Future Funk

What it is

Around 2014 a group of producers who had come up through vaporwave got bored of slowing records down and started speeding them up instead. The source material is the same: Japanese city pop and eighties disco, Mariya Takeuchi and Anri and Tatsuro Yamashita. The method is French house, more or less exactly, which is worth saying plainly because it explains the drums. You take four bars, filter them, chop them into sixteenths, rearrange the chops, and then stamp a modern kick on all four beats because the original loop is too polite to hold a dance floor. That kick is the only drum in most of these records that was not already on the sampled bar, and it is doing the same job Thomas Bangalter's kick did in 1997.

What it sounds like

Bright, filtered and loud. The sampled loop carries the hats, the ghost snares and the bassline all at once, because it is a single stereo file, and it gets a resonant band-pass sweeping between 300Hz and 8kHz across the phrase. On top of that: a punchy modern kick with real sub, sidechained hard so the loop pumps behind it, and often a clap doubling the sample's own snare. Vocal chops from the source get pitched up two or three semitones and repeated. The whole mix is compressed until the sample breathes visibly, and the top end is left bright rather than filtered, which is the fastest way to tell it apart from vaporwave.

Key elements

• The stamped kickFour to the floor with modern sub weight, laid over a loop that already has its own drums. The two disagreeing slightly is what gives it the shove.
• Sixteenth choppingThe sampled bar is cut into sixteen slices and reordered, so the ghost notes and hats inside it land somewhere the original drummer never put them.
• The filter sweepA resonant band-pass on the loop opening across eight bars and slamming shut at the turnaround. Straight out of French house and used without modification.
• Open hats on the offbeat halvesOne on the and of 2 and one on the and of 4, long enough to ring into the next kick. Not all four offbeats, which would turn it into house.
• Shaker on the offbeat sixteenthsThe e and the a of every beat, quiet, keeping the sixteenth pulse alive when the sample's own hats get filtered out of hearing.

How to get them

• Pick the bar, then the chopFind four bars where the bass and the drums both work, slice at every sixteenth, and rearrange three or four of the slices rather than all sixteen.
• Stamp the kickA punchy kick with content at 50Hz on all four beats, tuned to the sample's key so the sub does not clash with the bassline underneath.
• Sidechain hardDuck the sample bus 6dB off the kick with a 120ms release. More than you would use in house, because the loop is dense and the kick has to cut a hole.
• Band-pass the loopA band-pass with resonance around 50 percent, moving from 400Hz to 6kHz over eight bars, automated by hand so it lurches rather than glides.
• Two open hats, not fourThe and of 2 and the and of 4 only, with a 400ms decay so they ring into the next kick. Four offbeat open hats is a different genre.
• Pitch the vocal chop upTwo or three semitones with no formant correction, then repeat it on the last two sixteenths of the phrase. That stutter is the hook.

Reference points

Saint Pepsi, Yung Bae, Macross 82-99, Night Tempo, Skylar Spence, and the Neoncity and Local Visions catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not endorsements, and the sampled records belong to their original artists.