Avant-funk
Avant-funk (also called mutant disco in the early 1980s[2]) is a music style in which artists combine funk or disco rhythms with an avant-garde or art rock mentality.[4] Its most prominent era occurred in the late 1970s and 1980s among post-punk and no wave acts who embraced black dance music.[5]
For other genres known as punk funk, see punk funk (disambiguation).Avant-funk
1960s, United Kingdom and United States
Characteristics[edit]
Artists described as "avant-funk" or "mutant disco" have blended elements from styles such as funk, punk, disco, freeform jazz and dub.[2] Some motifs of the style in the 1970s and 1980s included "neurotic slap-bass" and "guttural pseudo-sinister vocals,"[1] as well as "Eurodisco rhythms; synthesizers used to generate not pristine, hygienic textures, but poisonous, noisome filth; Burroughs’ cut-up technique applied to found voices."[4] According to critic Simon Reynolds, the movement was animated by the notion that "rock's hopes of enjoying a future beyond mere antiquarianism depends on assimilating the latest rhythmic innovations from black dance music."[1]
Musicologist Simon Frith described avant-funk as an application of progressive rock mentality to rhythm rather than melody and harmony.[4] Reynolds described avant-funk as "difficult dance music" and a kind of psychedelia in which "oblivion was to be attained not through rising above the body, rather through immersion in the physical, self loss through animalism."[4]