Sunday Funk 5

Welcome back to the penultimate curated playlist for this month. While the two previous playlists were built with jumping-off points for further listen from each tracks, this is curated for listening from start to finish. 

This time, the theme is dark, twisted, unconventional forms that still deliver on the functional end for clubs, and for focused listening at home. It remains a core interest of mine after 5+ years of gyrofield how conventional, more rigid club forms can be torn down yet remain in the same universe as greater dance music. At the same time, I believe the beauty lies in how these forms are able to take on expression and emotion by deviating, but playing with the motifs and energy of dance music. It is an enduring source of inspiration, thought, and experimentation for me to explore these energies within the club music canon.

'Lethal Focus, Spritual' rumbles like a summer monsoon, scattering noise like pouring rain before unveiling fragments of voices and flowing tones.

'Fail Better (Bent Mix)' acts the opposite to me, as mellow pads break away into shuffling and grooving breaks in a muddled combination of techno, garage and breaks. This song distinctly feels like the color brown to me.

I found 'Hydrogroove II' one late night diving through techno uploads on Youtube. Though techno-morphic, it dials the tempo up while keeping a lethargic energy throughout its duration with blurred tones surfacing and submerging.

'Second Witness' is a continuation of the mood of the three tracks prior, but returns to pure, dry, abstract space. 

'Northern Flicker' introduces a stable groove in the low end, and injects a rising and dynamic energy to its style of repetition. I believe repetition has distinct character within different pieces of music and it's been a point of interest to seek the nuances in hypnotic arrangements with varying shapes of sounds, i.e. amplitude, frequency, expression etc.

Once 'Mitochondrion' begins to pick up, it's imposing energy is palpable. Diverse interplay of synthetic and organic chaos act in tandem until an overarching drum groove modulates and molds both parts around itself. At such high energy, I feel the ambiguous feel of unusual forms begin to yield to the need to deliver high intensity in sound. As such I feel this marks a deviation from the earlier tracks towards more intentional arrangements overall.

With 'Permeate' and 'Digitails' we reach the apex of intentional-ness in the arrangements, as many drum and bass tracks feel to me. All details become orchestrated points of meaning within the music, and there is no corner of the sound filled with excessive noise and spark.

'SKIN' backs off on the tempo immediately and brings in all the fizz and granular noise that was swept away from the past two tracks. These two states would probably not transition smoothly in a DJ set but it would be interesting to bring in a maximalist, noisy track mixed smoothly to a cold and rigid drum and bass track.

'Innocence' and 'Shimmer' take us back to the repetition that strongly reminds me of sweaty basement clubs. 

On the flip side again Bombardino' blares erratically in mechanical percussion and off-kilter instrumentation. On the timescale of seconds it feel entirely too chaotic to be understood but I believe the merit lies within the individual moments of artificial texture, tones, and interplay, such as when bright tones emerge above a deluge of noise. 

'Vogel' is teeming of negative space, contrasting the full crammed feeling of the previous track. Intended unintentional sounds from delays and field recordings take the lead in this broken electro jam.

At the end of this playlist we stabilize the musical grid for two tracks that once again feature the mechanical playing of synthesizer tones with organic elements, the barely-restrained stench of breaks in 'Purification' channels a live-sound feeling that I have explored in my own work, and the underground-anthemic vocals of 'Babylon Fall' channel a distinctly gloomy and hazardous feeling that has played a part in the current sound of UK Rap and Trap.

This has been quite a journey, and I got to share some long-time favorites of mine along with some deep digging for sounds, artists, stories I have not heard before.

I hope you have enjoyed the ride in some way. Happy holidays!