In many ways, DāM-FunK’s career has been hyper-focused on a single object. Modern funk is so tied to his name that it’s easy to reduce him to that alone. But the legendary California musician hasn’t been off on an island so much as he’s been developing a neural network of Black music in its many forms. It’s not just that DāM-FunK’s music is influenced by bass funk and boogie and disco. It’s not even that he’s collapsed those genres into one tidy box. It’s that he’s been carving out new ways of intoning and connecting with them through funk.
His latest EP, Architect III, is the third and final installment in a years-long genre study of house music. It may not be a significant milestone or an entirely unexpected turn in his discography, but the Architect series’ experiment brings to the surface what’s often bubbling beneath DāM-FunK’s music: the rabbit holes of sub-genres he famously explores, which often lead to a well of Black electronic music. That gravitation towards rhythmic intersections may be one reason that DāM-Funk’s records are equally timeless and futuristic. (It should come as no surprise that he has frequently cited the future-funk of Prince’s 1999 as the initial spark for his career.) The six pieces on Architect III take a different structural approach to track mechanics and soundscapes than DāM’s usual output, but the minimalist four-on-the-floor songs here aren’t such a departure for him in the grand scheme.
The spacy woosh and ambient soundscape that floats atop “Think” wouldn’t give him away, but the dense, bulbous sound of the bass synth is pure DāM-FunK. That bass is a straight line through the track that leaves nothing in its wake. A few times across the song’s nine-minute stretch, it bubbles out of its groove and, without missing a beat, adds or removes a note that makes it swing momentarily with the same forward momentum. “Night Kruise” is straight-ahead electro-funk, immediately familiar terrain to any DāM-Funk fan, though a more rugged and minimalist version of his standard pocket. It also takes the same balanced approach as “Think,” where the bassline is the center of gravity, and everything else hovers loosely around its orbit.
Other tracks are more aggressive and wear their structures on the outside. Neither “Feel” nor “Shine” scaffold towards or obscure their 4/4 foundations, but they’re not empty beats as much as they are vessels, dancefloor canvases for the shimmering, euphoric synth work that DāM-Funk paints over the top. Those synth sounds—both the watercolor-like ambient effects that blend in the background and the weightier foundational elements—are DāM-FunK’s calling card. It’s tempting to point to the artist’s brushstrokes (the synth sounds) as the end goal. But that would undersell the genius, simple chord progressions and melody writing that DāM-Funk bends those synths towards. DāM-Funk, after all, has never struggled to find substance with his music. One of his extraordinary talents as a DJ is how he invites listeners to share his perspective and look at familiar sounds in a new way or position them in unexpected contexts. Architect III isn’t some foreign object in his catalog; it’s just a different object for his gaze.
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