09: AFRONAUGHT
‘TRANSCEND ME’
(APOLLO 12″, 2001)

If there is one broken beat anthem everyone can agree on, it’s ‘Transcend Me’ by Orin Walters. It’s a simple but effective blend – the Harvey Mason drum break from Weather Report’s classic Sweetnighter LP is sliced and diced into a million bits on an MPC3000 and re-sequenced to give the sensation that the drums are grooving in suspended animation, filled with infinite rhythmic variation. In the background, a filtered Kaidi Tatham rhodes part swells and burbles, meowing like a hungry cat that hasn’t been fed for days, until finally the song reaches a crescendo and Melissa Browne’s dreamy vocals glue the disparate elements together. At 7 minutes 55 seconds, ‘Transcend Me’ shows that Co-Op was not about the three-minute pop song – only there could something as astral, otherworldly, disorientating and spiritual as this become a seminal party tune.

“We live in the funk / trash the junk / now what have we done”. It’s a simple hook line, but it was so effective in the way it works with the drum pattern. Like “Save It”, “Trash The Junk” is all about the anticipation in the groove, the snare seemingly skipping ahead of itself in a delightful way, whilst the melody, changes and vocal sporadically interrupt the drums at the start of the bar. “Trash” is odd, whimsical and experimental, it’s hypnotic in the way in which it loops and builds, until eventually Kaidi’s jazz changes emerge to lift our spirits, and the track erupts with analog synth colours. Another masterful Dego production, it’s well worth flipping this over to indulge in the more minimal and hard edged 808 dub on the flip, which still hits hard and fresh enough to contend with any “funky” dubplate today.

Mark “G” Force is perhaps one of the lesser known broken innovators – despite a large and varied discography that included progressive collaborations with Seiji in the Reinforced era, and numerous heavy dubplates during the noughties, he is still under-repped and underrated today. ‘Gypo’ is one of those tunes that many will recognise even if they don’t know the title. It’s an odd one that stops and starts, literally 2-step in that it has two parts to the groove – half garage bounce a la Maddslinky, half boogie a la Central Line, with a bassline that’s just nasty. And that’s about it – instant rewind at Co-Op as soon as the b-line dropped, and a crowd screaming for the heavy groove. As with many of these 12”s, the critics choice is on the flipside – ’40 Days’ is a beautiful slice of home-made boogie that wouldn’t sound out of place on the People’s Potential label if it came out tomorrow. The force has always been strong with Mark, and this still stands the test of time, totally relevant to the post-garage, post-dubstep scene of today.

Of all the tracks of the Goyamusic canon, ‘Loose Lips’ is perhaps the most well-known amongst casual listeners, and the one that crossed over to the widest audience. The heart of Loose Lips is a stripped down groove – a chopped drum break with Pierre Henry siren noises that echo away in the background, and in all honesty, not a whole lot else. The pattern in itself is noteworthy though – this was Seiji’s innovation, a double snare that emulates a Salsoul double clap at 130 bpm, a signature pattern often used in his work that followed. What makes the track so recognisable is Lyric L and her fast, high pitched voice rhyming with ease – “Loose lips, sink ships, flip scripts drama-tics” – repeated like a mantra for the length of the record. Easy to sing along with, or even shout along with, particularly if you’ve got a beer in your hand. The b-side ’3dom’ is the real favourite though – hard to describe exactly why it’s so good, I guess it must be the hooky 5 note melody that leads it along. When Eve and Benga’s ‘Me and My’ blew up last year, it felt like ‘Loose Lips’ had set the stage for it seven years before.

Kaidi Tatham was the jazz virtuoso lynchpin in the Cooperation movement. Doubtlessly, most of the records listed here would not have existed if it wasn’t for Tatham, whose ability to improvise on countless instruments will leave you dumbfounded if experienced in the flesh. A masterful flautist, percussionist, keyboard player and more, it’s his signature changes, based on the styles of jazz greats like Herbie Hancock and Harry Whittaker, that take all the records he plays on to another level of harmony. Despite leading on countless sessions for his numerous friends and collaborators, Kaidi only received praise in his own name for a couple of anthems – the best known of which is ‘Betcha Did’, a heavily orchestrated work that sounds like the Mizell brothers playing at double their normal speed. On Feed The Cat, Kaidi finally got to helm his own album, and the results still sound compelling today – the title track, with its classic, richly textured UK boogie feel, pre-empted Dam-Funk’s revival of the genre by almost a decade. Elsewhere Kaidi fuses spiritual jazz, Brazilian rhythms and analog electronics, with such purity of intent and richness of execution that this surely will be a collector’s item in years to come.

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