Broken beat Bugz out: the long trail of the West London sound

Plus Jahari Massamba Unit, Mariah Carey, Lauren Flax and more

A festive request

First of all, thank you very much for reading and subscribing to this newsletter. After stumbling around, initially a little unsure about what to do, I think I have hit a Substack groove, where every week there is something I really want to write about. So I hope you enjoy reading the newsletter as much as I do producing it.

I set myself a modest target of subscriber numbers for Christmas 2023 when I launched the newsletter in summer. As things stand, I am close to making it - but maybe not quite close enough. 

You might ask: what does it matter? And, frankly, the answer is not much: I set the target and I am the only person who knows about it. I will go on with the newsletter whether I hit it or not.

And yet, if possible, I would really like to hit it for my own personal satisfaction. So if you could help by persuading some of your friends / colleagues / loved ones to sign up in the next few days, that would be fabulous. As things stand, all content is free and I don’t even have a paid tier.  

If I do hit the target, I promise I will send out a bonus newsletter, featuring an interview I did with an absolute ICON of modern music. And, yes, I probably do abuse the “i” word. But, in this case, it is justified.

Broken beat Bugz out: the long trail of the West London sound

Does electronic music, a genre largely designed for the dance floor, need albums? This, perhaps, is a topic for another day; and yet I would say it does, with the curious fate of broken beat showing what happens when an electronic genre doesn’t have a star album to hang its hat on.

Broken beat - sometimes referred to as “bruk” (apparently Jamaican patois for “broken”) - is a dance music sub genre that emerged in London in the late 90s, known for its syncopated beats and heavy jazz funk influences. If I had to characterise it, I would say broken beat is best know for a snare drum hit that arrives ever so slightly before the fourth beat of the bar, which sounds hair splitting but makes sense in the tightly-knit, beat-driven world of dance music. 

Broken beat also draws from house music - Masters at Work’s seminal The Nervous Track was a big influence - jungle, reggae, Detroit techno, Latin music, R&B and hip hop, all rolled up into gorgeously funky knots. This is reflected in the backgrounds of several of its best known artists. IG Culture - who arguably made the first broken beat record in 1997, with New Sector Movements’ Groove Now / New Goya - made his name as part of the 90s hip hop duo Dodge City productions; Phil Asher originally made house; Demus was a recording engineer who worked with Acid Jazz-ers Young Disciples; and Dego was half of seminal jungle group 4 Hero. 

These four also founded CoOp, the club night that served as the heart of London’s broken beat scene from 2000 to 2007, returning in 2017 after the success of a 2015 Boiler Room event. But you can see these kind of influences throughout the broken beat world. Kaidi Tatham got his first credit on a Herbaliser single; Orin Walters (aka Afronaut) also started off in house; and so on.

This combination of influences reflects broken beat’s roots in West London. Goya Music, the distributor that was key for the genre, had its offices in Ladbroke Grove, with many of the leading producers operating out studios nearby. Not for nothing was broken beat sometimes known as the “West London sound”. 

And yet broken beat was never limited to the English capital: Mark de Clive Lowe is  “Japanese New Zealander”; Vikter Duplaix comes from Philadelphia; and Jazzanova are from Berlin. I’m not entirely convinced the last two artists are broken beat - I’d say Jazzanova are more future jazz and Duplaix closer to house - but their records were certainly popular on the broken beat scene and there were numerous crossovers with the CoOp crew.

I’m also not entirely sure how big broken beat ever got. I remember it very much being a thing in the late 90s / early 2000s and both IG Culture (as New Sector Movements) and Bugz In The Attic - the collective that, perhaps, more than any other, defined broken beat - signed deals with major labels. Bugz In The Attic’s Booty La La even made 44 in the UK charts in 2005, which might be the genre’s commercial peak.

But the fact that broken beat never had that one album - à la Goldie’s Timeless - to really show what it was about, makes it difficult to assess what exactly its impact was. Yes, there were hundreds of brilliant broken beats tunes. But more mainstream music fans often have quite simple tastes and it really helps if you can have one emblematic album that tells them what a genre is. 

For anyone with a nascent interest in jungle in the mid 90s you could hand over Timeless and it would, basically, explain what the genre was about. Which isn’t to say all jungle was contained within or that Timeless is a perfect album; but it did a very good, album-length job of allowing interested observers to sample the scene. And I don’t think broken beat has that one record.

