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Bomb Squad
The new Ninja tunes.
By Chris Tweney
APRIL 20, 1998:
Funk has always led a schizophrenic life. Even in the music's early days, when
James Brown was rocking the charts with "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," funk's
groove encompassed two distinct messages: move your ass and free your mind --
or as George Clinton later put it, "Free your mind and your ass will follow."
And as playful as funk grooves have gotten over the years, at their core the
best ones are still loaded with a political, spiritual, and/or social message.
The hip '90s British DJ label Ninja Tune may seem far removed from the urgent
political realities of the '60s or the disco liberation fantasies of '70s, but
Ninja artists wrestle with the same physical/cerebral split that helped define
the music of Brown and Clinton. The label is run by Jonathan More and Matt
Black, who record and perform under the name Coldcut, and whose "sample
everything and see if it grooves" approach is the cornerstone of what's become
a self-contained DJ-centric musical universe. Ninja artists like the
Herbaliser, who shred hip-hop clichés into a stoned, extra-heavy brew,
showcase the turntable as primary instrument while demoting "real" instruments
like acoustic bass to a supporting role. The likes of DJ Food and DJ Vadim boil
down old vinyl jazz with high-energy audio physics and hip-hop beats; Funki
Porcini plies weirdstep drum 'n' bass with heavier doses of hip-hop;
and the newest members of the Ninja conspiracy, Chocolate Weasel, draw on
extensive jungle production experience to reinvent '70s funk as pre-millennial
party music. Chocolate Weasel, DJ Vadim, Neotropic, and DJs Ollie and Jake of
the Herbaliser are currently on a US tour, which comes to Axis this Wednesday
to support the new Ninja Tune compilation Funkungfusion.
On their Ninja Tune debut, Spaghettification, Chocolate Weasel
digitally process the Cold War paranoia of the '50s through corny '70s funk
using modern sound-editing technology. The disc's focus on atomic holocaust
might seem to have limited relevance in the post-Cold War era. But this
fascination is actually in keeping with funk tradition: James Brown's "Say It
Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud)" dropped the bomb of social revolution;
Parliament/Funkadelic blew minds with the galactic fantasies of the Mothership
and Dr. Funkenstein; and who can forget the Gap Band's explosive hit "You
Dropped a Bomb on Me"? It's always been a short step from the bass bomb of funk
to a more literal sort of bomb. And in Chocolate Weasel's universe, that
connection is signified by a squishy, fattened analog-synthesizer line.
The result is an amusing and infectious hash of Doctor
Strangelove-style black comedy, electrofunk synths, Monty Python samples,
and hip-hop beats. The disc opens with a snippet of dialogue from the British
TV comedy Blackadder: "I've got a plan so cunning you could put a tail
on it and call it a weasel." It's like a bright red flag declaring "Warning:
Kitsch Ahead." Other snippets of sampled voices, many recorded in London's Hyde
Park, are littered throughout the disc giving a cinéma-vérité
quality to the proceedings. The bits of found dialogue -- "I prefer other kinds
of conversations, like a nice wholesome discussion of the morality of making
clean hydrogen bombs that'll kill your kids but not with nasty blisters, and
nice girls walk away when I talk like that" -- remind you that Chocolate Weasel
have their tongues at least partly in cheek.
Marc Royal and Cris Stevens, the beat-and-sample technicians behind Chocolate
Weasel, aren't afraid of kitsch. In fact, it's would be fair to say that Royal
is using the kitsch associated with Ninja Tune as a protective mantle,
shielding himself from any serious aesthetic expectations he may have generated
through the groundbreaking work of his former incarnation, T-Power, a hardstep
drum 'n' bass project with numerous singles and two albums on the
S.O.U.R. label. As he explains, "The move to Ninja opened up our field of
vision: now we've got license to try out these silly things."
Ninja Tune's aesthetic dispenses with the scenester purism and methodology
that sometimes makes "serious" drum 'n' bass tracks sound so much
like one another, freeing Royal and Stevens up to zigzag back and forth across
the boundary separating jungle from hip-hop. With Chocolate Weasel the duo duck
out avant-garde drum 'n' bass's back door and head for the groovier but less
fashionable retro-funk warehouse next door.
