Felix the Dog has been playing records in San Francisco for over a decade. If you ask him what similarity there is between mixing house and soul tracks in the late '80s and tearing up dance floors with his latest obsession, nu-skool breaks, you'll get one gleaming word, delivered with a devious smile. "Anarchy," he says.
Jennifer Hale
Felix lets his inner Dog out.
Jennifer Hale
Felix lets his inner Dog out.
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Everything about the 32-year-old DJ -- from his monolithic, silver death-metal rings to the gritty electronic sounds he favors -- comes complete with a rebel attitude. In fact, it was Felix's nonconformity that brought him to the Bay Area in the first place, after leaving his home in Birmingham, England, and traveling around Europe "with a rolled-up blanket" for five years. His iconoclasm also started him spinning downtempo music as a reaction against the harsh vibe of drum 'n' bass. Now, his musical mutiny is flaring up again. After six years of cooling out back-room habitués while other DJs spun house and jungle on the main floors, Felix has switched allegiance to nu-skool breaks, the hip new sound of swinging London.
"Downtempo got kind of turtleneck and geeked out," he says, laughing. "Around 1997, I was finding myself buying more breakbeat, and the tempo [of my DJ sets] just started moving up to between about 133 to 145 [beats per minute. At that speed], I could just pull out all the dark, funky, nasty music that makes you want to get down."
Though nearly all of the big nu-skool producers are coming out of England, the sound is merely a British twist on an American tradition. As the story goes, English artist Rennie Pilgrem was inspired by the Florida funky breaks sound while living in Miami in the mid-'90s. He took the sound back to the U.K., combined it with electro (the robotic proto-hip hop of the early '80s) and drum 'n' bass, and created nu-skool breaks.
Although Felix acknowledges the style's influences, he is quick to distinguish the new sound from previous incarnations. "Nu-skool is a fusion of all dance musics to the biggest degree -- all styles of rhythm-making and programming. Funky breaks and the Miami sound were based in repetitive loops of a break [and the sound of] old-school hip hop. The nu-skool sound comes out of the technical side, whereby the breaks are normally produced from scratch. The younger kids' opinion of the nu-skool moniker is something drum 'n' bass- sounding or breakbeat that's hard, aggressive, and fast. But nu-skool breaks is more about a whole different mind-set. It's about fusion."
There's no denying that the sound is at once fresh and familiar, a combination of speaker-busting bass, cut-up drum patterns, and squelchy robotic sampler tweaking, set at a manageable speed somewhere between hip hop's comfortable lope and house music's upbeat tempo. No doubt, the accessibility of the genre depends partially on its foundation of breakbeats (the instrumental drum sections usually sampled from old funk and soul records, which also underpin much of hip hop and drum 'n' bass). But nu-skool's startling ability to take in elements and techniques of myriad styles helps its popularity as well.
"[The new style is] accessible to everyone without being commercial," says Felix, precariously perched on a chair in the Upper Haight apartment he shares with his wife, "Eklektic" promoter Dmarie. "Anyone who's ever gone out dancing -- whether they think they're over [the club scene] or not, or whether they think they're just into a certain genre -- loves it. It's a total party vibe. It's back to before [raves were] a business, back when it was fun. You went out and your friends were like, "There's a late-night [party] going on, and it's going to go all night.' That's all you needed to know. You didn't care who was playing, what they were playing, and when they were playing it. It was brilliant."
Typically, upstart genres try to remain underground at all costs. A common theme among nu-skool DJs is wanting to make the music as approachable as possible from the start, as long as they can do it on their own terms.
"I started to spin breakbeat because I liked that there was more crossover going on," says Emily Griffin, alias Miss E, resident DJ alongside Felix at "Hektic," the front room of the Cat Club's long-running "Eklektic" night.
"When I was only playing drum 'n' bass, I would play at a house party, and it didn't come off right," Griffin says during an interview outside the offices of local electronic music magazine XLR8R, where she works as marketing manager. "People weren't wanting to get all serious with the music; they just wanted to shake their ass. Having breakbeat music in my [record] box let's me play to whomever, and they'll probably vibe with something I'm playing. With [breaks] DJs playing at different kinds of parties and keeping their sets more diverse, hopefully it will be spread all over the place and attract people from different genres."
"It's because all these different scenes are meshing, and people are feeding off each other, that breaks is doing as well as it is," concludes Adam Ohana, co-founder of record distribution com- pany Eyephunk. Ohana began Eyephunk 2 1/2 years ago with fellow breaks fiend Anna Sitko (aka DJ Anon) "as a way of getting music out in America that has a problem getting here." Since that time, the Lower Haight company has become one of America's biggest nu-skool breaks warehouses, thanks in part to its close relationship with independent labels in the U.K.
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