Zangu: DāM-FunK (Glydezone Recordings, US)

On August 28, Yerevan will host a live performance by funk wizard Damon Riddick aka DāM-FunK. This event will mark the beginning of the new project of the Urvakan Festival team.
According to the legendary film about afrodiasporic culture «The Last Angel of History», music has always been a «black secret technology». From blues to detroit-techno, from free-jazz to r’n’b — sound played a crucial role in afrofuturistic projections. Of course, this list will not be full without funk: George Clinton, a leader of Parliament\Funkadelic, created one of the most exciting mythologies in pop music history and started his celestial and interplanetary journey. Forty years later, Damon Riddick became the next passenger of funk spacecraft.

Since his massive and widely acclaimed debut album «Toeachizown», L. A.-born musician has become one of the genres most inventive and ambitious reformer. Over the last decade, DāM-FunK has been developing his self-called modern funk artistic approach. Despite that, Damon Riddick’s music is full of references to the afroculture highlight moments of the past and sounds as perfect picture of 80’s, at least as this epoch exist in our collective imagination. Lush and juno-like chorused chords, deep groove, broken rhythms driven by Sci-Fi tropes and neon-lighted narratives, could be a part of soundtrack to GTA Vice City or your favorite movie of that era.

However, DāM-FunK’s music is not a mere nostalgia about a future that we once had in the past. Space travel, aliens and UFO’s, dreams of high-tech cities of the future for afrofuturism are a way to critically look at the present. In various interviews, Damon Riddick said that for him, funk is not a carnival buffoonery, but a serious genre, a way of living, «a feeling of struggle and staying cool through it all». If it were rude g-funk basslines or weird pastoral soundscapes, numerous Riddick’s releases on Stones Throw Records, Music from Memory, Glydezone Recordings would be an attempt to create his own and unique vision of sonic utopia.
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