Royal couldn't care less if the drum 'n' bass scene turns up its
nose at his turn from dystopic, wickedly programmed jungle to acid-fried funk
tunes with titles like "A Blue Furry Plughole" and "Tragic Mushrooms." "I don't
particularly like being perceived as being cool," he admits. "It's not why I
make music. I don't want to be an icon." The production methods on
Spaghettification are essentially those of drum 'n' bass
proper: a foundation of chopped-up breakbeats resequenced to provide a
relentlessly polyrhythmic push. The difference lies in speed:
drum 'n' bass is based on reggae and hip-hop rhythm tracks, which are
so drastically accelerated that the groove is often eliminated. Chocolate
Weasel are much more concerned with preserving the funk. As Stevens explains,
"You slow jungle down by 20 beats per minute and you've got that weight again,
you can feel the drums kick."
You can hear the difference on Chocolate Weasel's "In-Continuity," which
straddles the line between high-velocity jungle and downtempo funk, reasserting
the importance of the groove that has nearly disappeared in the wake of deathly
cold techstep jungle. "In-Continuity" is prefaced by "Banana Skins," a
bewildering soundscape of booming drums and voices that ends with the loaded
question "Well, what do we do now?" Chocolate Weasel answer with another
sample: as the junglized drums of "In-Continuity" kick in, a voice is heard
declaiming, "The way I figure it, anything we want." Think of it as a wake-up
call to a drum 'n' bass scene where, in the words of Stevens,
"everyone sort of found a space where they thought they really don't have to
push it any further."
The two-CD Funkungfusion offers plenty of evidence that Chocolate
Weasel aren't the only Ninja Tune artists willing to push DJ science into new
frontiers. It's the broadest sampler of the label's sound to date, with tracks
from all of Ninja Tune's active artists. The Herbaliser, whose first-rate Ninja
Tune debut, Blow Your Headphones, came out last year, are back in style
with turntable scratching and ripping acoustic bass lines that combine the
bouncing drive of bebop and the programming precision of jungle. Coldcut jam
out a live version of their current showoff piece, "More Beats and Pieces,"
that refers to their roots with a sample from their own "Say Kids, What Time Is
It?" Other Ninja heavy hitters are in fine form too: Funki Porcini's "Surge"
layers scattershot jungle snare over a vaguely Tolkienesque vocal motif, and DJ
Food delivers a brooding track colored by resonant acoustic bass and programmed
drums titled "The Crow."
Some of the best material on Funkungfusion comes from lesser-known
Ninjas -- a sign that both the label and its unique aesthetic are in good
shape. Omnium deliver a track titled "Extua Textua," which is driven by a fast
walking-bass line and rock-solid jazz-funk drumming and accented by splintered
guitars and noodling synth. And the remix of Japanese producer/composer Ryuichi
Sakamoto's "Anger" shows just how frightening fractured drumbeats can be when
they're filtered through distortion boxes and set alongside barely audible
whispering voices.
Funkungfusion certainly doesn't have the coherence of 1995's Journey
by DJ, a Ninja Tune compilation that was held together by the guiding hand
of Coldcut. (Coldcut mixed tracks by various Ninja Tune DJs into a coherent DJ
set on that CD.) And with such a diverse roster of artists it lacks the
sustained DJ-battle energy that fueled 1996's ColdKrushCuts (Ninja
Tune). This release is, however, an excellent Ninja Tune primer, not to mention
a fair preview of the upcoming tour. And it's an indication that, like the
early-'80s punk label SST or the late-'80s indie-rock label Homestead, Ninja
Tune has become the home of choice for like-minded artists intent on
challenging people's expectations about how music should sound.
"We don't have a monopoly on truth," says Chocolate Weasel's Stevens. And
perhaps that point should be extended to cover the whole of the turntablist's
art: sonic monopolies are impossible in a realm where tracks are built from
pre-existing fragments of other artist's music, where the process of sampling
has all but eliminated the concept of the "song" as a discrete recorded text.
So there's no reason to believe that Spaghettification or
Funkungfusion is the last word on funk in this century. But they both
come as a reminder that some of the best revolutions in music sound an awful
lot like a party.
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