heart, Earth, Wind, and Fire, Kelis, Allen Stone, Ariana Grande, The Fugees‘ Pras Michel, Cool & Dre, fellow countrymen Jimmy Barnes and PNAU, as well as Cash Money Records.
Last year, the production duo began to establish themselves as artists with the release of their debut EP I.W.S.O.M, which featured the single “Tuesday.” Building upon an already growing national profile, the duo toured extensively to support the EP — and it included a set at Firefly Music Festival. (Interestingly, the festival may have had one of the biggest and most star-studded lineups of this past year’s festival season as Intergalactix played a bill that included Paul McCartney, Kings of Leon, Snoop Dogg, The Killers, Morrissey, and several others.)
Thursday marks the release of the Australian-born, Los Angeles-based duo’s sophomore EP S.T.S. – R.N.D. and the EP’s latest single “Right Next Door” featuring Capital Cities‘ Spencer Ludwig will further cement Intergalactix’s reputation for sleek, retro-futuristic synth pop that channels The Gap Band‘s “You Dropped A Bomb On Me” and “Outstanding,” Rick James and The Temptations “Standing On The Top” The Whispers “And The Beat Goes On” and “Rock Steady,” and Cameo‘s “Word Up,”as well as more contemporary fare including Dam-Funk, Rene Lopez‘s most recent return to all things funk, Boulevards, ISHI, and a growing list of others.
Growing up listening to a ton of synth funk back in the 80s, it isn’t surprising that a number of contemporary artists have revived that sound — both eras specialize in slick production based around sinuous bass lines, shimmering arpeggio synths, four-on-the-floor drumming (or drum programming), anthemic hooks paired with an incredible sense of memorable melody and sensual vocals. You can’t help but recognize how sexy the song is — but it’s also a certified club banger, that should make you get up out of your seat and to the dance floor.
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New Video: The Infectious, Girl Power Video for Escort’s “My Life”
New York-based neo-disco/electronic dance music/funk collective Escort have been mainstays on this site, since its inception 5 years ago. And over the course of that period, the collective founded by producers Eugene Cho and Dan Balls featuring frontwoman […]
Over the course of this site’s five year history, I’ve written quite a bit about New York-based singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Rene Lopez, who is among a group of incredibly talented and shamefully under-appreciated artists I’ve covered and have gotten to know in some fashion. And throughout those five years, Lopez has uncompromisingly refused to be pigeonholed into one particular genre. E.L.S. (short for Electric Latin Soul), Lopez’s 2011 release, saw the New York-based artist meshing salsa, boogaloo, old school hip-hop, merengue and electronica to create a sound that was a loving homage to Latino New York and to old school New York I grew up in, but with an inventive, modern re-interpretation. It’s an amiably swaggering, upbeat party album with sounds that grab you by the hand and pulls you towards the dance floor.
Paint the Moon Gold, his last and most recent full-length released in 2014 was comprised of stripped down compositions consisting of live instrumentation only — vocals, guitar, bass, percussion, horns, flute, etc. — while drawing deeply from salsa, and 70s Brazilian music. In some way, that material brought Lopez back to the music that his father played as a member of Tipica 73 — and is just as danceable; but importantly, the material on that album seemed to come from a deeply personal place, as lyrically and thematically, the material expresses the thoughts, sentiments, regrets, compromises and desires of a worldly, experienced man, who has looked back at his life with a sense of amazement and disbelief and the recognition life is at times remarkably painful, remarkably strange and incredibly, profoundly wonderful — sometimes simultaneously.
Lopez’s most recent recorded effort, Love Has No Mercy was released at the end of last year, and from his previous efforts it would seem to be the most dramatic change of sonic direction in his career as the material is comprised of slinkily seductive synth-based R&B and funk, inspired by Prince, The Gap Band, Rick James, Chic and others. However, as Lopez had told me in an interview, he grew up in a household where salsa and merengue and disco were routinely played, and his first band The Authority was deeply influenced by his love of the aforementioned Prince. So in some way, Lopez has come back full circle.
Now, if you’ve been frequenting JOVM over the past couple of months, you may recall that I wrote about Lopez’s then-recently released single “Heavy, Baby Heavy,” a single that not only continues Lopez’s long-held fascination and love of all things funk, but was also the first released single in his Jam of the Month series. (Presumably, the Single of the Month series is meant to build up buzz for a new recorded effort, which he and his backing band have been working on for quite some time.) The third single of the Single of the Month series, “Trouble Lovin’ Lady” consists of squiggling and trembling synths, a brass section that punctuates the song’s chorus, a sinuous and funky bass line, propulsive drums in a song that channels Rick James’ “Ghetto Life,” “Give It To Me,” and “Superfreak,” The Gap Band’s “You Dropped A Bomb On Me” and others — but with a sexy horn solo at the song’s bridge; in fact, the song sounds as though it could have easily been released in 1982. Simply put it’s a funky, party-friendly song that drive you to the dance floor — right now.
