Broken beat

Dance music genres are often defined by their own distinctive rhythm. This holds true for reggaeton, kuduro or 2-step garage, and, looking closer, even for more traditional styles like tango or polka. Other strands are more varied — it would be pretty hard to argue that all house music follows the same rhythmic template — but they tend to retain a recognisable skeleton. There is, however, one area that has placed unpredictability itself at its centre: broken beat (or bruk to its friends — “broken” in Jamaican patois), which sprouted in the late Nineties in West London, before spreading across the most varied time zones at the start of the following decade.

The name, in the end, fits perfectly: the first thing that grabs your attention in the intricate grooves of bruk is their broken, unstable character. Instead of the comfort of the four-on-the-floor kick or the boom-bap-derived patterns of hip-hop, with its inflexible emphasis on the second and fourth beat of every bar, broken beat offers up a thicket of shifting accents. A syncopated decomposition and recomposition of familiar rhythmic patterns which — while very rarely straying from “four-four” time — throws the listener off with unexpected pauses and hits (offbeats), catapulting them toward unexplored territory. And these patterns differ from track to track, and often, indeed, even from bar to bar within the same piece.
What makes the exploration of these new horizons possible are above all drum machines and sequencers, including the first digital audio workstations (DAWs) for personal computers. The relative accessibility of this technology, combined with the expertise producers from a variety of styles had built up over the preceding years, turns broken beat into a meeting ground for a range of different sensibilities and musical backgrounds, initially spanning hip-hop, jungle and acid jazz, before broadening out to house music, techno, latin jazz, trip-hop, folktronica, singer-songwriter fare, glitch, dubstep, afrobeat and more besides. A declaredly fusion-minded, progressive strand from its very first steps, bruk is adopted as a home by adventurous musicians and listeners ready to tear down the barriers between genres and experiment with unprecedented complexity, without ever giving up on the musicality of the tracks or, in many cases, on their pull on the dancefloor.

Compared to other key trends in British electronic music that emerged around the turn of the millennium (think drum'n'bass, trip-hop, garage, dubstep, grime...), broken beat is decidedly little remembered today. It has neither a signature track nor a landmark album universally known to fans with eclectic tastes, and its visibility in the music press (itself always fairly marginal, save for rare exceptions) had virtually vanished by the mid 2000s. And yet the marks of those fractured rhythms are everywhere across a whole range of electronic styles, from post-dubstep to nu jazz, from deconstructed club to UK bass.
Perhaps it's the genre's fate to remain a pervasive but unspoken influence, an eternal, well-hidden secret. This article's bet is that it doesn't have to be that way. That, in the absence of a perfect occasion for rediscovery, this can still be a good enough moment. Because the music made by broken beat's key figures is far too intriguing to stay buried.
Setting out to do what has been missing until now — a history of the genre that captures its many facets — this piece will be long and wide-ranging. But you won't need to read it from start to finish to come away with a usable picture: to allow for different levels of engagement, the text is split into three parts that can be read separately (the British scene at its most visible, its international counterparts, and its continuation after it lost visibility). To help navigate the hundreds of artists and records mentioned, an essential discography — with three key albums, ten more to dig deeper, and a further selection of recommended titles — runs alongside the main text. Finally, an introductory fifty-track playlist is offered as a fitting companion to the article, whose structure it mirrors (barring the odd exception).

Part one: West London sound

Ground zero

Type “broken beat” into a search engine and you won't find all that many articles. Reviews and interviews aplenty, but genuinely few organic perspectives on the genre: even digging a little past the first results, you struggle to get past a dozen. Almost all accounts agree on an essential narrative and geographical picture. Over the course of this article there will be room to examine its limits and distortions, but for now it's certainly worth starting right there: North Kensington, London, 1997. Because that, indeed, is where it all begins.
Kensal Road runs off Ladbroke Grove, a secondary artery cutting through the North Kensington neighbourhood, connecting the monumental Kensal Green Cemetery with Holland Park. There, at the northern end of the long road, hemmed in between the railway and the Grand Union Canal, sits the Saga Centre, three storeys plus a basement. It's in that very basement that, in 1997, Mike Slocombe and Spencer Weekes set up shop, having recently quit their jobs at music distributor Global Distribution, to give some semblance of officialdom to their wish to strike out on their own. The pair have already started a label, People, on which they've put out one 12-inch, and are ready to release the next one — for which they also want to act as distributors, handling storage and shipping and striking deals with shops to stock the records.

The newborn record distributor is called Goya Music Distribution, and the new 12-inch is titled “Groove Now/New Goya”. The artist on the label is New Sector Movements, aka Ian Grant, aka IG Culture. The vocals are by My Linguistics, stage name of singer Kate Phillips, better known from then on as Bémbé Ségué. Credited on vibraphone is Roger Beujolais, aka Roger Downham, a recurring name in London's swing revival and acid jazz scenes since the mid Eighties.
IG Culture himself has been around for a while: he's contributed to the jazz/funk/hip-hop hybrid of Young Disciples, was part of the hip-hop duo Dodge City Production, and already has solo productions under his belt. But “Groove Now” and “New Goya” have something that stands out, at least in hindsight, compared to his earlier work. They're jazzy and groovy, but in a genuinely personal way. They seem to limp, to stumble over their own rhythm. Yet in that apparent stumble they find a compelling forward drive. And that's exactly how it will play out, since it's from that rhythmic insight that an entire scene will spring to life.

Zoom out. New zoom in. This time we head further south, to Richmond, on the other side of the Thames. It's still 1997, and the steady stream of musicians who, since 1994, have been filling the flat of producers Orin Walters and Paul Dolby has more or less settled into a crew with shared horizons. The flat, modest but roomy, is jokingly nicknamed “The Attic”, and the nine-strong collective christens itself Bugz In The Attic. The line-up is thoroughly eclectic: Orin Walters (soon to become Afronaught) already has years of house productions behind him, as does Scott Clifford/Cliff Scott/Psyan; Paul Dolby, meanwhile, has for some time been active in the drum'n'bass scene under the name Seiji, as has Mark Lipka (Mark Force, or G-Force), a breakdancer with an electro and hip-hop background. Darren Benjamin (Daz-I-Kue) and Matt Lord (Thy Lord) are engineers and sound technicians, Mikey Stirton is a DJ handling the mixes, Alex Phountzi (Al Da Bubble) started out as a guitarist in a funk band before moving into production. Kaidi Tatham (Agent K), finally, is a multi-instrumentalist with a jazz touch, having previously played flute for the National Children's Wind Orchestra of Great Britain before becoming keyboardist for hip-hop/jazz outfit The Herbaliser — hailed almost unanimously as a musical prodigy by everyone who's worked with him (Mike Slocombe reportedly said: “I'd heard him play keys and it was incredible, and then he was telling me his main instrument was actually the flute!”).
The collective is bound together by a handful of shared obsessions: “The Nervous Track” by Masters At Work, a devotion to the jazz turn taken by 4Hero's jungle (whose Reinforced Records both Mark Force and Seiji have released on), and the desire to make music “like drum'n'bass, but slower”. But it's above all their differences that are the crew's strength: differences in musical background, ethnicity, skill set. Over time they put out singles, EPs, and (much later, in 2006) an album, but it's mostly through remixes and club nights that they make a name for themselves. Depending on what a client is after, they know exactly who to call on: “For a really spacey vibe track or something ambient there's Kaidi and Cliff, if they want something electronic and hard and brash the names are G-Force and Seiji, on the more vocal, gospel-flavoured stuff Daz comes into play,” Orin Walters reportedly explained.

Back to North Kensington. In search of space for his own studio, IG Culture moves into an unused part of the basement at the Saga Centre. Before long, Bugz In The Attic follow him there too. A good chunk of the “scene”, in fact, initially takes shape through internal recombinations among Bugz, IG Culture, and vocalists Bémbé Ségué and Eska (Eska Mtungwazi). The second 12-inch under the New Sector Movements name, “My History”, comes out in 1998, again on People, and features alongside IG Culture: Bémbé Ségué, Kaidi Tatham, Orin Walters. In 1999 comes a first (and only) album under the Neon Phusion name: the credited members are Phountzi, Walters and Tatham, but the record also features Daz-I-Kue, Seiji, IG Culture, Bémbé Ségué, Matt Lord. In 2001 it's the turn of LPs by New Sector Movements (“Download This”, with Bémbé Ségué, Kaidi Tatham, Eska) and Orin Walters (“Shapin' Fluid”, released as Afronaught, with guests Tatham and Beaujolais). It wouldn't be until 2017, however, that the many recordings made by Tatham and IG Culture under the name Likwid Biskit — which between 1998 and 2005 featured collaborators including Afronaught, Bémbé Ségué and, surprisingly but not entirely so, legendary bassist Pino Palladino — would finally be collected.
Release after release, an increasingly recognisable and multi-hued style takes shape. Beyond the iconic rhythmic transmutations, the pillars of the sound draw heavily on Seventies fusion and its rare groove offshoots. Herbie Hancock is the idol of both IG and Tatham — indeed BBC DJ Benji B reportedly called the latter, with a fair bit of nerve, “Britain's Herbie Hancock” — with the two disagreeing only on their favourite title: “Man-Child” for IG, “Head Hunters” for Tatham. Other recurring reference points are George Duke, Brazil's Azymuth, and Roy Ayers' Ubiquity, a cornerstone of funk and soul/jazz (“It all started with the idea of doing our own version of Ubiquity,” IG recalls of the beginning of his collaboration with Bémbé Ségué on the first New Sector Movements material).
The tracks, midtempo pieces often running past the 5-minute mark, are built around the instrumental element. The vocals, for the most part, provide little more than a frame of MC'ing, circling around a handful of words or interjecting melodic fragments. Alongside the rhythmic constructions, which grow more elaborate and shape-shifting from record to record, the keyboards take centre stage: while steering clear of blistering solos, they draw on a broad palette both in terms of tone (Rhodes, Moog, Clavinet, ARP Odyssey, Roland Jupiter, Yamaha CS-15D...) and harmony, with an abundance of extended chords able to combine momentum and suspension. Always geared toward groove and a proper sense of drive, the compositions unfold through additions, subtractions and gradual shifts, ensuring both variety and reliability in their hold on any given dancefloor.

Here another leap is needed. To 2000, at 143 Charing Cross Road, right in the heart of things, overlooking Tottenham Court Road, between Soho and St Giles. Yet another basement. This is where CoOp is born, a night held every other Sunday at Velvet Rooms, a cult venue of the era which from 2001 alternates it with Fwd>>, a key fixture of the nascent dubstep scene. Especially for singles and remixes, the dancefloor dimension is essential, and the artists based at the Saga Centre frequently finish new tracks the very same day as the night, burning them onto CD-Rs and bringing them along as gifts for a crowd open to and hungry for surprises.
From its very name, CoOp is built around a sense of community and collaboration. Its creators are IG and three other major names on the scene: Demus (Dilip Harris, producer for Young Disciples and an established name in the acid jazz and jazz-hop scenes), Phil Asher (producer and DJ on the scene since the early Nineties, and, from 1995, a key figure in the deep house team Restless Soul) and Dego. The latter is Dennis McFarlane, already a celebrity in the jungle world for his work alongside Marc Mac: under the name 4Hero, the pair have been pioneers of breakbeat hardcore and drum'n'bass since the very early Nineties, a status they helped cement on record by founding Reinforced Records back in 1989. In particular, the 1992 12-inch “Darkrider” (by Rufige Krew, aka Goldie) and 1993's “Journey To The Light” (as 4Hero) are essential milestones in the development of the darkcore sound that would soon flow into the first productions christened “drum'n'bass”.
But it's above all with 1994's “Parallel Universe” that 4Hero move away from the frantic sound of rave music, giving rise to an atmospheric drum'n'bass strand built on advanced sound-editing techniques the pair themselves developed. Time stretching and pitch shifting, achieved by breaking apart and resampling sampled breaks, allow them to sidestep the law tying BPM to pitch: through painstaking production work, it becomes possible to change the tempo of a rhythmic phrase without altering the pitch of the percussion, or, conversely, to raise or lower the pitch of a rhythmic element without having to speed up or slow down its duration.
But it's above all the following album, the 1998 double “Two Pages”, that turns 4Hero into a crucial reference point for the genre. A further slowdown in tempo, a broadening of the sampled rhythmic palette ever further away from the amen break, the adoption of acoustic tones and jazz-inflected sound schemes, and, above all, a systematic use of stretching, shifting and internal permutations of the beats: these elements turn the duo's adventurous jazzstep formula into a beacon for countless beat-breakers in the years that follow. Looked at closely, Dego and Marc Mac weren't the only electronic experimenters in mid-Nineties England to have effectively anticipated the solutions IG and the Bugz would arrive at: very similar insights can be found both in the Plaid of Ed Handley and Andy Turner and in the Future Sound Of London of Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans. But it's the scene's own key figures who point to 4Hero's inspirational role, and the connection is borne out by Dego's own activity within the bruk scene (in 2004 he released, with Tatham and Daz-I-Kue of the Bugz, the only album ever put out on Bitasweet, “Future Rage”, under the name DKD), and, initially somewhat less visibly, by Marc Mac's as well.

Producers, distributors, club nights: the picture is starting to fill out, but a few ingredients are still missing. One of these is labels: alongside People, other names spring up around the turn of the millennium. In 1997 Dego founds 2000 Black as an offshoot of Reinforced, and in 1999 the Bugz set up Bitasweet Records, while IG starts releasing music through his own Main Squeeze. Neon Phusion and Kaidi Tatham's debut solo album ("Feed The Cat", 2002, credited to Agent K) come out on another creation of those years, Laws Of Motion, which would go on to house many other artists from the movement.
Finally, radio and press. One indispensable name is that of radio DJ Gilles Peterson, already a voice of pirate stations like Radio Invicta back in the Eighties, on Jazz FM and Kiss FM in the Nineties, and from 1998 on BBC Radio 1 with his late-night show "Worldwide". A devotee of nu jazz, acid jazz, future jazz (labels that, with hindsight, largely overlap), as well as hip-hop, soul, electronic music and world music, Peterson is immediately enthusiastic about bruk sounds and proves essential in bringing them to the attention of the most curious listeners, keeping them updated on the genre's constant new developments.
Besides Peterson's show and the CoOp nights, fans have two other key reference points: the magazines Straight No Chaser and XLR8R. Founded in 1988 by journalist Paul Bradshaw, the former spends over a decade as an extremely attentive observer of black diaspora music, especially its most progressive fringes. Between the Nineties and the 2000s, Bradshaw and his fellow contributors follow the developments of broken beat with real involvement, seeing it as an even bolder continuation of the fusion routes already explored in acid jazz and nu-soul. XLR8R, meanwhile, was born in 1993 in Seattle, initially focused on electronic music before gradually expanding to other genres. During the peak years of broken beat it covers the genre's artists scrupulously thanks to a roster of writers that includes Britain's Paul Sullivan as well as American enthusiasts like Tomas Palermo and Peter Nicholson, who between 2006 and 2008 curates the magazine's regular column "Broken Business – Future jazz and busted beats".