Vikter Duplaix’s DJ Kicks is a fabulous album that features two broken beat anthems in 4 Hero’s Hold It Down and New Sector Movements’ The Sun; but it oozes all over the shop in terms of genre, while Duplaix’s own International Affairs LP is similarly eclectic. 4 Hero’s brilliant Creating Patterns and Play With the Changes may see the duo slough off their jungle roots but the two albums are a little too jazz funk to be truly representative of broken beat. And New Sector Movements’ Download This always felt slightly fragmented, a handful of brilliant tracks in search of a connection, as if IG actually needed more major label A&R nous, rather than a label president who simply wanted to impress his The Face-reading friends.

Similarly, I was trying to work out what one song was the broken beat anthem and I couldn’t quite get there, not helped by the fact that many of the genre’s classics aren’t on streaming. Seiji’s utterly anthemic Loose Lips (with Lyrics L) is only available on Spotify as part of a Mr Scruff DJ Kicks, where it is infuriatingly mixed up with other songs; Bugz In the Attic’s classic remix of 4 Hero’s Hold It Down can only be found in a horrendous looking Lifestyle 2 Dance Grooves compilation, whose cover art I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy; Neon Phusion is only represented by his remix of Len’s Feel My Sunshine; Mark Force’s Gypo is nowhere to be seen. And so on. 

In fact, if I had to pick the biggest broken beat song on streaming, it would probably be Seiji’s remix of Amy Winehouse’s Take the Box, which has wracked up three million streams by virtue of being on the extended album version of Frank. Neat though this remix is, it isn’t even one of Seiji’s best, let alone an anthem for the whole broken beat scene.

Perhaps the record I would recommend to anyone interested in broken beat is Bugz In the Attic’s second remix collection Got The Bug 2, which has their own rhythmically bugged out Amy Winehouse remix (In My Bed); their version of Fela Kuti’s Zombie, one of a handful of covers to actually add something new to a Fela classic; and their cheese-knife sharp remix of BB Boogie’s Tell Him, which was a low-key anthem when I lived in Paris. 

The last song is particularly appropriate. The original Tell Him, by Eighties Ladies, was produced by Roy Ayers, very much the patron saint of broken beat. In a 2018 interview with Bandcamp Daily, IG Culture says his take on broken beat “started with this idea of our own version of Roy Ayers’ Ubiquity”, also citing Herbie Hancock’s Man-Child LP and “all the George Duke fusion stuff” as inspiration.

Between Got The Bug’s 13 tracks you get an idea of broken beat’s obtusely snappy rhythms, like jungle for jazz funkers, the genre’s fluid musicality, with swooping jazz chord sequences very much to the fore; and it’s overall warmth, which shines out beyond any beard-scratching concerns. Plus it seems right that the genre should be represented by Bugz In the Attic, who are somewhere close to a who’s who of broken beat, as home to Afronaut, Seiji, Kaidi Tatham, Daz-I-Kue, Alex Phountzi (Neon Phusion), Cliff Scott, Mark Force and Matt Lord

But, annoyingly, THAT’S not on streaming either, so how about a dose of Bugz In The Attic’s only artist album, Back In The Dog House and Agent K (aka Kaidi Tatham)’s Feed The Cat album as a two-for-the-price-of-one starting point? 

Back In The Dog House may have failed to bring the commercial breakthrough that people had hoped for but it shows how outrageously bright and immediate broken beat could be at its best. Move Aside, I’m Gonna Letcha And Booty La La are three-minute pop bangers wrapped in broken beat’s syncopated slink, while Sounds Like’s bass squelch and Intro’s cinematic riff show what a brilliant ear Bugz had for an instrumental melody. (Lots of love, incidentally, should go to the vocalists on Back In The Dog House, who include Michelle Escoffery, Vula and Mpho Skeef.)

Feed the Cat is more of a heads record, with Tatham way out in his own orbit, where bass lines stretch out, ever more elastic, drum lines tangle away on cosmic waves and pianos trace astral trails of freeform chords, like jazz slowly being sucked into a black hole. There are pop-ish vocals, for example on Ladies; but the dubbed-out eight-minute sprawlathon of Hands, less a song, more of an ever-evolving musical trail, is more typical of this record’s brilliantly far our approach. You can imagine Flying Lotus and his Brainfeeder mob learning a lot from this record.