Interview: A Q&A with Jamil Rashad, a.k.a. Boulevards
As the son of a renowned jazz radio DJ, Jamil Rashad grew up in a musical household in which, a passionate interest in music was fostered and encouraged. And as a result, the young Rashad […]
New Audio: Chet Faker’s Club-Friendly and Sexy Collaboration with Marcus Marr
Up-and-coming, London-based DJ, producer, electronic music artist and multi-instrumentalist Marcus Marr has received international attention over the last couple of years for a number of critically acclaimed singles released through renowned dance music/electro pop label, […]
New Audio: Check Out Rhythm Scholar’s Inventive, Genre-Spanning Remix of Blondie’s “Rapture”
More than enough ink has been spilled about Blondie and their impressive streak of hits during the late 70s and early 80s, including “Rapture,” which is one of their most familiar, most covered, most sampled […]
Currently comprised of Eric Krasno (guitar), Adam Smirnoff (guitar), Neal Evans (keyboards, Hammond B-3 organ, piano), Adam Deitch (drums), Erick Coomes (bass), Ryan Zoidis (saxophone) and Eric Bloom (trumpet) and Rashawn Ross (trumpet), the acclaimed funk/jam-band octet Lettuce can trace their origins back to 1992 when several members of the band met and bonded over a mutual love of Herbie Hancock‘s jazz fusion work in the 1970s, Earth, Wind & Fire and Tower of Power, while attending a summer program as teenagers at Berklee College of Music. And as you can imagine they jammed together over the course of the summer and then went off on their separate ways at the conclusion of the program.
By the fall of 1994, the members of the band had reconvened as undergraduate students at Berklee, and during that time, they attempted to pick up gigs with local musicians and at local clubs. Ironically, the band’s name is derived from this period, when the band would walk into a club and would ask a club owner or a band leader if they would “let us play.” Mainly through word-of-mouth, the band developed rather fervent followings in Boston, NYC, San Francisco, Chicago and Tokyo, and their profile grew even larger as the band released their debut effort, Outta Here (2001), followed by Live in Tokyo recorded at the Blue Note Jazz Club’s Tokyo location. Over the past seven or eight years, the members of Lettuce have been balancing a number of different projects with busy touring schedules. Krasno along with Evans and Evans’ brother Alan play together in Soulive, a jazz fusion/jam-band act, perhaps best known these days for their annual Brooklyn Bowl residency. But lately, Krasno has been exceptionally busy as he’s picked up roles as a producer, songwriter, released a solo album, and has played on a couple Grammy Award-winning albums by Tedeschi Trucks Band. Smirnoff has been a member of Lady Gaga‘s touring band and has had a stint as a touring member of Robert Randolph and The Family Band. Zoidis is a member of Rustic Overtones but he also joins Soulive during live shows as a member of The Shady Horns. Coomes has been a session player for Britney Spears, The Game, and has contributed to Dr. Dre‘s Compton. Deitch drums for and has produced a number of artists including Pretty Lights, Talib Kweli and has collaborated with John Scofield and Wyclef Jean. And Ross has been a full-time member of Dave Matthews Band since 2010. Of course, as a result Lettuce has had gaps between their recorded output with their sophomore studio effort, Rage! released in 2009, and Fly released in 2012.
Coincidentally during that time Lettuce developed a reputation for being one of the country’s best live acts — and as a result they’ve played at some of the country’s biggest festivals. Interestingly, the band’s forthcoming Crush is reportedly inspired and came to life during the band’s most recent stints on the road together — with a great deal of the material being road-tested. “Phyllis,” the first single off the new album continues the band’s reputation for jazz fusion and hip-hop inspired, psychedelic leaning funk — but with a subtly futuristic sheen as the song is comprised of spidery guitar lines that twist and turn paired with atmospheric and swirling electronics, hip-hop inspired beats and horn blasts. There’s a sense that the trippy composition comes from a basic idea and expanded upon during an expansive jam session, as the band builds up a tight, motorik-like groove — and in some way, the song is a subtle revision of the sound that has garnered the octet such attention.
The band is currently on a rather lengthy tour, which will include two NYC area shows. Check out tour dates below.
Tour Dates
10/14 at Newport Music Hall in Columbus, OH
10/15 at Turner Hall Ballroom in Milwaukee, WI
10/16 at The Pageant in St. Louis, MO
10/17 at Hillberry 2: Harvest Moon Festival in Eureka Springs, AR
10/18 at The Blue Note in Columbia, MO
10/20 at Slowdown in Omaha, NE
10/21 at Liberty Hall in Lawrence, KS
10/23 at Art Outside in Rockdale, TX
10/24 at Hangtown Halloween Ball in Placerville, CA
10/27 at Intersection in Grand Rapids, MI
10/28 at The Vogue Theatre in Indianapolis, IN
10/29 at Headliners Music Hall in Louisville, KY
10/30 at WorkPlay Theatre in Birmingham, AL
10/31 at Voodoo Music and Arts Experience in New Orleans, LA
11/1 at Suwannee Hulaween in Live Oak, FL
11/3 at The Chop Shop in Charlotte, NC
11/4 at Lincoln Theatre in Raleigh, NC
11/5 at The Orange Peel in Asheville, NC
11/6 at Buckhead in Atlanta, GA
11/7 at War Memorial Auditorium in Nashville, TN
11/8 at Track 29 in Chattanooga, TN
11/10 ay Rex Theater in Pittsburgh, PA
11/11 at Tralf Music Hall in Buffalo, NY
11/12 at State Theatre in State College, PA
11/13 at PlayStation Theater in New York, NY
11/14 at PlayStation Theater in New York, NY
12/3-12/6 at Dominican Holidaze in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
12/31 at Riviera Theatre in Chicago, IL
1/6-1/10 at Jam Cruise 14
2/12-2/14 at Gem and Jam Festival in Tucson, AZ
New Audio: Escort’s Latest Single Channels Some Beloved Party Anthems
I’ve probably written about the New York-based neo-disco/electronic dance music/funk collective Escort, so much here on JOVM, that you probably feel as though you’ve known them — and have seen their career grow. The collective founded by […]