The broken beat ecosystem builds up real solidity, and for a few years the style is confidently viewed as the next big thing by journalists and producers alike. But, for one reason or another, the bomb never quite goes off. Outside of Peterson's show, very few DJs commit to the genre (even on pirate radio). In the club world too, DJs remain sceptical: the beats are indeed steadily in 4/4, but the irregularity of the accents makes the tracks especially hard to mix effectively. Only the die-hard fans and the most seasoned jazz dancers, then, feel truly at home on bruk-oriented dancefloors (particularly brilliant is the remark by journalist and Afrofuturism theorist Kodwo Eshun: "It's probably the only form of dance music that makes you feel like you have the wrong number of legs").
Around 2003, the CoOp moves along with Fwd>> from the Velvet Rooms to Plastic People, in Shoreditch: a step up in terms of sound system quality, but also – according to the event's followers – a narrowing of horizons. Mike Slocombe of Goya Music recalls: "The sound changed to fit the club. The Velvet Rooms nights were more eclectic; once it moved to East London it became much more like what everyone expected from broken beat."

In 2005, at last, Bugz In The Attic release a single built for success: "Booty La La La", featuring South African-born singer M'pho Skeef and Bémbé Ségué on vocals. The track, especially in its radio edit of under four minutes, is a song-oriented little bomb built on synthetic, biting basslines, poised neatly between jazzy inflections and dance-pop cheek. But it doesn't break through. It enters the charts, but stalls at number forty-four. The following year, the collective's much-anticipated debut LP, "Back In The Doghouse", comes out on a Universal sublabel, V2, and is packed with songs hovering around the three-minute mark, with rhythms that are, all things considered (perhaps too much so), fairly straight — yet it doesn't even crack the top 100. What had been seen as the genre's big shot at mainstream success turns out to be a substantial flop.
These are, after all, the years of the commercial collapse of CD sales: after peaking around 2000, the bubble bursts, and many businesses large and small that had been made possible by the market's constant growth see the foundations they were built on crumble. In 2007, Goya Distributions and the People label effectively cease operations. That same year, Straight No Chaser magazine stops publishing and the CoOp nights come to an end. Ten years after its birth, having never truly broken into the mainstream, the West London sound reaches the end of the line.

Widening the circle

What has been reconstructed above is, with reasonable detail and a bit of cleanup of the background noise, the most easily documented perspective on the history of broken beat. It presents the style as a scene limited in time and space, a West London affair tied to a small, dynamic and cohesive community of artists. It's a story with a beginning and an end, effective and compelling.
It is also a mistaken view — or worse, a limited one. It doesn't lie about the fundamentals: it simply omits centrifugal elements and details that aren't marginal at all. It's perfect for making broken beat look like a delightful curiosity with no wide-ranging consequences — but bruk was a broader and more interesting phenomenon than that, and the purpose of this article is to bring to light the how and why. Fortunately, by digging through material scattered across the web (interviews, rare print pieces, cross-referenced discographies, blog posts, the XLR8R archive and what remains of Straight No Chaser's web version), it becomes possible to widen the view, taking in other artists, other countries, other styles. This finally allows us to grasp the long-range implications: far from having vanished around 2007, broken rhythms are still here among us, and in excellent health.

A first widening of scope comes from considering three non-British figures who nonetheless gravitate around London and play crucial roles in the local scene. These are New Zealand keyboardist Mark De Clive-Lowe and producers Alex Attias, from Switzerland, and Enrico Crivellaro, aka Volcov, an Italian from Verona. All three interact with the other leading protagonists, and all three launch their own labels: Antipodean Records for De Clive-Lowe, Visions Records for Attias, and the Archive/Neroli pairing for Crivellaro. The latter two, in particular, would release numerous significant records and stand as genuine key reference points for the movement.
Continuing the exploration, it's inevitable to step outside Britain and head towards Germany, Japan and Sweden. Berlin's Jazzanova (with their two labels Compost and Sonar Kollektiv), the duo Kyoto Jazz Massive (founders of Especial Records) and the many names of the Gothenburg scene are the crucial nodes in the global network of contacts that has Goya Distribution as its main hub. A network running parallel to the main channels, developed on the model of the already-legendary Detroit techno collective Underground Resistance, which from the early 2000s turns broken beat into a branching, planet-wide phenomenon with rich local variations.

Born in Auckland in 1974 to a Japanese mother and a New Zealander father, Mark De Clive-Lowe starts studying piano at age four, falls in love with hip-hop in early adolescence, buys a Yamaha drum machine and a Roland PR-100 sequencer, then loses his head over Miles Davis and John Coltrane. By the time he moves to London in 1998, he already has two albums behind him. He immediately slots into the nascent broken beat community: between him and Kaidi Tatham, the two cover the bulk of releases requiring a jazz keyboardist (which is to say, nearly all of them). With Tatham, Daz-I-Kue, Matt Lord, Orin Walters and Seiji he founds Homecookin', who in 2001 release the album "Do What U Wanna". A great many important collaborations separate this release from the album "Tide's Arising", the first of two releases under his own name on Columbia (the other being the remix album "Face", from 2006). A blend of hip-hop, jazz, Afro-Cuban rhythms, shimmering synths and broken rhythms, "Tide's Arising" pushes broken beat musicality into territory that's more gripping and purposeful than ever. Guests on the album include Bémbé Ségué, Kaidi Tatham and two other New Zealanders, Joel and Nathan Haines: the latter is among the first to welcome De Clive-Lowe to London, getting him to collaborate with Goldie within a week of his arrival, and stylistically speaking, he brushes up against broken beat at least on some of the tracks produced by Phil Asher on the albums "Sound Travels" (2000) and "Squire For Hire" (2003).

In 2005 the first mini-album by Legends Of The Underground also comes out — a multimedia project involving dance, storytelling, 3D animation and, on the musical side, Mark De Clive-Lowe, Seiji, Bémbé Ségué and producer Domu. A particularly cinematic and accomplished experiment, helped also by contributions from flautist Finn Peters and guitarist Dave Okumu. The experience would get a sequel in 2007; we'll return shortly to the figures of Domu, Peters and Okumu. Also in 2007 come two other major releases from the keyboardist (so much for 2007 supposedly being the year of bruk's final collapse!): the self-titled album by The Politik and "Journey 2 The Light", a new album under his own name. The former comes out on Antipodean Records and is the fruit of his artistic partnership with Bémbé Ségué, aided on individual tracks by Finn Peters and Daz-I-Kue. It's a direct record with bright, ringing tones, repeatedly stepping away from the customary rhythmic fractures in favour of more aggressive hip-hop beats, a longstanding passion of De Clive-Lowe's. "Journey 2 The Light", on the other hand, is without doubt the most accomplished of his many works from this phase, the record that gathers the ripe fruits of everything accumulated so far. Backed by the ever-versatile Bémbé Ségué, rising bruk drum star Richard Spaven and saxophonist Jason Yarde (formerly with The Politik, today in Heliocentrics), as well as by his trusty Akai MPC3000 drum machine, the keyboardist delivers ten tracks as compelling, luminous and kaleidoscopic as the entrancing cover artwork by Jamaican illustrator Bernard Hoyes.
Mark De Clive-Lowe's career would carry on without flagging in the years that follow, to the point of making him today the leading ambassador of the broken beat gospel among nu jazz fans. But having reached one of his clear high points, it's worth pausing here and moving on to other names.

Alex Attias hails from Lausanne, in the French-speaking canton of Vaud, but moves to London in 1997. By the time he arrives in England, he already has a reputation in the nascent bruk circle: his tracks "Dark Jazzor" and "Jazz With Altitude", released that same year by the duo Bel Air Project, have been played by Gilles Peterson and noted for the unsettling character of their atmospheres. Attias visits the Saga Centre while the studio spaces are still being set up, and is among the very first to join IG Culture and the Goya Distributions offices in the North Kensington basement. Involved, like almost everyone, in numerous collaborations, his key projects in those years are Beatless and Mustang. The former can't really be filed under broken beat, but it does lead him to work with Madlib/Quasimoto on two tracks of the album "Life Mirrors", released in 2001 by Ubiquity — a US label that would gradually take on a significant role for the scene and its evolutions. The album "Back Home", released under the name "Alex Attias Presents Mustang", comes out instead in 2004 on the German label Compost. It's here that Attias's very personal take on bruk emerges most clearly: dark and strongly cinematic (not to say cinematographic), the style of the tracks combines the rhythmic inventiveness of the West London sound with the crate-digger spirit of instrumental hip-hop, and shows a reach for grandeur that comes across as thoroughly original. The artist would later christen his favoured field of action with the fitting phrase cinematic breaks, and in 2002 curates for his own label Visions the compilation "The Chromatic Universe", with tracks produced by Dego, IG and himself that neatly exemplify his stamp. Having returned to Switzerland in 2004, Attias subsequently hosts a late-night show on Swiss national radio, keeping his connections to the scene alive.

By the time Enrico Crivellaro moves to London in the late Nineties, his label Archive is already up and running, as a sublabel of Milan's Dipiù, founded in 1998. Looking for a British distributor, he gets in touch through mutual contacts with Mike Slocombe of Goya — one of his reference points at the time: the deal is done quickly. In the years that follow, the label puts out several notable records from the bruk scene, including singles by Alex Phountzi/Al Da Bubble, Dego/Cousin Cockroach, Mark Force, and early works by new faces such as Nubian Mindz and Domu. It's with the latter that Crivellaro, under his already well-established alias Volcov, starts a partnership: after a few releases credited to both names, this leads into the project Rima, and the album "This World", out in 2003 on Compost. Born from a shared passion for the fusion of Flora Purim, her husband Airto Moreira, and Return To Forever, "This World" tries to reinterpret some of their traits (including, as openly stated, "a certain redundancy") filtered through the sensibilities of the two artists. It's one of the most varied records to emerge from the broken beat field, thanks both to the two artists' willingness to range widely and to their working method (some tracks are handled by one, some by the other, some are created together in London, others produced by bouncing files back and forth across the Channel), and to the vast roster of guests brought in. The ever-present Mark De Clive-Lowe, vocalists Julie Dexter (already heard on New Sector Movements' "Download This") and Nicola Kramer (a regular collaborator with Domu), promising future-jazz talent Georg Levin (with an album due that year on Sonar Kollektiv), and singular bruk-scene characters like Ian O'Brien and Colonel Red (more on both shortly): each of the artists involved brings their own musicality, enriching the record's colourful picture. In the early 2000s, Crivellaro sets up a second label, Neroli, and moves back to Italy: geared towards less conceptual productions, the label releases, among other things, Crivellaro's early output as Isoul8, more tied to deep house than to broken beat. The album, "Balance", arrives in 2006 and, though stylistically distant from the West London sound, features well-known figures from the scene, including Kaidi Tatham on the closing track. Meanwhile, Crivellaro has settled in Milan and started a monthly night at the Pergola social centre, where he brings in a remarkable roster of leading figures from the scene.

A look at these three expats on British soil has led us to encounter further local musicians associated with the scene but previously left out of the analysis. It's worth taking a closer look, then, at British artists, starting with those already mentioned.
Domu is Dominic Stanton, from Bedford. He debuts on Reinforced, and later adopts his better-known alias to mark out his broken beat-style productions. After numerous tracks, in 2001 he releases on 12-inch for 2000 Black "Save It", which establishes itself in the scene for the distinctive character of its rhythmic pattern, with a synthetic clap sitting ahead of the beat. The same year also brings his first album, "Up + Down"; in 2005 comes its follow-up, "Return Of The Rogue". Both are released by his friend Crivellaro's label, Archive. In between, among other things, came "Enter The Umod" (credited to Umod), released in 2004 on Jazzanova's Sonar Kollektiv. The style Domu offers on these albums has, in the flow and construction of the beats, a distinctly hip-hop component, particularly evident on the Umod record, which shows the influence he picked up during a stint in the States.
His work is also marked by standout collaborations, involving other figures of interest. The voices, often tightly bound to the scene: Rebecca Pottinger aka Rasiyah, Valerie Etienne and above all singer Nicola Kramer, who also collaborates with Jazzanova ("Let Your Heart Be Free", 2004, on Sonar Kollektiv). In 2007 Kramer releases an album, "The Other Side", produced precisely by Domu: it's an enjoyable blend of broken beat and downtempo, light yet enveloping thanks also to jazz-inflected vocals (recommended for fans of Zero7). Also significant is the figure of Ian O'Brien, originally from Essex but now based in Japan, an academically trained musician struck by lightning from Weather Report. Having converted to Underground Resistance-style jazz-techno (notable is "Desert Scores", from 1997, with an unusually heavy use of odd time signatures for the field), he arrives, with "Gigantic Days" (1999) and then "A History Of Things To Come" (2001), at a hybrid, nocturnal and evocative formula — not exactly broken, but understandably appreciated within the scene.

Among the female voices, Vanessa Freeman also holds a prominent position. Active since the mid-Nineties, she records with 4Hero, Nathan Haines, Agent K (Kaidi Tatham), Alex Attias, Mark De Clive-Lowe, Bugz, and Pepe Deluxé (the Finnish outfit known today in prog circles, but back then devoted to a curious trip-hop/big beat hybrid). Her solo debut, "Shades", dates back to 2004, moving between soul and downtempo, but gains a clear broken beat push thanks to Phil Asher's production and the support of high-profile session players such as Kaidi Tatham, Mark De Clive-Lowe and Rasiyah.
A story all of its own, on the other hand, is that of Ursula Rucker, a poet and spoken-word artist from Philadelphia who, having already worked in the mid-Nineties with the Roots, begins in 1997 a collaboration with 4Hero that has her lending her voice to all of their broken beat-adjacent albums, and recording with Jazzanova on their debut "In Between". Her own solo records don't fit neatly into the movement, but both artists appear on her second album "Silver Or Lead" (!K7 Records, 2003), and 4Hero are also present on the previous "Supa Sista" (!K7 Records, 2001).