In 2023, broken beat lives on, in its own niche kind of way. Resident Advisor lists ahandful of CoOp nights over the last few years and most of the genre’s key producers are still in action. Bugz In the Attic produced an excellent remix of Reel People’s Upside in summer 2023; Afronaut’s rattling 2021 single How It Goes is among his best; and Dego is as busy as ever. 

There are also a handful of new broken beat (and broken beat influenced) artists, who have emerged over the last few years, including WheelUP, whose 2023 album We Are The Magic comes highly recommended, and EVM128; alongside DJs Bradley Zero and Alexander Nut, with their respective Eglo and Rhythm Section labels. A lot of this new talent can be found on IG Culture and Alex Phountzi’s CoOp Presents label, which they founded in 2018.

Perhaps, though, it is Kaidi Tatham that best keeps the broken light flaming. Not only did Madlib sample Feed The Cat track Orbit on his 2019 Freddie Gibbs collab Flat Tummy Tea. But Tatham also produced a remix of Nubya Garcia’s La Cumbia Me Esta Llamando that provides evidence of broken beat’s long trails of influence into the UK’s vibrant young jazz scene.

It’s a link that seems obvious, when brought up in this way. Like broken beat, the current revival of British jazz has its roots in London’s eclectic musical pot pourri, with the two genres sharing musical DNA in their love for funk, R&B, jungle, reggae, house etc. The two genres share a certain musicality, too: broken beat never made a boast of its virtuosity but many of its leading lights (Tatham, Mark de Clive Lowe) were incredibly talented musicians and this filtered down into their productions. Unlike, say, techno, which could often be mastered by a raw musical instinct, broken beat was not a genre that a savvy musical amateur could easily conquer, its jazz chords and complex rhythms needing considerable knowhow. 

You can hear the influence of broken beat in Nubya Garcia’s music; and I would also argue you can also hear it in the music of Floating Points, Nala Sinephro, Nicola Cruz and SBTRKT. Which makes broken beat one of the UK’s most subtly enduring musical forces, its influence more an ooze that flavours generations, than a jungle-ish slap in the face, like a good honey spread thinly over slices of autumnal toast.

PS big up to Bémbé Ségué, too, who played a key role in broken beat and lent her vocals to may of the classic tracks.

Some listening

Jahari Massamba Unit - Stompin Gamay

Is there anything better than Madlib in jazz mode? (Shout out to his excellent Shades of Blue album, incidentally.) Well how about Madlib in jazz mode plus the rhythm killer than is Karriem Riggins, a jazz drummer / hip hop producer of note, as the two come together once again as Jahari Massamba Unit? Stompin’ Gamay, the first song to be taken from their forthcoming second album, is a triumph of brushed drums, sunshine flute, moody chord changes and just enough hip hop focus to keep the jazz rambling in line.

Mariah Carey - Joy to the World (Celebration mix by David Morales)

This time last year, I interviewed Manchester producer Finn for a festive Line Noise special, after he released No More Coal - A Christmas Dance Record. One of the topics of conversation was which forms of dance music are Christmas-y and which aren’t. Brostep, I think we concluded, very much isn’t (although dubstep has its moments). The MOST Christmas-y dance genre, we agreed, is definitely house music and this festive banger from Mariah Carey proves it, all gospel choir, ecstatic key change and bumping beats. It feels like it has sleigh bells, even though it doesn’t. It’s that kind of record.

Things I’ve Done

Lauren Flax - Liz & Lauren EP review

This EP, from Detroit via Brooklyn producer Lauren Flax and Elizabeth Wight of Pale Blue, is an emotional beast for the sad, horny teenage raver that lurks within us. I reviewed it for Pitchfork. “Four sorry anthems for anyone who has danced their way through their pain and insecurity, lost in the anonymity and forgiveness of a sympathetic club crowd.”

Line Noise YouTube

I’ve had a Line Noise YouTube channel for a few years now but done very little with it. Given that many of the Line Noise interviews I do now are on video, I thought it might be a good idea to put them on YouTube and see what happens. So, for your enjoyment, I being you Colleen, Ana Quiroga and KILIMANJARO and Junior Simba.

The Playlist

Oh come on: it’s Christmas. Would a like really be beyond the pale for my playlist of the best new music? Currently runs to 1,663 songs, for maximum put-on-and-forget-about-it vibes.