Funkycan

Plucky midi funk and kerned disco tricks from Berlin’s Funkycan - a regular collaborator of Max Graef and alum of Out To Lunch - doing it with ample cuboid charm for fans of Max D, Ceephax, Christian Love Forum, Novo Line, L.G. Mair, Jr.

‘Funkycan’ is German artist Ömür Can Kilic aka Funkycan’s definitive album statement in this mode, some decade after his early work arrived on Anthony Naples’ Fact mix, and when he first stepped out on record with Murat Tepeli & Damiano von Eckert in The Ava Brothers. It is Funkycan’s ode to the art of midi-funk, and shuffling boxes on a screen, resulting chewy chunks of slap-bass, warped vox and skewed synths shaped into playfully daft bits of new jack swang and squirming offbeat jazz-funk.

There are clear precedents for this sound in the recently reissued work of L.G., Mair, Jr. - a slap funk bassist at a New York comedy club, who also made this sorta gear - and the likes of Novo Line, who laboriously works up a funk from twin Amigas, and we can now safely add Funkycan to that niche with his eponymous debut LP.

If we’re playing favourites, the pendulous, acidic new jack swang of ‘cdown’ with its cracking snares, ragtime blooz riffs and oily machine gunk is up there, as is the bendy, dubbed-out strut of ’Skylounge (Demoversion pc2 TBZ)’, and his curdled ‘Outro’ ft. Yoga Peit, or the loose charms of ‘Nite’n’d’ recalling Christian Love Forum, but it’s all likely to prod the buttons of heads that grew up with 8-bit game soundtracks and whose first fuck with computer music was midi trackers in the ‘90s/‘00s, and who will recognise his skill in chiselling out this kinda funk from scratch, and dry grids.