Among the vocalists who contributed most to the scene as guests are Marcus Begg/Ne-Grove and Ovasoul7, most at home in soulful contexts, and the brilliant San Francisco rapper Capitol A. Although appearing on countless collaborations, some of them never released anything purely under their own name; Colonel Red (alias of Nicholas Romillie), however, appears on records by Beatless, Alex Attias, Rima, Bugz, but in 2005 self-releases on People the album "Blue Eye Blak", featuring Rasiyah on a few tracks. It's a nu-soul record with a warm funk feel, to which Romillie gives a fitting bruk flavour by meticulously curating the rhythmic programming. Still within nu-soul territory, the path of London's Omar Christopher Lye-Fook, known artistically as Omar, certainly deserves closer attention. The relevant album here is "Sing (If You Want It)", from 2006: an elegant, richly textured record that applies broken rhythmic devices to disparate influences such as hip-hop, bossa nova, orchestral soul and salsa. Played largely by Lye-Fook himself, it features IG Culture and Pino Palladino on one track, and on others Stevie Wonder favourite, US jazz-rapper Common; overall, it stands as an effective reunion between two different "accent-shifting" schools within early-2000s music: the West London sound and the behind-the-beat approach descended from D'Angelo (with Palladino among its chief architects). The move towards Latin styles — a recurring trait on this record as on others in the movement — also carries real rhythmic weight, since the essence of broken beat lies precisely in layering multiple metres and placing strong accents outside their usual positions in Anglo-Saxon music. Music built on Cuban clave rhythms and Brazilian samba syncopation has explored both elements meticulously for decades, and thus provides a rich archive of possible inspirations.

Also working from soul/r'n'b premises is the offering of Silhouette Brown, namely Dego, Kaidi Tatham and Bémbé Ségué (though the lead voice on the tracks is singer Deborah Jordan). Their self-titled 2005 debut leans into a relaxed mood and honeyed tones, with the odd downtempo accent softened by the inevitable broken rhythms — here more reassuring than ever, if anything. Suspended on an unexpected cloud of singer-songwriter lounge/dub/bossa, the self-titled debut by Tom Noble (Laws Of Motion, 2003) is another interesting border-crossing record, with beats — more or less broken — programmed by Noble, Kaidi Tatham on flute here and there, and Daz-I-Kue at the controls. Sean Khan, aka Sk Radicals, wades instead through jazz-funk, hip-hop rhythms (broken ones included) and soul-inflected vocals on his debut LP "When Will Be Belong?" (People, 2001): a jazz saxophonist, Khan leans on Daz-I-Kue's rhythm programming and the keyboard support of Mark De Clive-Lowe and Kaidi Tatham to put together a multifaceted album that even includes a track produced (remixed, actually) by Volcov.
The project Positive Flow, too, led by British producer and multi-instrumentalist Jesse Reuben Wilson, starts out from nu-soul in its softest, funkiest guise: by the time of its second album "Positivity" (2006), though, it has widened its spectrum to include broken rhythms aplenty, always well blended into a decidedly smooth palette. Then there's the case of Simbad, that is Pierre Louis Stanislas Renouf, a French producer based in London: an organic part of the scene since its very beginning, on his major releases he presents a very soulful style in which the broken element only shows through faintly. Listening to his contributions to Audiomontage's "Snert" (saxophone and writing credits on some of the record's broken episodes, released in 2000), or to his twelve-inches "Peaktime" (2004) and "Sweet Exorcist/Gospel Golpe" (2005), his ease with offbeats becomes clear enough.
A mention certainly also goes to the albums released by Spacek, in particular the second, "Vintage Hi·Tech", out on !K7 Records in 2003: a bouncy broken funk, somewhere between lumbering and ethereal, which shines for the creativity of its programmed beats even if, overall, it risks being more appealing for its sound than for its songwriting. Lack of direction aside, together with the band's immediately preceding releases it marks the start of the intricate artistic journey of Steve White/Steve Spacek, who in the following decades would become one of the main torchbearers and continuers of the bruk style.
Moving into strictly hip-hop territory, more than one project has played with incorporating broken beat elements (after all, the movement has always had hip-hop among its roots). One of the more credible experiments goes by the name Breakthrough and is the creation of three Japanese artists (Daisuke Nakagawa, Jin Yamamoto, Masaya Kobayashi). Leaning on the usual crew of top-tier broken beaters (De Clive-Lowe, Demus, Bémbé Ségué) and a broad cast of MCs, English-speaking and otherwise, the three assemble on their self-titled 2005 album over twenty tracks of solid, varied jazz-rap, with skilful bruk-style accent games and a few proto-wonky shades à la Dilla. Jay Dee's influence is also important for the production choices on Ty's "Upwards" and "Closer" (2003 and 2006 respectively): on these two brilliant albums, with contributions from Mpho, Eska, Bémbé Ségué and horn player Jason Yarde, the rapper's clear yet imaginative flow winds alternately over broken-leaning beats, or over a more straight-up jazz-hop, or markedly unquantized rhythms, and even over an afrobeat number built by Tony Allen himself.

Finn Peters is a jazz-trained saxophonist and flautist with a degree in musicology. From his very first EP under the name New Sector Movements he collaborates with musicians from the Goya circle, and in 2005 releases the album "Bansuri" under the same-named project. Mixed by Matt Lord of the Bugz, alongside the voices of Eska and Bémbé Ségué, it features contributions from Tom Herbert (future member of Acoustic Ladyland and Polar Bear, as well as a recurring figure on the London nu jazz scene) and Tom Skinner (Sons Of Kemet, Melt Yourself Down, The Smile) on drums. The following year, for the debut under his own name, "Su-Ling", both Herbert and Skinner return, joined by Dave Okumu on guitar. We'll meet all three of these figures again further on, but for now two tracks ("La guerre" and the title track) from the second album "One Step Forward" (2003) by nu-soul project Les Nubians will suffice. On these two tracks by sisters Hélène and Célia Faussart appear: Finn Peters, Bémbé Ségué, Dave Okumu, Tom Herbert, with production by IG Culture and mixing by Demus.
Peters bends the bruk rhythmic insights into a strongly jazz-oriented key, folding metric fragmentation into an elegant, controlled sound that gradually moves away from the funk and hip-hop influences of the artists already examined, turning instead towards minimalism, South Asian music ("bansuri" is the name of an Indian flute), and an expressive leanness inherited from third stream. Among the musician's many collaborations, one that stands out is with DJ Tom Szirtes in the project Shur-i-kan: on the second album, "Waypoints", released on Freerange Records in 2004, Peters enriches with his flute the London producer's graceful future-jazz constructions, which move between broken beat and stripped-down deep house.

Now it's time to venture into some of the more progressive - or, if you prefer, hybridized, unclassifiable, leftfield - releases produced in Britain during those years. If broken beat itself was born and developed as frontier territory, in these works it becomes just one of many ingredients in even more adventurous, recombinant explorations. A starting point that ties together many of the names already mentioned is the story of Two Banks Of Four, launched right around the new millennium by Dillip Harris/Demus and Rob Gallagher/Earl Zinger, leaders of the recently disbanded acid jazz pioneers Galliano. Across three albums, the project charts a new musical horizon, which on "City Watching" (2000) takes the shape of a highly imaginative and abstract jazzstep/downtempo, yet expressive, enveloping and always very tactile in its timbres. This is due above all to the remarkable instrumental personalities of the musicians involved, the real added value of the record and the project: among them, double bassist Andy Hammil, saxophonist Chris Bowden and former Galliano keyboardist Ski Oakenfull. On the following "Three Street Worlds" (2003), a broken beat component surfaces, if only on a few tracks, and the cast is updated: also joining in are Valerie Etienne on vocals and, alternating with Hammil, bassist Robin Mullarkey. Among the guests is also saxophonist Chris Bowden, who in 2002 had just released the avant-jazz album "Slightly Askew" on Ninja Tune, with influences from the scene. Two Banks Of Four's trajectory is a very elegant one, immediately appreciated by the press keen on this kind of refined sound, but it's with the third album "Junkyard Gods" (2008, also released on Sonar Kollektiv) that the partnership, rebranded 2bo4, reaches its peak. Released unfortunately just as attention to bruk was already waning, the album is star-studded from the lineup alone: Demus and Zinger (of course), Valerie Etienne, Bémbé Ségué, Ski Oakenfull, Finn Peters, Jason Yarde, Robin Mullarkey, Tom Herbert, Tom Skinner - a synthesis of the most jazz-leaning front of broken beat, past, present and future. The compositions are ambitious, intricate, full of unexpected openings and passages that are utterly consuming in their timbres. Straight No Chaser founder Paul Bradshaw wrote of it: "Seek out 'Junkyard Gods' immediately: there are multiple rewards in the twilight zone of their evocative urban landscapes." If we wanted to venture into unlikely comparisons, we could imagine a union between y2k rhythms and a palette in the style of Bark Psychosis, hushed and then blown apart. Or a revival (deliberate? entirely accidental?) of that tightrope-walking balance that had characterized the most mature phase of British progressive jazz-rock (Nucleus, Neil Ardley, late-period Soft Machine), so skilled at moving along the line between calculation and fire, spirituality and detachment. The most fitting comparison, though, would probably be with Jason Swinscoe's Cinematic Orchestra, but with an emphasis on experimentation and rhythm in place of that caressing, seductive quality which (together with their home on Ninja Tune) allowed the Orchestra to achieve greater fame.
Two Banks Of Four's transition from the post-jungle framework of their debut to the even richer sound of their later records is anticipated by another Demus project, titled Numbers, responsible for a single, self-titled album released in 2001 on Main Squeeze. Again backed by Oakenfull and Mullarkey, Demus here explores a funk/soul/jazz with a live, kaleidoscopic sound, bringing together decidedly vintage-flavored afro cues with metric fragmentation and contemporary jazz flourishes of a far more metropolitan taste.

Mullarkey also makes a fleeting appearance on the second album by Robert Mitchell's Panacea, "Trust" (2005). The line-up, which also includes Silhouette Brown vocalist Deborah Jordan, is rooted in a contemporary but rather orthodox strain of jazz; the presence of drummer Richard Spaven, however, tips more than one track into broken-leaning territory. Alongside Mullarkey, the same record features Eska, rapper Ty and Norma Winstone of Azimuth, a cult name in late-Seventies British jazz.
Mullarkey's most cohesive contribution to bruk-style experimentation, however, lies in his personal project, Brotherly. Their debut album, "One Sweet Life", came out in 2007 and marks one of the most intricately embroidered chapters of the entire movement. Across more than an hour of music, the bassist and pianist/singer Anna Stubbs (both jazz graduates of prestigious colleges of music) conjure a luminous, energising sonic alchemy. Support from Dave Okumu, Eska, Ty, Earl Zinger and Finn Peters – plus an Mpc 3000 handling the rhythmic parts – proves essential in shaping a groove that is both funky and funambulistic, one capable of giving CoOp nights one of their anthems ("Put It Out", released as a single in 2005) while also setting a new benchmark for metric complexity. The opening track in particular, "System", is still cited today as an extremely challenging drumming showcase, and more than a decade on it has been the subject of countless reinterpretations and breakdowns on YouTube.

Moving now toward an increasingly electronic front: Welsh producer Branwen Munn, working under the alias Somatik, appears alongside 4Hero on their much-loved "Creating Patterns" (2001). She contributes with Bémbé Ségué, Dego (on "This Ain't Tom N' Jerry", a twelve-inch regarded as legendary by bruk die-hards), Phil Asher, Alex Attias, DKD, Nu Era (aka Marc Mac of 4Hero), Silhouette Brown, Mark De-Clive Lowe (for whom she mixes "Tide's Arising") and eventually finds room for a solo album of her own. "Learning The Colours" came out in 2007 and was entirely written, played and produced by Munn. It's a release with a distinctly synthetic character which, while still holding on to fusion chords, sets aside both the hip-hop leanings and the jazzy languor of the movement's early productions, leaning instead heavily into funk drive and the aggressive potential of digital sounds.
Another cultivator of the more electro-leaning corners of the broken beat map is Maddslinky, aka Dave Jones, also known as Zed Bias – under which name he was likewise a pioneer of Uk garage and dubstep. Between the turn of the millennium and the years that followed, his singles under both aliases narrowed the gap between the two scenes, heightening the role of offbeats in the 2-step/dubstep transition and leaning into the bass-driven side of the broken sound. As the West London sound's popularity waned, his ability to embrace other styles kept him a reference name, and one of the first artists a new generation of musicians would look to roughly a decade later when rediscovering the trend. His debut album "Make Your Peace" (Laws Of Motion, 2003) already offers an effective blend: 2-step bounce, jarring rhythmic fractures and low-end shudders perfect for galvanising the dancefloor. Rather more soulful and restrained is "Feel It Out", released the same year under the name Phuturistix alongside dj Injekta: nonetheless, it manages to slip in a couple of decent bangers, built on a sparkling garage sound with horns up front and broken beats.

Having widened the field to producers with a more electronic bent, the conversation branches out further. Especially within house and techno, many artists have borrowed the odd element to give their grooves a broken-sounding edge, even without deeply altering their accent patterns. Rather than listing every single musician who has added a touch of broken flavour to their regular four-to-the-floor, we'll try to highlight a few particularly relevant names, either because they pushed further than others in bending rhythmic structures, or simply because they're often cited as reference points in the field.
The contribution of certain pioneering figures, such as Ltj Bukem (Danny Williamson) and Nubian Mindz (Colin Lindo), can't be properly grasped by focusing only on their album-length releases, which in both cases connect to broken beat only tangentially. To understand their role in the scene one has to look elsewhere: in Bukem's case, for instance, to the "Earth" compilation series, whose first volume, released as early as 1996, gathers downtempo, drum'n'bass and future jazz tracks that give a sense of the primordial soup from which the earliest bruk would emerge. For Nubian Mindz, it's twelve-inches like "Black Science" (Archive, 1999), "Interstellar Blackness" (2000 Black, 1999), "Forgotten Parts" (Archive, 2000) or "Check Da Vibe" (2000 Black, 2001) that convey a path embracing offbeat play while moving freely between IDM, techno and drum'n'bass, thereby creating a template for future productions.

