Broken Beat

What it is

Co-Op ran on Sunday nights in a basement off Charing Cross Road from 1998, and the people playing it were jungle producers who had got tired of 170. Dego and Marc Mac from 4hero, IG Culture, Bugz In The Attic, Kaidi Tatham. What came out was a broken 4/4 at 125 or so, with the kick displaced off the beat, seventh and ninth chords borrowed from seventies jazz fusion, and a rhythmic sense inherited directly from cutting up breaks at drum and bass tempo. They called it bruk. The name broken beat came later and from outside. It never became big, but everything about the way UK dance music has handled syncopation since 2000 comes through this room, and you can hear it in UK funky, in future garage and in the past decade of London jazz.

What it sounds like

Live and slightly out of focus. Congas, shakers and a shuffled hat pattern that never repeats exactly, over a kick that lands almost anywhere except beat 1 and beat 3. Rhodes and Wurlitzer chords with extensions, played rather than programmed. A bassline with a lot of notes in it, usually a Moog or a real electric bass. Vocals are soul vocals, sung properly, often by a guest. The mix has real dynamic range because nobody was mastering these for a peak time drop. It should sound like a band, and about half the time it was one.

Key elements

• The displaced kickBeat 1 is there and after that almost nothing lands where you expect. The kick lands on sixteenths that a house producer would never use, and the bar still resolves, which is what took people years to copy.
• Chords with extensionsMinor ninths, major sevenths, suspended fourths, played on Rhodes with the tremolo on. Harmony this specific is rare in dance music and it is the fastest way to identify a bruk record.
• Hand percussion against the gridCongas and shakers running alongside the kit rather than doubling it. They carry a triplet feel over a duple grid, and the friction between the two is the groove.
• Jungle timing at 126The edits are drum and bass edits done at three quarters of the speed. Snare rolls into the barline, sixteenth-note kick clusters, and phrases that resolve a step late.
• Real playersBass, keys and often horns tracked live and then chopped in the sampler. Kaidi Tatham's keyboard parts are the clearest case: written as jazz and then treated as source material.

How to get them

• Put the kick where it is uncomfortableBeat 1 and then nothing on 2, 3 or 4. Try the a of 1, the a of 2 and the e of 4, then move one of them a sixteenth and keep whichever version makes you tilt your head.
• Swing at 58 percent, then break the swingSet the global swing to about 0.58, then drag two or three individual hits off it by 15 to 25ms in the opposite direction. Uniform swing sounds like a preset, and this music was never uniform.
• Congas at the thirty-secondThe conga part in a real bruk record has flams and triplet fills that a sixteenth grid cannot hold. Program the skeleton at sixteenths, then halve the grid twice and add pairs of quick hits before the accents.
• Voice the chords highRoot in the bass, the seventh and ninth up around middle C, nothing doubled. Rhodes with the tremolo at about 5Hz and a short plate. Avoid triads; a plain minor chord makes it sound like deep house.
• Let the bass be busyTen or twelve notes a bar, with slides and dead notes, playing across the kick rather than with it. Sidechain lightly if at all, because the point is that the two parts interlock rather than take turns.
• Leave the dynamics aloneMix bus compression at 2:1 with two decibels of reduction at most. These records breathe, and squashing one to a modern loudness target removes the interplay you spent all that time programming.

Reference points

4hero, Dego, IG Culture, Bugz In The Attic, Kaidi Tatham, Domu, and the 2000Black, Bitasweet and Main Squeeze labels. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.