Avant-funk (originally known as mutant disco[) is a music style in which artists combine funk or disco rhythms with an avant-garde or art rock mentality.]
Characteristics
Artists described as "avant-funk" or "mutant disco" have blended elements from styles such as funk, punk rock, disco, free jazz and dub music.[ Some motifs of the style in the 1970s and 1980s included "neurotic slap-bass" and "guttural pseudo-sinister vocals,"][ as well as "Eurodisco rhythms; used to generate not pristine, hygienic textures, but poisonous, noisome filth; Burroughs’ cut-up technique applied to found sound."][
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Musicologist Simon Frith described avant-funk as an application of progressive rock mentality to rhythm rather than melody and harmony.
History
Early acts who have retrospectively been described with the term include German krautrock band Can,
According to Reynolds, a pioneering wave of avant-funk artists came in the late 1970s, when post-punk artists (including A Certain Ratio, the Pop Group, Gang of Four, Bush Tetras, Defunkt, Public Image Ltd, Liquid Liquid, and James Chance, as well as Arthur Russell, Cabaret Voltaire, Talking Heads, DAF, and 23 Skidoo)[ Thomas H Green, "Mutant disco from planet ZE", Daily Telegraph, 13 August 2009]
Later groups such as Skinny Puppy, Chakk, and 400 Blows represented later waves of the style. By the mid-1980s, avant-funk had dissipated as white alternative groups turned away from the dancefloor.[ Many of its original practitioners instead became a part of the UK's first wave of house music,][ Reynolds compared the UK's rave music and jungle music scenes of the early 1990s to a "reactivation" of avant-funk, calling it "a populist vanguard, a lumpen bohemia that weirdly mashed together the bad-trippy sounds of art school funk-mutation with a plebeian pill-gobbling rapacity".][ Avant-funk influenced 1990s drum and bass producers such as 4hero and A Guy Called Gerald.]
See also