One of the artists most often associated with the broken beat label in this area is Kirk Degiorgio, aka As One, who has built a well-regarded techno career dating back to the early Nineties. Release after release, the producer draws closer to future jazz, weaving asymmetric breakbeats into his ambient textures: the enthralling, vital jazz-techno of "Planetary Folklore" (1997) can certainly be seen as a forerunner of the entire broken sound. The albums "21st Century Soul" (Ubiquity, 2001) and "Out Of The Darkness" (Ubiquity, 2004) move increasingly closer to proper bruk patterns. Though the first of the two is the more fondly remembered record, the second is the more varied and complete, with oblique, shifting beats that, while staying lean, adapt to contexts as distant as hip-hop, sprawling fusion, r'n'b and IDM. "Elegant Systems" (2005) and the following "Planetary Folklore 2" (Archive, 2006) mark a gradual drift away from the movement, with the latter once again expanding its rhythmic constructions, absorbing the lessons of the CoOp crowd while also moving beyond them. Although broken beat represents just one phase of Degiorgio's sprawling discography, his influence and his sets have inspired dozens of producers both inside and outside the bruk sphere.

Modaji, aka Dominic Hugo Jacobson, was among the first djs to take part in CoOp and one of the members of the Restless Soul house production team. As a solo artist he's been active since 1997 with various twelve-inches on Laws Of Motion, on which his blend of future jazz, downtempo and lounge takes increasingly jagged rhythmic routes. Many tracks from that period are collected on his second album "Pre-Sets" (2000), including those from the "Lost Soul" Ep which, the year before – thanks in part to Kaidi Tatham's presence – had marked his definitive entry into bruk territory. His self-titled debut album also came out in 2000 on Laws Of Motion and features, besides Tatham, a far heavier dose of broken beats, in a production that nonetheless remains suspended between downtempo and deep house.
The "bruk turn" in Russ Gabriel's techno/house path instead arrives around the "We Will Be Turning" Ep, released in 2001. The track was later included on the album "Into The Unknown" (2002), which shows his personal take on the sound, with more properly broken episodes sitting alongside seductive jazz-house tracks featuring latin percussion and, often, a prominent funky streak. The following "The Other Side Project Volume One" (2004), released as Russ Gabriel's Audio Spectrum, delves further into rhythmic meandering, keeping the light mood of the previous record while raising the futuristic bar with more unpredictable, lean and syncopated percussive lines.
The legendary ambient electronica duo Global Communication, made up of Mark Pritchard and Tom Middleton, also flirt with broken sounds: after a few experiments by Pritchard alone in 2004 on the album released as Troubleman, 2006 saw the recording of the live mix "Fabric 26", which alternates rhythmically calmer sections with episodes of highly segmented beats (featuring tracks by As One, Shur-I-Kan, Steve Spacek). Not long after, Pritchard would return to the fray with Steve Spacek himself in the rhythmic fragmentations of the Africa Hitech project, examined further on in this article.
Finally, one of the movement's most organic reworkings is tied to Martin Iveson, aka Atjazz, a leading figure with an album and numerous short releases straddling techno and jazzy house in the late Nineties. That path led in 2000 to the bruk single "Touch The Sun" and, the following year, to the second Lp "Labfunk", which contains it. Both album and track show a recombinant mutation of the sturdy tech-house beats of some of his earlier productions, alongside a greater emphasis on jazz shadings, with horn contributions from multi-instrumentalist Peter Wraight (later enlisted by several other artists in the scene). Lean and multifaceted in sound, the record feels warm and abstract at once, thoroughly deep house yet possessed of its own soul that sets it apart from every other release in the field. In 2007, "Full Circle" (which followed the 2002 remix album "LabResults") marked a partial move away from bruk, but retained his personal approach to the beat, playing with new reconfigurations that also saw the producer engage with other significant figures on the European scene, including Clara Hill and Ernesto, who will be explored shortly.

Part Two: Other Latitudes

Germany

Setting sail to explore the scenes that developed outside the United Kingdom, the first stop is necessarily Berlin. This is where the Jazzanova collective is based, the most emblematic outfit of the "German path" to broken beat. Even more than in the British variant, artists here place remix culture front and centre and blur the boundaries between genres. Devotees of cross-pollination and of keeping one foot in two (or well more than two) camps, the scene's key figures cut records that are often hard to classify entirely within the movement, because they simultaneously push forward others too: distinguishing between downtempo, house, lounge and broken beat becomes largely a moot exercise, since the very essence of these musicians' sensibility lies precisely in treating these styles as one and the same thing. Their projects unfold through constant, mutual reworkings in the form of singles, Eps, remix albums and mixtapes. Focusing only on the classic studio album, in short, would give a very partial picture of the scene's actual vitality – a scene whose horizon doesn't stop at the capital but takes in several other cities across the country, with the Bugaloo club in Pfarrkirchen, Bavaria, as its clubbing reference point.

Jazzanova formed in 1995 as a team of six djs: Alexander Barck, Claas Brieler, Jürgen Von Knoblauch, Roskow Kretschmann, Stefan Leisering and Axel Reinemer. The name is taken from the title of the sole album by the Ira Kris Group, a latin jazz outing recorded in Munich and released in 1972 (an early sign of the Berlin dj ensemble's fondness for historical jazz and South American styles).
In 1996 the six began producing their own music, mainly to have fresh tracks to slot into their sets. In 1997 they set up their own label, Sonar Kollektiv, and the following year a second one – Jazzanova Compost Records – in partnership with German label Compost Records. Initially the latter leaned towards more jazz-oriented sounds while the former focused on electronic productions; over time, however, Jazzanova chose to concentrate solely on Sonar Kollektiv, and in 2003 they wound down the joint venture with Compost.
The band's working method calls for each track to pair one member acting as "dj" with another as producer, while the rest weigh in with feedback. From this modus operandi comes just one proper album fully attributable to the broken beat movement: the debut Lp "In Between", released on Jazzanova Compost Records in 2002. Built entirely on samples and software sequencing, it stands as one of the movement's greatest achievements, dense with collaborations and, above all, brilliant flashes of creativity. Zigzagging and multifaceted, the tracks rarely end on the same vibe they opened with – not without stringing together quite a parade of surprises along the way, at the very least. The many guests, some already encountered (Ursula Rucker, Valerie Etienne, Rob Gallagher, Capitol A) and others yet to be explored (Clara Hill, Hajime Yoshizawa, Vikter Duplaix), take turns over rhythmic beds that are a constant puzzle of interlocking parts, often crooked and enigmatic, but always exceptionally groovy.
Other styles dominate both the earlier releases (the self-titled Eps of 1997 and 1998) and the later albums, but the band's own highly personal broken beat is well represented on the compilation "The Remixes 2002-2005" (Sonar Kollektiv, 2005) and on the mixtape "…Broad Casting From OFFtrack Radio" (Sonar Kollektiv, 2007). The former gathers reworkings of a varied roster of artists including Masters At Work, Calexico and Free Design; the latter sees Jazzanova joined by Dirk Rumpff, a producer and event organiser in Marburg, Munich and Berlin. Rumpff is also a radio host, and the collection draws its inspiration directly from the playlists of his fortnightly show "OFFtrack", hosted on one of the earliest web radio stations. The selection features many significant names from the Sonar circle (Outlines, Slope, Deyampert, Clara Hill) and spans a spectrum running from fully-fledged bruk to the peculiar folktronica/modern classical hybrid of composer Volker Bertelmann/Hauschka. "Remixed" (Sonar Kollektiv, 2003), finally, flips the perspective: this time it's Jazzanova themselves being "remixed", across more than two hours of music offering the band's tracks reworked by key figures of the movement and, surprisingly, even by Stereolab.

Branching out from Jazzanova, one can reach almost every major figure on the German scene. Among the first to cross paths with them is Clara Hill, a Berlin-based singer with an acid jazz background but solo inclinations leaning towards a kind of folk/r'n'b singer-songwriter style. Her debut album, "Restless Times", came out in 2004 on Sonar Kollektiv and involved most of Jazzanova in its making. In particular, the backing tracks for nearly every song are programmed by Stefan Leisering, mastermind of the Berlin collective, who crafts a relaxed yet seductive mood for the record, with medium/low Bpms made intriguing by anticipations and irregular accents. On the second album, "All I Can Provide" (Sonar Kollektiv, 2006), the artist is instead joined by several other producers from the scene, for a record that stirs emotions similar to its predecessor but overall features less jagged beats. Even more intimate and hushed is "Sideways" (Sonar Kollektiv, 2007), recorded as Clara Hill's Folkways: the all-acoustic-leaning formula is intriguing, but by this point there's very little broken about it, despite Marc Mac of 4Hero appearing on one track.
Digging into the individual paths of Jazzanova's members turns up other stimulating projects. Take Kosma, an intriguing borderline experience conducted solo by Roscow (born Thomas) Kretschmann. Active since the mid-Nineties with a shadowy, downtempo-leaning future jazz, the one-man band starts weaving in some broken schemes on the second album "Early Works" (2002), eventually expanding their presence on the closing "News Aspects" (2005). Here the sound is especially imaginative and expansive, with orchestral colourings, Middle Eastern elements and even operatic touches, always used sparingly: what emerges is music in which a constant atmospheric vocation dialogues with a creeping restlessness, fuelled by unpredictability and by the importance of its rhythmic component.
Also notable is the trajectory of Extended Spirit, the brainchild of Reinemer and Leisering, who appear as featured guests on several records tied to the scene: their sole album, "Solid Water" (1999), captures their sound in an interesting pre-bruk phase, in which drum'n'bass rhythms show signs of breaking apart and recombining, for now channelled into a hushed but subtly tension-laden downtempo/jazzstep. Extended Spirit themselves, along with Leisering working solo, turn up on the sole album by Deyampert, "Shapes & Colors", released on Sonar Kollektiv in 2003. A former US serviceman stationed in Germany, he studied at the Mannheim campus of the University of Maryland and, after a spell in Australia, turned to music production, delivering this album full of soulful colours and rich acoustic orchestration. Broken rhythms are certainly not the main ingredient of the formula, but they surface naturally on a few tracks, adding a futuristic dimension to the sound.

The other heavyweight name on the German scene is Beanfield, namely Michael Reinboth, Jan Krause and Tobias Meggle, all three based in Munich. Michael Reinboth owns Compost Records, and that's where the band has released all its output since the mid-Nineties. The first record to show clear broken traits is, as early as 1999, the second album "Human Patterns": eleven tracks of abstract, jazzy deep house, in which intricate grooves full of slippage take centre stage in the alchemy of the songs. The following "Seek" (2004) preserves the trio's personality, effectively developing the rhythmic component in a perhaps less convoluted but more incisive and driving direction. Both records feature the voice of Bajika, a poet and singer of Indian descent (raised, however, between Portugal and South Africa), who in 2010 uses her own album ("In Wonderland") to fuse acid jazz, acoustic timbres and occasional rhythmic fractures.
Also released on Compost in 2004 is the sole album under the name Wei – Chi, namely American Raoul Walton, who relocated to Germany and teamed up with producer Ben Mono (Paul Beller, with another Lp of his own on Compost) to make the record. Produced mostly by Ben Mono, but on two tracks by Beanfield too, "One Eye, Two Eyes" gives bruk material a solid electro-house cut, beefing up the bass and straightening out the rhythms (without losing their limping gait).
Decidedly more laid-back is the Augsburg duo Les Gammas, whose sole album "Exercices de styles" (Compost, 2000) brings in Jan Krause as sound engineer and leans towards an elegant, comfortable jazz/lounge sound, with the odd foray into cinematic spy music that happily adopts broken rhythms to boost the tracks' dynamism.

Time's reconstructions also place Trüby Trio – Rainer Trüby, Roland Appel and Christian Prommer – at the heart of the scene. The Freiburg trio released just one album, "Elevator Music", out on Compost in 2003, which, though only a handful of tracks display broken beat's hallmarks, makes clear why the association sticks: amid flamenco, bossa nova and Afro-Cuban echoes, their latin-flavoured, live-feel nu jazz is built entirely on rhythmic accents shifted away from Anglo-Saxon norms. Their remix collaborations with other artists from the scene, plus the "Dj-Kicks" mix released back in 2001, featuring tracks by Afronaught and Modaji, confirm the group's interest in bruk and underline its defining trait: standing with one foot in and one foot out.
Also from Freiburg are Intuit, a producer duo devoted to a pure fusion formula: their self-titled debut (Compost, 2004) enlists an impressive array of jazz musicians, including Airto Moreira and Flora Purim. Only some of the tracks feature broken rhythms, but the record, ranging from afrobeat to funk to latin jazz, holds together with admirable coherence.
Another project that drew attention from the press of the time is Inverse Cinematics, the work of Stuttgart producer and dj Danilo Plessow (better known, in fact, under his alternative moniker Motor City Drum Ensemble). His output consists of a handful of brilliant, inventive and cutting bruk/house twelve-inches and Eps ("Slow Swing", "Shoot The Pianist", "Detroit Jazzin'", "Airways", "Ep 1"), the "long Ep" "Vogelhaufen" (2005) and the album "Passin' Through" (2008), which also gathers some of the earlier material alongside newer tracks leaning more towards hip-hop.
The duo Slope, meanwhile, hail from Berlin, with two albums out on Sonar Kollektiv. The most relevant is "Komputa Groove" (2005): a house/hip-hop hybrid featuring Clara Hill and Ovasoul7, with an elastic spin given to the beats through unusual anticipations and accents. One last borderline, and thus hard-to-classify, project goes by the name [re:jazz] and is helmed by Frankfurt-based dj and jazz pianist Mathias Vogt. The project's main releases are jazz reinterpretations of electronic tracks; alongside these, however, Vogt also curates remix albums in which the reinterpretations are further reshuffled by deep house and broken beat producers. The first "Re:mix" (2003) features, among others, Nicola Conte, Les Gammas and Russ Gabriel; on "Electrified" (2010) it's the turn of Shur-I-Kan and Atjazz, as well as Swedish outfit Swell Session (already featured on "Re:mix").

