~scape

scape17

v.a.
staedtizism 4 An experiment. Open a randomly chosen electronic music magazine, go to the review section and start counting how often writers refer to something as being funky. We stop after having found it 294 times and wonder. "Funk" has become one of the most common metaphors in electronic music, being used to describe more or less anything. Take a dry minimal house track, for instance, in which the funk slowly evolves out of reduced multi-layered beats. Here, funk is used to label this strangely flowing groove, driven by a hard-to-describe-swing. As soon as laptop-rockers record their coding errors ... it is funky. And finally, Funk is one of the most important sound references in electronic music, which sometimes translates as sample library, too. Be it the specific sound of a handclap, found on a long-forgotten Mowtown recording, one of those irresistable Fender Rhodes-licks, played by an unknown but sunglasses-equipped keyboard impresario, or the guitar riff which finally finishes off the track itself. Perhaps being the most important metaphor for a good groove, the term "Funk" has definitely entered itself into universal language more recently. Wherever there is electronic music, there is funk. Let alone Soul. Funk & Soul - the definitive musical mothership of what surrounds us today within the diverse genres of electronic music - is the obvious theme for the fourth and final part of ~scape's "Staedtizism" series of compilations. After Dub, Jazz (parts 1 and 2) and HipHop ("Instrumentals" - part 3), the musicians appearing on part 4 dig deeper and deeper in search of the missing link to their own musical history, tracing the reconstructed origin of dance music. Sonic research in the middle of the big bang. Of course, everybody involved chooses a different method, operating within either their own current Status-Quo, consciously integrating their idea of funk, or deliberatley not fastening their seat belts to step out into the unknown world of Funk. Your audience, Cappablack! These two young gentlemen from Japan combine their HipHop with a barely existing chord on the keyboard, a little bit of Freestyle and suddenly the gates throw themselves wide open. What a perfect opening track. Meanwhile, Safety Scissors is more interested in stacks of synths in old, long forgotten clubs, bringing back the intensity of a good Moog-melody with his singing. Andrew Pekler isolates sonic slides and projects them with a supercool, modern device. Jan Jelinek sings his song right in the middle of an early morning Wah-Wah-jam while Daniel Bell pushes an angular, stoical groove through a techno-ish stringmachine and unveils the old, forgotten connection between Funk and Kraftwerk. Akfuen blurs traces, allowing evidence to vanish into the unknown with a laptop full of ideas and sounds from back then, finally breaking free, shuffling of course. Thomas Fehlmann, via autopliot, inserts his special blend of noisy dub into the funk (or is it vice versa?), Deadbeat abstratcs his search of funk and delivers an obscure straight stomper, while Tadd Mullinix, when thinking of Funk and Soul, imagines a slow-motion view in the heaven of legends, who still carry on playing the Rhodes somewhere up there. Coolness never dies. Thaddeus Herrmann