#2000's breaks

Today’s mix:

Damn That DJ Made My Day by Richard “Humpty” Vission 2001 House / Breaks / Deep House / Electro

Alright, this is an awesome mix and Richard “Humpty” Vission came really close to making my day with it. It has plenty of that turn-of-the-millennium house music that I love: that upbeat strings-and-horns-and-warm-keyboards stuff that’s all rooted in disco, funk, and soul. I can’t get enough of that shit. BUT, the mix takes a little bit of time to really start to strike that groove. After the first few opening tracks, this thing quickly becomes a jumbled-up, mashed-up megamix mess of sorts, going in all directions and seemingly trying to please everyone. And by the time we hit around the 18-minute mark of this 56-minute mix, we’ve already gotten through half of its tracks. The infusion of “I See You In My Dreams” by Fallen, which is a bad Euro-house song, is a total head scratcher. However, once you get past that point, it’s smooth, sensational, good-time party sailing from there. 😎 And the mixing skills on display here from Vission are super on point, even when the selection is perplexing. 

Listen to the full mix here.

Highlights:

Phantom Beats - “Rumbler” Collectivism 2000 Breakbeat

Phantom Beats were a highly successful breaks and breakbeat duo from Cardiff, Wales. Consisting of Matt Callahan and Neil Cocker, the pair strung together a good bunch of singles between 2000 and 2004 and released a handful of mixes, too. They were ranked as top breaks and breakbeat DJs in the UK for the few years that they were around and played alongside Fatboy Slim and The Chemical Brothers. Phantom Beats also played a set for BBC Radio. Cocker, who’s since gone on to become a successful entrepreneurial tech start-up guy, co-founded the Plastic Raygun label, which played host to popular acts like The Propellerheads and Bentley Rhythm Ace. Phantom Beats also somehow managed to record a song with famous maker of model buses, Boris Johnson. 

In 2000, a track by Phantom Beats called “Rumbler” appeared on a super rare electronic comp, Collectivism (I had to put an alert on my Discogs account to buy it because when I first discovered that it existed, not a single person was selling it), which was released by the instantly ephemeral label, Raya. As stated on their still somehow currently existing website, “Raya are a collective of film-makers, designers, visual artists, DJs and musicians whose critically acclaimed festival and club events have brought a little bit of street culture into gallery spaces and a little bit of gallery culture into club-land.” Neat idea of some class mixing at work there.

Anyhoo, “Rumbler”’s a cool tune because it’s like a sweet hybrid of punchy, distorted breakbeat with a lot of wickedly subterranean drum-n-bass-and-electro sub-bass to go along with it. As the foundational drum break smacks with scratchiness and the sub-bass takes on a bit of a squelchy character, the song wanders pretty unpredictably, adding percussive tweaks here and there, and continues to build on itself while also making room for some intermittent patches of deconstruction. However, just when you think to yourself, “this is all actually getting just a wee bit monotonous,” Callahan and Cocker go ahead and drop the string synths on it, transforming the track for the back half, which also ends up lending some unexpected emotional depth to it, too. Awesome track.

The Funk Lab - “Smoke Marijuana” ElectroAcidFunk, Volume 3 by DJ Voodoo 2000 Florida Breaks

***Song starts at 24:57 and ends at 32:13***

As music technology rapidly advanced throughout the 90s, a new style of electronic music appeared to emerge at a rate of what seemed like every few weeks. A lot of these newfangled styles reflected a fusion of previously established genres, but perhaps none of these attempts at fusion were as unique as the Florida breaks scene, which mixed electro, Miami bass music, hip hop, and jazz and funk breaks, and freestyle. Originating in Orlando in the 80s, the Florida breaks sound would reach its peak in the mid-to-late 90s, and by the early 2000s, trail off into irrelevancy.

One of the dopest Florida breaks groups, The Funk Lab, came on the scene in 1997, and although they’re not listed as one of the top providers of the Florida breaks sound in the style’s Wikipedia article, they sure as shit should be. In 2000, they contributed an exclusive track called “Smoke Marijuana” to ElectroAcidFunk, Volume 3, a mix by a southern DJ named DJ Voodoo.

“Smoke Marijuana” is a high-powered and impressively layered dance groove. It has a roving and rumbling bass hum, drum breaks and 808 drums, aquatically acidic and crystalline chiming synth shards, and electro-funk keys. It’s also sample heavy, and with all these chopped up and looped vocals that both play on top of and in between all these elements, The Funk Lab are able to build a groove, ride it, deconstruct it, and bring it back in full force as they constantly tinker with the inclusion and exclusion of certain sounds to keep us on our toes as we groove along. The result is a great blend of electro, Miami bass, and breaks that, when combined, uniquely screams “Florida”.