Japan

Setting off for Japan, one name stands as an essential reference point, and it is certainly Kyoto Jazz Massive. The group was founded in 1992 by two producer brothers, Shuya and Yoshihiro Okino, fans of Steely Dan and followers of rare groove and Japan's thriving acid jazz scene, itself a direct continuation of the fusion sound of previous decades. Their story is bound up with the British scene from the very start: it was in fact radio dj Gilles Peterson who suggested the duo's future name, during a Japanese tour by Galliano, signing an autograph with a joking nickname. And it was Peterson himself, a few years later, who promoted the band's music in the United Kingdom, in tandem with the exponents of the West London sound.
Their first release, in 1994, was a compilation of acid jazz and jazz-rap, partly produced or remixed by the brothers. Even once the two began making their own music, still relying on expert jazz musicians, keyboardist Hajime Yoshizawa chief among them, the acid jazz component remained dominant, as did their admiration for slightly earlier funk/fusion outfits such as the United Future Organization of Raphael Sebbag, Toshio Matsuura and Tadashi Yabe. Around 2000, broken beat elements start creeping into their tracks: the Ep "Substream" (Compost, 2001) contains no fewer than two Afronaught remixes, but the title track itself already carries a fairly syncopated rhythm. The recordings from the very early 2000s form the basis of the first album in the conventional sense, "Spirit Of The Sun", whose credits include Alex Attias, Vanessa Freeman and Hajime Yoshizawa. The two brothers handle direction and programming, threading the musicians' elegant fusion style with sparkling, futuristic rhythmic fractures.
More at home in curating and djing, the two subsequently focused mainly on launching their own label, Especial Records, founded in 2000, and on compiling selections, including two collections of covers and remixes of their own tracks by major names in the field: "Re Kjm (Tribute Tracks)" and "By Kjm (Remix Tracks)", from 2004 and 2005 respectively.

It's on Especial that one finds the other leading figures of the Japanese broken beat scene. Among them are some of Hajime Yoshizawa's solo productions and the albums by his group Sleep Walker. The latter is a quartet of jazz musicians: besides Yoshizawa on keyboards, it comprises Fujii Nobuaki on drums, Masato Nakamura on sax and flute, and Tomokazu Fujimoto on bass (replaced from the second album onward by Kiyoshi Ikeda). Their style is a fluid fusion with a distinctly bebop verve, full of broad, singable, virtuosic passages. Broken beat influences surface only through Nobuaki's whirlwind drumming, which keeps a jazzy, swinging foundation while handling accents in a loose and often surprising way, blending bossa nova with echoes of London clubs. Three Lps were released: "Sleepwalker" (2003), "The Voyage" (2006, featuring guests Bémbé Ségué and Pharoah Sanders) and finally "Works" (2007, again with Bémbé Ségué and a few tracks by other artists, remixed by Sleep Walker).
In Yoshizawa's career, particular attention has gone to the 2005 album "Music From The Edge Of The Universe", on which broken beats often leap right to the fore thanks to the composer's meticulous programming. Energetic, airy and vividly coloured, the record boasts dazzling interplay and a guest list that includes Sleep Walker bandmates, saxophonists Jason Yarde and Nathan Haines, Vanessa Freeman, and singer Akiko (for whom Yoshizawa had crafted a decidedly bruk remix of the "Lupin III" theme, included on her debut album "Upstream").
Sleep Walker's path crosses further with Kyoto Jazz Massive in a curious project led by Shuya Okino under his own name. The album "United Legends" (2006) brings together Clara Hill, Phil Asher, Bugz, Domu and Mark De Clive-Lowe in a collaborative experiment that looks fascinating on paper but turns out rather flat in practice (perhaps due to the near-total absence of broken beats?). More successful is the album of jazz reinterpretations curated by Sleep Walker, released in 2007.

The last major name on the Japanese scene is Jazztronik, aka Ryota Nozaki, a dj, pianist and producer from Kawaguchi, a city in the hinterland just north of Tokyo. Having recently graduated in music theory and composition from Nihon University College Of Art, in 1999 he released his debut album "Numero Uno", establishing himself in Europe too as one of the leading figures of the global club jazz scene. His name is linked to the broken beat phenomenon above all thanks to "Samurai", a track released as a single in 2004 and included on his fifth album "七色" (2004). The title, "nanairo", corresponds in Japanese to the seven colours of the rainbow: a fitting choice given the breadth of spectrum and radiant character of the music that makes up the record.
Having come to jazz through Return To Forever and to electronic music through the Yellow Magic Orchestra, Nozaki shows, in terms of expressive range, a clear continuity with the brightness of his inspirations. The airy quality and strong melodic effectiveness are the record's common threads, tying together tracks of graceful fusion and episodes more geared towards deep house, songs sung in Japanese and others in English with more international ambitions. The instrumental "Samurai – 侍" is one of the record's several forays into broken beat, and it's easy to see how its energetic pace and the melodic strength of its piano and keyboard themes convinced dj Gilles Peterson to push it on his radio playlists. "en:Code" (2005) is another representative album in Nozaki's varied discography: almost an hour and twenty minutes of music in which catchiness and complexity meet an approach that is more funky and rhythmically elaborate than ever. The style is a progressive and thoroughly omnivorous house music, bringing together direct contributions from Rob Gallagher, Valerie Etienne, Ski Oakenfull (as sound engineer), as well as legendary Brazilian singer-songwriter Marcos Valle and (as additional programmer) house dj and producer Yukihiro Fukutomi. The latter also plays a part in the overall picture of the Japanese scene: his albums "On A Trip" (2000), "Timeless" (2001) and "Equality" (2004) include, within a generally upbeat and danceable style, a good dose of unusual percussive breaks, even if not strictly broken. The rest of the records mentioned are dominated by handclaps and fairly straight rhythms, but the dj has been called upon to remix tracks by Jazzanova and [re:jazz], and his own tracks appear on authoritative retrospective compilations of the broken beat strand. A sign of how blurred the category has always been, and how, especially the further one moves from its centre, the transition into other styles happens seamlessly.

Sweden

The third and final unmissable stop on our guided tour: Gothenburg. Sweden's second city, with roughly half a million inhabitants sitting more or less halfway between Copenhagen and Oslo, is the place where a small but rich and creative scene took shape – a musical ferment enthusiastic enough to give itself a name: Gonkyburg. God + funky + Gothenburg, where "god" is the Swedish word for pleasant, easygoing, delightful. A circle where everyone knows everyone, and where, at least at first, the pleasure of producing and playing among friends far outweighed any competitive drive (with the arrival of the first commercial breakthroughs, things would change).
A wonderful article on Freer Sounds goes a long way in reconstructing the scene's story. Its beginnings can be traced back to the late Nineties, when two young electronic music enthusiasts rented a space in the former butter factory at Redbergsplatsen, in the eastern part of the city, to turn it into their own production studio. The two were Joel Eriksson (aka Jol) and Jonas Quant (who would release music simply under his surname), and it seems it was Quant himself who came up with the name that would become the banner for the whole scene: Gonkyburg Studios. From the outset, the music produced at the Studios bore the mark of a passion for British music of those years: trip-hop, drum'n'bass… But also more vintage listening such as Vangelis, Grandmaster Flash, and Detroit techno. And the nu jazz that Gilles Peterson championed on his radio shows, which would be a reference point for many artists of the emerging scene.
The sound that developed, and which found its own personality from the early 2000s onward, is a highly varied hybrid of house and downtempo, with plenty of jazz elements both in its colouring and in its frequent use of conventional instrumentation alongside the usual tools of the electronic producer's trade (software and hardware). As other like-minded artists began populating the city's club nights, a further distinctive trait emerged compared to similar scenes elsewhere in the world: the centrality of songwriting, which never dissolved into instrumental flows aimed purely at the dancefloor but always kept the song as its horizon. The music of Quant, Jol, Swell Session, Hird, Ernesto, Plej, Cloud, Little Dragon, Nils Krogh and their collaborative projects came out on local labels (Dot and Hollow Recordings chief among them) or, especially once the scene began gaining visibility, on labels with greater international reach (Britain's Exceptional and Stockholm-based DNM – Dealers Of Nordic Music). Crossovers between musicians were frequent; as for singers, they tended to get called on by pretty much everyone – the most sought-after voices being those of Ernesto/Jonatan Bäckelie, Elsa Hedberg, Mimi Terris and Japanese-Swedish singer Yukimi Nagano. Broken beats are just one of the many ingredients in Gonkyburg's stylistic melting pot: essential for some artists, a distant echo – if present at all – for others. In choosing which names to explore in depth, actual relevance to the bruk strand was given priority over purely qualitative judgement (that said, listening to "Moving On" by Hird/Christoffer Berg – warm and cold jazz/house at once, featuring Yukimi Nagano on vocals – comes highly recommended regardless).

Quant is the first artist from the Gonkyburg circle to release music. Initially devoted to techno, he later found his own style with a fusion of house, downtempo, future jazz and melodic electronica, in territory not far from Röyksopp. Although he is one of the scene's key names, his forays into broken beat are concentrated mainly in two twelve-inches, "Funkster Ep" (Hollow Recordings, 2002) and "Tryin'" (2004). Some tracks from the latter also appear on his second album "Getting Out" (2004), which contains a few other episodes with fractured rhythms.
His fellow traveller Jol's path, by contrast, was closer to the strand from his very first singles in 2000, and became even more so with the twelve-inch "Cool Cat" (2002), which included a remix by Swell Session. The release of the album "Moody Aow" (2003) added new tracks in a decidedly bruk-oriented style to reworkings of previously released material. Melodic and funky, yet at the same time full of shadows and drizzly atmospheres, the record exemplifies the most brilliant aspects of the Gothenburg sound of those years. An imaginative mix able to sound at once metropolitan and homely and, thanks to a successful blend of moods, jazzy, vintage and hypermodern.

Swell Session is dj and producer Andreas Saag, originally from Hönö, a small island in the archipelago off Gothenburg. He played piano from a young age, then discovered jazz and electronic music thanks to his father's passion for it (which allowed him to use an Atari computer with Cubase to compose his first tracks). He enrolled in the music programme at Hvitfeldtska gymnasiet, Gothenburg's largest and oldest high school – the same one attended by much of the future Gonkyburg crowd. He grew interested in techno and Warp sounds, then got in touch with Quant and Jol, and in 2000 took a small room at the Gonkyburg Studios. He also met Stefan Bede of the Dot label, who was planning to launch a new label, Hollow Recordings. Bede suggested aiming for a sound closer to jazz, and Saag, who adores Herbie Hancock and had followed Jazzanova's early releases, began working on his own hybrid sound. His arrival at broken beat came only some time later, the result of a trip to London with Jonatan Bäckelie, staying with a musician friend. Discovering CoOp convinced them that this was the style to pursue. Their friend was puzzled – if you already have your own style, why copy someone else's! – but when the two released the single "Let Me Decide" on Hollow Recordings in 2002, it was clear their synthesis was anything but derivative. The track launched two hallmarks of the Saag style: broken rhythms with echoes of tribal techno and an ultra-funky Rhodes piano – here played in extremely low octaves. The West London scene took notice, and those very CoOp nights that had inspired the track made Swell Session and Ernesto hype names in the field.
In the years that immediately followed, Saag was in demand for various remixes (Shur-I-Kan, Jol, [re:jazz], even Ennio Morricone), mostly to be found – alongside "Let Me Decide" – on "Selected Singles & Remixes", released in 2010 on London's Freerange Records. Saag's first record to appear on the label was the debut of his electro/trip-hop project Stateless, in 2003. Backed by all of Gonkyburg's key voices, the album combines jazziness and electronic grit, exploring a downtempo take on Saag's bruk sound that hadn't found room until then. It was in 2007, however, that the album under the Swell Session name arrived, "Swell Communications": an hour and ten minutes of music that, had a good thirty per cent been trimmed, could have been a minor classic of its era. Bringing together Domu and Elsa Hedberg, the obvious Jonatan Bäckelie and Rob Gallagher, Masato Nakamura of Sleep Walker and Mark De Clive-Lowe, Saag put together a quintessential mixed bag of toothless tracks and bruk bombs ranging from trip-hop to raggamuffin to a rather broken take on electro-swing.
More cohesive, but with fewer high points, is the solo debut of Ernesto, simply titled "Album" and released on Hollow Recordings in 2004. Bäckelie produces or co-produces many of the tracks, but the credits feature all the names from Gonkyburg Studios, as well as Mimi Terris (who plays trumpet on one track). Varied and intimate despite its occasionally frantic rhythms, the album has its fair share of broken beats, but never gets stuck on a single stylistic template. Bäckelie, for his part, loves to vary things up, as shown by the geographical range of the features he takes part in over the following years: between 2004 and 2006 alone he records with Beanfield, [re:jazz], Yukihiro Fukutomi, Kyoto Jazz Massive, Swell Session, Atjazz.
In 2005 he released "A New Blues" on Exceptional, a bizarre broken blues experiment perhaps not entirely successful, but undoubtedly daring; in 2006 came "Find The Form", which, while sounding by now quite far removed from bruk, involves Seiji and Rob Mullarkey, Yukihiro Fukutomi, Atjazz, Mark De Clive-Lowe and Shuya Okino of Kyoto Jazz Massive, as well as Nils Krogh, Christoffer Berg/Hird, Elsa Hedberg and the ever-present Saag.

Gonkyburg's early successes changed the mood of the scene: competition began to creep in among the artists, and over time some started to feel they were making music mainly to please radio djs (Gilles Peterson above all), hoping to be "launched" towards better commercial prospects. The role of the label Dnm – Dealers Of Nordic Music also contributed to the transformation: by promoting individual tracks from the scene within "Nordic lounge" compilations, it widened the artists' audience but at the same time repositioned their style, pushing it in a more cool and prepackaged direction. The shift in horizons became definitive with the small breakthrough of Similou, the pop project of Jol and Erik Niklasson of Plej: their synth-pop single "All This Love", released in 2004 on Dnm but reissued in 2006 in the UK by a Sony sublabel, reached number twenty on the British chart. By that point, though, the scene's personality and cohesion had already long since started to unravel. Gonkyburg, in short, was already a thing of the past.

Unattached to the Gothenburg scene, but connected to the international landscape through Jazzanova and, once again, Gilles Peterson, Erik Wahlforss (aka Forss) is an interesting outsider to the strand – destined, however, to become a central figure in the digital music ecosystem: today he is best known as co-founder of SoundCloud alongside fellow Stockholmer Alexander Ljung. At the turn of the millennium, Wahlforss spent a year travelling around Europe by train, crashing at friends' places, sampling their record collections and using the samples to compose music on his laptop. He already had a deal with Sonar Kollektiv, and what emerged from that experience was "Soulhack", his first LP, released in 2003. The album is accomplished and original: a singular glitch-jazz whose recombinant beats conceal fragments of Bill Evans and Herbie Hancock, Curtis Mayfield and Godley & Creme. Its approach is clearly independent of the dominant stylistic tropes and influences within bruk, and precisely for this reason especially intriguing; both the fusion impulse and the obsession with off-kilter, funky rhythmic constructions nonetheless build a bridge that easily explains the interest of both Jazzanova and Peterson, who would have Wahlforss perform at the Montreux jazz festival in 2003.

United States (and Canada)

Not just the UK, then: Germany, Japan, Sweden too. And beyond that? In fact, several other countries have had artists active in the broken beat field. As far as can be seen today, however, these did not coalesce into scenes with dense internal networks of labels, radio stations, distributors and reference venues. In various cases, they nonetheless managed to connect to the global network of those interested in the strand, and so took full part in the sound and its developments.
The United States counts a fair number of musicians engaged in exploring the genre, and if they never gave rise to a proper "scene" it is mainly due to the sheer geographical spread of their diffusion, and the lack of a central hub capable of acting as a magnet (even though, as we shall see, the city of Detroit did have a fairly cohesive bruk circle). Ubiquity, a label founded in San Francisco in 1990, played the important role of bridge to the British market, hosting many of the field's key artists and also making room in its catalogue for releases by European protagonists.

A name that turns up in most accounts of bruk is Vikter Duplaix, born Victor Emanuel Cooke, originally from Philadelphia. He is behind one of the movement's signature singles: "Manhood", released in the United States in 2000 and soon reissued in Europe with remixes by Volcov and Domu. Duplaix's style falls within the nu-soul sphere, leaning towards more arty, downtempo constructions and careful crafting of the rhythmic parts. His first album, "International Affairs", features tracks produced and recorded by Somatik and Marc Mac of 4Hero, and involves Pino Palladino on songs that update the D'Angelo-style behind the beat approach in a bruk direction.
A few broken beats also remain on the following "Bold And Beautiful" (2006), which received a Grammy nomination, but the artist's significant role is testified above all by his collaborations as vocalist with Domu, Jazzanova, Clara Hill. Or by the density of tracks tied to the strand in Duplaix's contribution to !K7 Records' "Dj-Kicks" series, released in 2002.
Duplaix also appears on many releases by another Philadelphia musician often associated with the scene, King James Britt, aka King Britt. Involved for two years in supporting the jazz-rap trio Digable Planets, Britt is essentially a dj and hip-hop beatmaker with a passion for stylistic exploration. Much of his output, often catalogued as broken beat – including the well-regarded "Adventures In Lo-Fi" (2002) – is not directly traceable to the strand; the situation is different, however, for lower-profile projects such as "The Philadelphia Experiment – Remixed" (2002), built from material stemming from the collaboration between ?uestlove of The Roots, jazz pianist Uri Caine, bassist Christian McBride and producer Aaron Louis Levinson. Or with the compilations "Scuba – Hidden Treasures" (2002), "Black To The Future" (2002) and "Jazzmental" (2005), released as "King Britt Presents…" and featuring tracks by 4Hero, United Future Organization, Ski Oakenfull, Vikter Duplaix, Bugz, Mark De Clive-Lowe, Intuit, as well as King Britt himself (who on the first of the three records also handles the remix of every track). These releases give an effective sense of just how much Britt was perceived at the time as an integral part of the strand – something also confirmed by his many collaborations and by the press of the era, which regularly cited him among the scene's reference figures.

Several other well-known American artists have also been linked to broken beat, both at the time and since. In most cases, the association is not especially representative: it's not uncommon to find figures like Carl Craig lumped into the genre (perhaps because of Innerzone Orchestra's jazz-techno, which does share some common ground) and Theo Parrish (whose 1998 twelve-inch "Pieces Of A Paradox" may at most have been an influence on Bugz and co.). Another artist, less well known but fairly often mentioned, who can only be linked to bruk in a peripheral way, is Chicago producer Titonton Duvanté (a couple of broken-beat techno Eps in the late Nineties, and another on Neroli in 2003). In all three cases, these are undoubtedly artists whose musical vision served as reference and inspiration for lovers of rhythmic fracture; probably also figures who, at the time, really were perceived as part of the same stylistic conversation. Their recorded legacy in that respect, however, is too slight to recommend them to anyone looking to get into the strand. By contrast, a surprising figure who really did record an album explicitly inspired by the West London sound is Otis Jackson Jr., aka Madlib. His "Theme For A Broken Soul", released in 2004 on Stones Throw, had originally been presented as the debut of an unknown name, Dj Rels, and distributed by Goya. The approach taken by the beatmaker is certainly personal, with a hip-hop dominant that rarely gives up entirely on strong boom-bap-derived accents, but shatters them into a thicket of hi-hats, claps and offbeats perfect for shaping an intricate, oddly alien rhythmic landscape.

The path of Chris Brann, originally from Atlanta, also cuts across several genres: in 1999 he scored a dance hit with "King Of My Castle" under the name Wamdue Project (originally released in 1997 as a downtempo track). Also in 1999, he released the album "Compressed Light" on Ubiquity under the moniker P'Taah. Its ten tracks form a sort of ambient techno/jazzstep crossbreed, with highly abstract synth pads, sometimes frantic live percussion, sax lines over hip-hop beats and passages of pure Seventies-style jazz-rock/fusion (with straight samples from Airto Moreira). Its penchant for rhythmic decomposition, recombination and accent-shifting undoubtedly places the release among the earliest – as well as among the most original – examples of broken beat in album form. In 2001, again on Ubiquity, came "De'compressed", with remixes by Kirk De Giorgio, Nubian Mindz, Chateau Flight.

Moving on to Detroit, we come across another significant Ubiquity signing: producer John Arnold, who began experimenting with rhythmic contrasts as early as his first twelve-inch releases in the early 2000s ("Universal Mind", somewhere between techno and deep house, dates from exactly 2000). In 2002 he released "We're Not" on Ubiquity, later included on his debut album "Neighborhood Science", one of the creative high points of broken beat on its house-leaning side. Layered rhythms packed with Latin elements and offbeats galore, a funky attitude, extended chords and radiant synths: his nine tracks push the artist's formula to its most vivid.
The following "Style And Pattern" (Ubiquity, 2005) is even more multicoloured in terms of the styles involved, with Latin excursions and varied features (rapper Ty, kora player Mady Kouyate), but relies less often on broken beats, which it presents, moreover, in a frequently rather straightened-out form.
Among the collaborators on Arnold's first album is fellow Detroiter Amp Fiddler as vocalist, a versatile musician with a jazz background and a long-standing stint with George Clinton. His solo albums are devoted to a nu-soul/rnb that has little to do with the styles under discussion, but the artist has a solid track record in the bruk field, also appearing on releases by Bugz In The Attic, Rima, Breakthrough.

Both of Arnold's albums also feature another Detroit musician who can, without much hesitation, be counted among the strand's greats: Jeremy Ellis, also known as Ayro. With only two albums to his name (one under each moniker), Ellis boasts a roster of collaborations ranging from scene names like Jazzanova, Daz-I-Kue and Recloose all the way to Justin Timberlake and Carl Craig's Detroit Experiment. A keyboardist since the age of five, he first trained as a classical pianist, then moved into jazz, and in the late Nineties played in Detroit acid jazz outfit Jazzhead, coming into contact with the city's electronic jazz circles.
His first solo LP is "ElectronicLoveFunk" (2003, released as Ayro), which already showcases the finest qualities of his style: a galvanising fusion built on broken beats and Stevie Wonder-style funk/soul. Electric piano and synths running wild, dizzying percussive interplay (both live and programmed), a luminous sound: the comparison that springs to mind is Mark De Clive-Lowe, and the two artists' music does indeed share substantial common ground. Ellis is also a talented vocalist, and over the years would build a reputation as a finger drummer – that is, as a virtuoso in the use of digital drum pads such as Akai's Mpc and Native Instruments' Maschine. Regarding his first album, the artist would later recall: "I felt the need to play music that was jazz, a bit drum'n'bass, a bit soul jam, and had a certain Squarepusher-ness to it. All at once!"
For his next work, Ellis boarded a plane to Puerto Rico with the aim of immersing himself in the local rhythms, which had bowled him over at a concert at the San Sebastian Street Festival in San Juan. Ubiquity, with whom Ellis had connected thanks to Arnold, his roommate at the time, agreed to fund the venture. After two months on the Caribbean island, almost everything was ready, but on returning from a concert in Miami the laptop holding the recordings vanished. Back in Detroit, the musician set to work again, recreating the tracks for the record from scratch: the result, "Lotus Blooms" (Ubiquity, 2005), is a kaleidoscopic, almost entirely instrumental album that fuses his jazz background, the West London Sound, what he'd learned in Puerto Rico and just the right amount of Detroit Techno.
For anyone wishing to explore Ellis's and Arnold's output further, a further listen might focus on two albums by John Beltran, a Michigan producer with a long career in ambient music. His "Americano" (Exceptional, 2002) and "In Full Color" (Ubiquity, 2004) blend house, gypsy jazz, lounge, Latin grooves and broken rhythms. The second of the two, in particular, features collaborations with the two Detroit musicians as well as Colonel Red, Andreas Saag and Elsa Hedberg, for a formula that is about as soft and close to easy listening as anything produced in a field adjacent to bruk.

Finally, a few "outlier" names to round off a picture that, while never coalescing into as cohesive a national scene as those already examined, has nonetheless come closer to it than any other among the "minor" countries. The first name worth pulling out of the hat, if only for his standing in other fields, is that of esteemed pianist Craig Taborn, also from Detroit, a mainstay of Tim Berne's Science Friction and Hardcell, two of the key ensembles of early-2000s avant-jazz. Together with saxophonist Aaron Stewart, violist Mat Maneri and drummer David King (The Bad Plus), Taborn created the project Junk Magic, which released a self-titled album in 2004 on Thirsty Ear, a label emblematic of the alternative music of those years. Though arriving at a mood quite different from the dazzling fusion of other artists covered in this piece, the record draws on similar elements: jazz (in this case avant-garde), electronics, fractured rhythms – probably the result of similar influences, as well as of the considerable experience Taborn had gained with a master of metric dissection like Tim Berne. The alchemy produces a lunar, cerebral mood, yet as adventurous and unpredictable as that of the most successful bruk works. At the time of its release, few got excited about it, whether among followers of the West London sound or lovers of more challenging jazz, but the album would prove a notable influence on important jazz musicians who, many years later, would once again make an obsession with broken rhythms a central point of their artistic research.

Less renowned, but certainly worth a mention, is also Grey Filastine, or simply Filastine, a US beatmaker, tireless traveller and founder of the marching band Infernal Noise Brigade, a "tactical rhythm unit" formed for the protests at the 1999 Seattle WTO summit. His first album, "Burn It", came out in 2006 and offers music that is undeniably borderline. With a stubbornly all-shredding approach, Filastine mixes hip-hop and reggaeton, dub, drum'n'bass and Balkan music, North African bagpipes and spoken word fragments, all over a bed of dry rhythms that – if not perpetually broken – are at the very least always right on the edge of fracture. What emerges is a deliberately global sound, indeed one of global revolt: through the sounds of the West's repressed unconscious, the artist assembles the mosaic of a widespread tension, a cold guerrilla war that defies the logics of exploitation, both through rhythmic decomposition and through the recontextualisation of the countless samples that make up the tracks.
The well-regarded urban nu-soul of New York's Sa-Ra Creative Partners, beyond its clear hip-hop and synth-funk roots, incorporates lopsided beats that make them a reference point cited on the other side of the ocean too. Already clearly audible on their debut album "The Hollywood Recordings" (2007), these affinities had already translated into direct connections via the mixtape "Sa-Ra Presents Dark Matter & Pornography" (2005), which included a collaboration with Spacek, as well as via the rather broken remix of Four Tet's "Sun, Drums and Soil" the same year.

To tell the truth, it was in the United States itself that an extremely successful production style emerged within urban music, one with notable ties to British-school broken beat. It's usually not associated with the strand (more often people draw the not unfounded parallel with Timbaland's rhythmic approach), but listening in a row to tracks like Destiny's Child's "Say My Name", with its frantic stop'n'go and bursts of offbeats, Jennifer Lopez's "If You Had My Love", or *Nsync's "Celebrity", it's hard not to be convinced that, even wanting to deny a direct influence, something must have been in the air in those years, pushing musicians from very different backgrounds towards rhythmically comparably intricate territory. There are dozens of tracks one could cite, and often behind them are two specific names: Rodney Jerkins aka Darkchild and the Brooklyn duo Poke & Tone/Trackmasters. Examining their respective careers in detail, as well as their impact on other producers' style, would take us too far afield, but a future deep dive in this direction is not out of the question.
Finally, before leaving North America behind for good, a brief stop north of the Forty-Fifth Parallel. In Montreal, Quebec's main city, in the late Nineties Kevin Moon aka Moonstarr was composing tracks inspired by street culture, Sun Ra and Underground Resistance-style techno. By the time of his first album "Dupont" (2001), his style had become an instrumental hip-hop in which one can hear as much Dj Shadow and Detroit as echoes of what was happening in London's North Kensington scene.

New Zealand and Australia

Still a Detroit native, but a resident of Auckland, New Zealand since 2001, is producer Matthew Chicoine, aka Recloose. Coming from a background in techno and its hybridization with instrumental hip-hop, after a few EPs still in search of a signature style, the musician arrived in 2002 at his debut album, "Cardiology". The record is produced by Carl Craig for his label Planet E, and offers a formula that is at once light and spot-on, one that doesn't suppress the steady four-to-the-floor pulse but leaves it as an easily-decoded backdrop for broken-beat embellishments capable of keeping the listener's attention alive. Between showers of deep-house-style hi-hats and a funky attitude with vocals up front, there already emerges a hint of what will become Chicoine's main stylistic signature in later albums: a smooth-funk sound with occasional offbeat percussion and a growing live component.

Living in Melbourne since the Nineties instead is New Zealander Lance Ferguson, better known in the field as Lanu. His debut album came out in 2007, titled "This Is My Home", released in the United States on Ubiquity and in the UK on Tru Thoughts – a label that hosts various artists sometimes linked to the broken beat strand (often a bit forcedly, as in the case of Bonobo, Quantic or Belleruche). Ferguson's record is instead a triumph of broken rhythms and jazz/funk splendor, with the artist perfectly at ease juggling three roles: producer in charge of all the beats, coordinator of the various session musicians enriching the groove, and multi-instrumentalist handling guitar, bass and occasionally vocals. Sparkling and decidedly solid in its interplay, it's perfect for those who favor the more jazz-fusion, luminous and upbeat side of the genre.

Brazil

Staying south of the Equator, one can turn to the creative team behind two records by Patricia Marx, a pop artist with a well-established career in fields related to sophisti-pop and later acid jazz. On "Respirar" (2002) and "Patrícia Marx" (2005), the singer experiments with broken rhythms and crafts a genuinely successful art-pop electro-jazz in terms of arrangements, always inventive and elegant, though somewhat clouded by the occasionally cloying tone of her voice. Both records feature Somatik, Kaidi Tatham, Dave Okumu, Dego and Marc Mac of 4Hero, but a significant contribution to the sound also comes from São Paulo multi-instrumentalist Bruno Pires De Souza, aka Bruno E. A devotee of British underground electronic music, it's he who introduces Marx (then his partner, and his wife since 1998) to Portishead, Goldie, Prodigy. Around the early 2000s, the two go back and forth to London, where they get acquainted with the CoOp crowd – a connection that had actually already been made some time earlier, when 4Hero, listening to bossa nova classics sung by Marx, had decided they wanted to collaborate with the singer (a plan that came to fruition on the track "Unique" from "Creating Patterns").
Time spent in London leaves its mark on both artists' paths, and Bruno E.'s albums also reflect the influence of the West London sound. "Lovely Arthur", in particular, comes out in 2003 and channels the broken approach into a rather austere, contemporary jazz. The record receives some good reviews in the international press, and the artist is called on to remix tracks by Intuit and Silhouette Brown.

France

The French picture is an interesting one, with a handful of artists – some decidedly original and arriving at formulas that are rhythmically quite broken, but firmly distant from the British templates that dominate most other cases.
Starting with the more canonical ones, we find Steppah Huntah, a duo from Strasbourg made up of double bassist and producer Steven-Joyce Ames and Russian-born singer and keyboardist Olga Tourkevitch. Between 2003 and 2005 they put out a few twelve-inches (including "Walk This Step", released on Compost with contributions from Seiji, Daz-I-Kue and Mark De-Clive-Lowe), and in 2007 they release their only LP, "Things About Us". A dazzling encounter of deep house, broken beats and occasional Latin detours, with hip-hop MC'ing interventions and instrumental flourishes that give the whole thing remarkable vitality.

Moving on, we can bring out the name with the greatest resonance (at least at the time): Château Flight, namely Parisians Gilb'r (Gilbert Cohen) and I:Cube (Nicolas Chaix). Already active on record from 1997 within the much-hyped French touch scene, they soon veer toward an increasingly jazzy style and in 2000 release their best-known album, "Puzzle". The record, imaginative and light-footed, alternates fairly straight-rhythm tracks with electro-funk inventions marked by unprecedented rhythmic fractures and an elusive jazz momentum. The balance leans quantitatively toward the former (helped along by some markedly downtempo-cut tracks), but the result is cohesive and sonically unique enough to still be remembered as a small classic tied to the genre. Even at the time, moreover, the duo is recognized by bruk artists as kindred spirits: the list of those remixed by the two Frenchmen includes Seiji, P'taah, Atjazz, Beanfield.

Also Parisian are Outlines: the two producers Jérôme Hadey and Christopher Irfane Khan-Acito, plus graffiti artist Jay Ramier (who handles all the graphic elements tied to the project). Theirs is an experience entirely rooted within hip-hop culture – but with plenty of cross-pollination. The accent pattern of the Amen break is well present across the fifteen tracks of their self-titled debut album "Our Lives Are Too Short", released on Sonar Kollektiv in 2007, preceded in the couple of years before by releases done in cahoots with Jazzanova and cohorts ("Just A Lil' Lovin'", in particular, sparks quite a bit of hype). The broken beat's remixing imprint is nevertheless clearly perceptible in the countless rearticulations, jazzifications and (further) funkifications of the base rhythm scattered throughout the record. Bruk citizenship aside, the record is simply a perfect example of shimmering jazz-rap, tending toward the radiant and funky, but sharp-edged whenever it needs to be. The featured guests are mostly in English (among them even RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan), but one of the finest tracks is built around the French-language flow of Congolese-born rapper Abd al Malik.

For the final stretch, the most unconventional acts. Sayag Jazz Machine, namely five Paris-based artists: Christophe Vermand (programming and keyboards), Pierre-Yves Le Jeune (accordion, double bass, cello), Nicolas Scheid (sax, clarinet, flute), Charly Amadou Sy (scratching), Laurent Meunier (videomaker). Their stylistic approach is a direct offspring of jungle – and in particular its jazzstep evolution – and in a sense is closer, more than to West London, to the Sheffield and Manchester of Moloko and Lamb, or to the Athens of the later Stereo Nova. While in the case of those latter bands their placement within the broken beat field seems a bit forced (though not without reason, at least judging by "I Am Not A Doctor", "Fear Of Fours" or the pioneering "Vitamina Tek"), the perspective is more convincing when looking at Sayag Jazz Machine's fourth album, "No Me Digas" (2007). At its root, the French quintet's sound is a kaleidoscopic nu jazz built on drum'n'bass with plenty of drum and plenty of (sub-)bass, plus a myriad of twists, turns and stop-starts. Grafted onto this, depending on the occasion, are: swing horns, orchestrations one step from spy music, Stravinsky-esque passages, dub inflections, MC'ing in a choice of French, German, Spanish, English (with a cameo from Busdriver). A blender, in short, but a surprisingly well-aimed blender, the engine of an ever-thrilling whirlwind.

Denmark and Finland

If these two Nordic countries had their own microscenes, information about them is currently well hidden. Still, a few projects that made contact with the international circuit have left notable traces.
Nuspirit Helsinki are indeed among the first non-British bands one stumbles upon when getting curious about the genre, and this is largely thanks to ties with Jazzanova, which allow the Finnish collective to release material on Jazzanova Compost Records and Sonar Kollektiv. Launched in 1998 by DJs Tuomas Kallio and Hallio Nieminen, the project grows to include further members and, after a few twelve-inches, puts out a self-titled album in 2002 that immediately finds favor with the press and interested radio DJs. The record blends elegant tones and enveloping arrangements of strings, horns and electric piano with angular but never invasive beats. The band's output then thins out in terms of major releases, and the various compilations of their own and others' music that follow the debut album contain a much-reduced quantity of broken rhythms.
Still in Finland, some points of contact can also be found in the imaginative tech-house of Jori Hulkkonen, dense with sci-fi references and driven by a constant forward momentum: metric segmentations show up especially on the diaphanous "When No One Is Watching We Are Invisible" (2000); the later phase of his career, more geared toward reviving the abstract atmospheres of the most adventurous synth-pop, will lead him to collaborate with Tiga and John Foxx, but also to straighten out his rhythmic approach.
The Society, meanwhile, is the nu jazz project of Copenhagen saxophonist Thomas Hass Christensen, with a long-running résumé that saw him involved from the mid-Nineties with the exotica revival of Germany's Señor Coconut. Of the two albums released under his own outfit, it's the debut "Electronic – Bionic" that concerns us here. Released on Freestyle Records in 2005, it's one of the most vivid embodiments of bruk as a meeting ground for different styles and personalities. The ensemble of Danish jazz musicians assembled by Hass encounters, across the tracks, diverse vocal contributions (from Ovasoul7's r'n'b to hip-hop to Ursula Rucker's spoken word) alongside darting beats programmed by Hass himself, or performed with the support of percussionist Peter Kiebsgaard and drummer Niels Ratzer, himself a former Rucker collaborator. While consistently preserving an acoustic, live feel, the record manages to project itself toward both classic jazz and the loosest fusion, bringing a wah-wah bass to the fore or indulging in intoxicating jazz/r'n'b surges over a dembow beat. Interesting rhythmic hints also appear on the earlier album released as Kyoto, out in 1999 and decidedly more downtempo-oriented.

Austria

Naturally influenced by the German scenes, Austria was also, in the Nineties, home to a renowned production duo working in the downtempo and nu jazz fields, Vienna's own Kruder & Dorfmeister. Right from their first EP, the two launched their own label, G-Stone Recordings, which over the years has become a home for the duo's related projects as well as a reference point for artists working on similar frontiers. Among the former, the one most connected to broken beat is Peter Kruder's Peace Orchestra. Already on the first self-titled album (G-Stone, 1999), a nocturnal dub/electronic "chamber music" with an exotic, spacious sound, some rhythmic fractures appear. It's in the following remix album "Reset" (G-Stone, 2002), however, that the element sharpens, thanks especially to contributions from Beanfield, Trüby Trio and Kosma/Thomas Kretschmann of Jazzanova.
Also released on G-Stone are "Creation" (2003) and "Kunuaka" (2007) by Vienna DJ Megablast (Sascha Weisz), the latter made together with Marcus Wagner-Lapierre aka Makossa. Very different from one another, the two albums present a souped-up version of the bruk sound, leaning hard on the bass and on the dancefloor impact of the rhythms. On "Creation" the emphasis is mostly on the epic, energizing potential of the sound, with elements borrowed from progressive trance and an effective use of rhythmic thinning and thickening. On "Kunuaka" the style takes on a more Afrofuturist cut, also including ragga elements and acoustic percussion.
Unconnected to G-Stone, on the other hand, is the path of Alban Bekic, first a student of mathematics and music, later a filmmaker, and somewhere in between also a producer under the name Albanek. In 2003 he releases "Shade Of Blue", an album with a personal style that combines a somewhat tech-house abstraction with a pensive yet active mood. Decidedly creative on the rhythmic side, the eleven original tracks are enriched, in the version currently available for streaming, by remixes from Swell Session, Moonstarr and the latin/deep house duo Cuica.

Netherlands

Jazz-fusion, hip-hop, house, techno, downtempo, latin music, funk, soul, r'n'b: the range of genres intertwined so far with the story of broken beat is extremely wide, but the one perhaps most obvious – given the genre's characteristics – has surprisingly been absent. Was there really no direct contact with good old progressive rock of the Seventies? In almost every case, it seems the answer is no: after all, the historical reference points have always been centered on black music, and when the term "progressive" does come up (which happens quite often, even in period magazines), it's progressive soul one should be looking at. But then, dulcis in fundo, closing the circle is the Dutch microscene centered on the label Music For Speakers, founded in 2000 in 's-Hertogenbosch (Den Bosch), in North Brabant. The label's founders are also its main contributors in terms of releases, largely relatable to broken beat, albeit often in markedly borderline forms.
Aardvarck is Mike Kivits, DJ and producer from Den Bosch. Active since the early Nineties, he's among the founders of Music For Speakers but releases only one record on the label, the EP "Emsees" (2001), made up mostly of very short abstract techno/IDM tracks. His debut album "Find The Cow", instead, comes out on the Dutch label Delsin and offers a less claustrophobic sound, quite comparable to the direction taken by Autechre and Plaid, but with a particularly melodious and comfortable feel, and a clear focus on the broken construction of the rhythmic textures. In 2003 Kivits joins Rednose Distrikt, an inventive hip-hop production duo that folds in jazzy and broken traits, most visible on their last album "Poes" (2007). Kivits also appears as remixer on the EP "Third Person" by Madcap (Richard Hermes + Felix Van De Vorst), another co-founding act of Music For Speakers, who deliver on this record a slowed-down breakbeat that also includes a cover of Pink Floyd's "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun".

Also from Den Bosch is Sandor Caron, producer and sound engineer behind many of the label's records, who, after a few exploratory twelve-inches, releases the album "Harmonica And Cross" in 2001. The prevailing style is illbient in roughly equal parts trip-hop and Tuxedomoon, but on the title track and elsewhere a taste for delayed and anticipated beats clearly emerges. The element is more pronounced on "Inflatable Scream", a 2002 EP by Relaxo Abstracto, namely Kivits, Sandor Caron and his brother David Caron, and further highlighted on "Music Against People" (2002) by Roomtone, an electroacoustic band founded by Sandor Caron and guitarist Jeroen Kimman. The duo will soon expand into a quintet, moving toward a deconstructed and curiously restrained math-rock that, on the album "Gloom In Major" (2004), pours its bruk insights into a sound not far from that of Chicago's Storm & Stress.
Multi-instrumentalist Richard Van Kruysdijk and singer Marie-Claudine Vanvlemen, on the other hand, make up Sonar Lodge, a trip-hop-leaning outfit that, from their first twelve-inches in the late Nineties, pairs retro/noir atmospheres and jazzy shades with electronic beats well versed in drum'n'bass and its offshoots. Already the debut LP "Soundeffects" (2000) shows a leaning toward rhythmic fracture, with rather fragmented jazzstep passages, but it's above all "Needlework" (2004) that pushes further in that direction, both in the new tracks and in the multiple reworkings of previously released material (one remix is courtesy of Domu).

Van Kruysdijk and Vanvleemen are also involved in Strange Attractor (founded by Van Kruysdijk together with Niels Van Hoorn), who open up the microscene's more deliberately prog side: their two albums "Rorschach" (2004) and "Rorschach II" (2005) marry sparse electric jazz, IDM, flute excursions, enigmatic atmospheres, and feature among others two cult figures such as Richard Sinclair of Caravan and Hatfield And The North, and Edward Ka-Spel of the Legendary Pink Dots. In 2006 the two releases were collected into a single edition, currently available for streaming.
Released in 2009, meanwhile, is the fruit of studio improvisations recorded in 2005 by Szense (again Van Kruysdijk and Van Hoorn, this time joined by bassist and guitarist Eric van der Westen): here the horizon is pure impro-jazz-rock, but as inevitably happens, broken beats surface time and again.
All the experiences mentioned converge in 2005 on the album "Popular Music Must End" by the near one-shot project Music For Speakers Amplified, bringing together Van Kruysdijk, Vanvleemen, Kimman and Sandor Caron. The music sits at the crossroads of jazz-rock, post-rock, trip-hop, combining jagged rhythms and displaced accents with instrumental trajectories that are unabashedly Crimson-esque. Where the almost Rock In Opposition daring of the guitar-clarinet pairing doesn't take over, one seems immersed in a Portishead-ified version of the most intimate tracks from "Islands" or "Red": a rockier counterpart to the transcendences of Two Banks Of Four, one might simplify it as. A few months earlier, the ensemble – bolstered by Mike Kivits/Aardvarck – had released the twelve-inch "Ummo Gummo", far more electronic but also far less evocative in its atmospheres.

The story of Flowriders, led by Amsterdam keyboardist Vincent Helbers, is instead unconnected to the Music For Speakers crowd. Devoted to a broken fusion with very soulful, polished characteristics, they release their debut album "Starcraft" in 2004 and readily earn the praise of British observers, who liken them to the more arty exponents of the genre such as 4Hero and Two Banks Of Four. Their formula is very elegant and lively, and the musicianship of the numerous members is clearly perceptible too on the follow-up "R.U.E.D.Y.", released in 2007, which features drummer Richard Spaven and, if anything, further sharpens the funky, urban character of the mix.

Part three: 2008 – ∞

The sound that endures

As already noted: according to most accounts, something clogged up around 2007. Maybe it was digital killing physical sales, maybe the delay and flop of the long-awaited commercial breakthrough for Bugz and the genre as a whole, maybe the natural economic and life cycles that led a pillar like Goya Distribution to shut its doors, maybe the gradual shift of interest toward other sounds among musicians in the scene, audiences and potential new converts. More likely, it was a combination of all of the above. Looking closer, the scene had in fact already been running at somewhat reduced speed for a while, with artists spacing out or halting releases altogether, or else, having only recently adopted broken beats, abandoning them shortly after to chase new hype. Entire national scenes had by then deflated: Gonkyburg had stopped sparking, Jazzanova had found other downtempo paths…
The fact that 2007 marks a before-and-after for bruk doesn't mean this “after” doesn't exist at all. Quite the opposite. In its duration and its branches, it's substantial enough to force us to abandon the completist scope of the article's previous parts, and focus instead on just an essential overview. The task isn't made impossible only by its vastness (temporal, stylistic, geographic, quantitative): the genre's loss of centrality also means many of its offshoots were never labelled as such, and that the tag "broken beat" is even less useful as a search key for mapping significant artists and labels.
So here are a few key threads to help frame the fifteen years (and more) following the 1997-2007 decade of peak visibility. As with all strands declared dead, activity has continued in multiple forms: through veteran artists who, evolving themselves, evolved the genre along with them; through musicians who, inspired by the classic sound, made important contributions to closely related strands – but with their own distinct traits and audiences; and through much more recent names who, coming perhaps from distant backgrounds, rediscovered the West London sound and folded it into their own music, with results ranging from more revivalist to more eclectic.

Among the figures already active back then, three in particular have solidified their prestige. Keyboardist and bandleader Mark De Clive-Lowe has released more than ten albums, almost always winning praise from specialist critics and leading intercontinental tours spanning dozens of dates. In labelling his music, the term "spiritual jazz" has been increasingly applied by press and fans alike (in line with the bubble that's built up around the phrase in recent years), but listening to sharp, spaced-out works like "Renegades" (2011), "Live At The Blue Whale" (2017) and "Hotel San Claudio" (2023, with Shigeto and Melanie Charles) will easily confirm that fusion traits and metric shifts always remain central to his expressive horizon. Perhaps the most representative view of the musician's path, though, comes from the expanded sound of "Church" (2014), two sessions between New York and Los Angeles featuring MC'ing, horns, strings, African chordophones and harp, masterful drive and his usual pianistic versatility.
Standing a bit further from the stylistic canon, the ever-slightly-alien Steve Spacek achieved a certain fame as a member (alongside Mark Pritchard of Global Communication) of the percussive bass music duo Africa Hitech, which had commentators racking their brains over the least inadequate subgenre to pigeonhole the hyper-futuristic rhythmic jaggedness of their acclaimed self-titled album, released on Warp in 2011. On his own, the artist has continued the sparser take on broken beat inaugurated by his original band, Spacek, whose trace he kept in his moniker. This holds true both for releases under his own name ("Natural Sci-Fi" came out in 2018, "Houses" in 2020) and for the album released in 2015 under the name Beat Spacek, more colourful and tight-knit, but ultimately also much less broken. Steve Spacek's style has retained, from his early days, a dreamy, easygoing nature which over time has sanded down his initial crowd-pleasing streak, turning the tracks' lack of direction, rather than a weakness, into a necessary feature of his liquid atmospheres.

Dave Okumu's trajectory, on the other hand, saw a first departure from bruk with the founding of indie-rockers The Invisible – a departure that was only partial, to be fair, since among the other members is Tom Herbert, Tom Skinner has always orbited the band, and the jigsaw-pop strand they contribute to counts rhythmic entanglements among its distinctive traits. After many collaborations and stints as a session man, however, given the chance to develop a solo path the guitarist rediscovered his old passion, and integrated it – with considerable modernisation in a wonky-jazz direction – as early as his first album "Knopperz" (2021). In 2023, his black prog project 7 Generations involves Eska and Skinner, but features rhythms far more krauti than broken. By contrast, that same year, the whirling reinterpretation/upheaval of Miles Davis's "Bitches Brew" mounted by his London Brew – which involves him alongside a host of London jazz-scene players, including the usual Skinner and Herbert – broadly integrates bruk traits into the double album's magmatic funk/jazz/rock.
Among the many other early broken beaters who, from a less prominent position, kept following routes akin to the style, Dego of 4Hero is notable for having released his first solo LP only in 2011, and along a line directly continuing the West London sound. "A Wha' Him Deh Pon?", released on 2000 Black like almost all his subsequent work, features Kaidi Tatham on many tracks and reflects a particularly sunny, colourful mood, somewhat in tune with Brotherly's debut LP. The two had already paired up as a duo on "A Next Set A Rockers" (2008, credited to 2000 Black), and would do so again in 2017 with "A So We Gwarn", once more along decidedly luminous, bruk-oriented lines.
For his part, Kaidi Tatham released his own debut album under his own name, "In Search Of Hope", also in 2008, entirely written, played and produced by himself. The same modus operandi applied, featuring and mixing aside, to much of his subsequent work too, including the inventive "An Insight To All Minds", in which Tatham combines his extended, increasingly measured chords with a particularly funky verve. Among his collaborations, notable is his 2020 work with Boxcutter associate and producer Kab Driver on the soundtrack for the race game "Inertial Drift", which finds the multi-instrumentalist tackling vibes that are indeed broken, but closer to 2-step than to his more familiar style.

On the border

Discussing adjacent styles and directly related strands can easily lead into a briar patch: untangling the relationships among the many different electronic genres and subgenres at home in London over the past couple of decades is in fact a hopeless task, one it makes no sense to attempt here. It's best, then, to stick to a few verifiable and necessarily schematic facts. At the turn of the millennium, two currents emerged in London out of jungle's wake, with both differences and points of contact: the one, widely dissected by devotees, that led from UK garage to 2-step garage and from there to dubstep, and the broken beat one. The former generally favoured drier, more squared-off beats, dub spatiality, strongly emphasised basslines, and atmospheres that soon veered into more or less urban cyberpunk; the latter, as we've seen, placed unpredictable rhythmic articulation, stylistic hybridisation, funk-derived groove and jazz elements at its core, and where it reached for science-fiction leanings it was mostly in an Afrofuturist direction. Both made extensive use of offbeats, with early releases on the 2-step/dubstep side presenting a fairly recurrent accent scheme, while the bruk field was instead very active in experimenting with variations and recombinations.
From 2000/2001 onward, the two strands shared the same physical temple – first the Velvet Rooms, then Plastic People – which hosted two dedicated nights on alternating evenings: Fwd>> and CoOp. Each had its own audience, but accounts of crossover are plentiful, both among artists who frequented both scenes – among the examples, two dubstep pioneers, Kode9 and Zed Bias – and among the general crowd (which inevitably also included future artists). During the years of coexistence at Plastic People, dubstep's rhythmic constructions began growing more shape-shifting, and before long the strand received major attention from specialist critics, also gaining traction with a more indie audience thanks to artists like The Bug, the aforementioned Kode9, Dutch producer 2562, and above all Burial (whose Bandcamp page, incidentally, tags all his early work as broken beat too). To bring into focus the fertility of the relationship between the two fields, particularly telling – besides Maddslinky/Zed Bias's productions – is also Kode9's "Dj-Kicks", released in 2010 on !K7.
The scene's subsequent shift into a shapeshifting post-dubstep galaxy produced a myriad of offshoots and micro-categorisations, further spurred toward rhythmic manipulation by the emergence of the wonky sound, of which Californian Flying Lotus is the most prominent exponent. A current whose roots lie in the disjointed hip-hop accents pioneered by J Dilla and, in the long run, in the behind-the-beat groove perfected by D'Angelo. Without attempting here to distinguish between purple sound and aquacrunk, future garage, footwork and other countless branches of bass music, a list of names showing more than a hint of broken beat in their music will suffice (some of whom have also openly acknowledged their ties to the strand).
One landmark album per artist, just to get one's bearings. The largest contingent is British, including standouts like Clubroot ("II:MMX", 2010), Sbtrkt ("Sbtrkt", 2011), Ital Tek ("Midnight Colour", 2011), Djrum ("Seven Lies", 2013), Alex Banks ("Illuminate", 2014), but Americans abound too: Baths ("Cerulean", 2010), Salva ("Complex Housing", 2011), FaltyDl ("You Stand Uncertain", 2011), Machinedrum ("Vapor City", 2013), Shigeto ("No Better Time Than Now", 2013). Elsewhere, one naturally finds the widely acclaimed Germans Moderat ("Moderat", 2009), but also Italy's Clap! Clap! ("A Thousand Skies", 2017) and Swedish artist Forss ("Ecclesia", 2012), already discussed in the article.
Partially comparable to this broad group of artists, but also to the following one, is the intriguing case of Altered Natives, aka London's Danny Yorke, whose eclectic style has been dubbed mutant house for lack of a better label. His music, always heavily percussive, moves along the border between future garage, house, UK funky, grime and of course broken beat, all delivered with great personality and confidence, allowing the author's signature to remain recognisable even as the reference strand shifts considerably from one record to the next. The two albums most explicitly tied to the West London sound are the first, "A Thousand Days Of Patience" (2008), and the third, "Serial Vendetta" (2010), both released on Yorke's own label Eye4Eye Recordings. Powerful, unstoppable and bursting with invention, the two records feel like a glimpse into a parallel dimension where totally mind-bending rhythms have taken over bass music and are plotting to conquer the dancefloor with acid lines and chameleonic time signatures. Today both albums are rather forgotten, but "Serial Vendetta" can boast a curious reception at the time: released right after a second album with a more conventional style and a single, "Rass Out", that fit comfortably within UK funky, it was branded by some disappointed fans – unaware of the artist's more experimental sides – as "the shittiest dubstep record ever".

Sticking with UK funky: this school's direct lineage from bruk is explicitly traceable. Emerging around 2007, it was framed at the time as a dance-oriented reaction to grime's rise: Geeneus, DJ at the leading British pirate station Rinse Fm, said in 2009: "Girls in clubs weren't dancing anymore. [With UK funky] they could dance again, the floor was 70% girls." The new sound was a mongrel meeting of tribal house, throbbing basslines, MC'ing a step away from grime, and thoroughly danceable reggaeton patterns, but it had a strong bond with bruk from the start, disciplining its rhythmic freedom by adapting it to its own syncopated take on the dembow rhythm typical of dancehall music.
Indeed, producers like Apple – a genre pioneer with the 2007 track "Mr. Bean" – and Cooly G – considered among the field's most experimental figures – have explicitly used the "broken beat" label to describe their own music. Often framed as a passing fad that petered out by 2010, UK funky bridged bruk and other percussive dance music styles, paving the way for successful artists like Disclosure and passing on its inventory of beat-fragmenting tricks to distant fields such as fidget house, deep tech and afro-house. Cooly G's first album, "Playin' Me", released in 2012, contains the 2010 track "Up In My Head" (with "Narst/Love Dub", from the year before, her most explosive twelve-inch) and stands as effective proof of how the broken approach filtered into other styles, simplifying itself and largely shedding its jazzy edge while retaining its punch.
Incidentally, UK funky has stirred up conversation again in more recent years too: the hype that emerged in the early 2020s around the meeting of London club culture and dance sounds from West and Southern Africa, in fact, largely centres on veterans of the UKF scene. Roska, Ikonika, Scratcha Dva are among the leading names pushing the hybrid of South African amapiano and gqom, Gulf of Guinea afrobeat, and urban house with broken beats. The "Fact Mix 842", curated in 2022 by Fiyahdred, an up-and-coming DJ on the scene, offers a telling picture of the still-present link to the early-2000s West London sound, including alongside his own tracks and those of key figures in the field also songs by Sean Paul, Gotan Project, and by broken beaters who are anything but obvious choices, like Clara Hill, Vikter Duplaix, Nathan Haines.

The career of New Yorker Eric Douglas Porter, aka Afrikan Sciences, is likewise devoted to Africanness: his style, launched by a few EPs and then by the album "Means And Ways" in 2011, centres on a decidedly original outsider house rich in rhythmic layering (acoustic percussion with a folkloric feel, four-on-the-floor kicks, broken beats… not necessarily all in time with each other). The result is often rather chaotic, but certainly far from prefabricated templates. The double LP "Circuitous" (2014) is generally seen as the most representative work of his eclectic approach, which he has openly said is rooted in the music of Sun Ra and in the research of 4Hero, while also drawing inspiration from figures like science-fiction writer Octavia Butler (the first Black author to win the field's top prizes, the Hugo and the Nebula). 4Hero were also – thanks to an online board – the occasion for a meeting with Oakland producer Aybee (Armon Bazile), founder of the label Deepblak which, besides the two men's own creations, would host releases by other musicians with a similarly centrifugal approach. Among them, fellow Oaklanders Blaktroniks appear alongside Afrikan Sciences on Bazile's very first LP, "East Oakland Space Program" (Deepblak, 2009), with a techno edge owing as much to "E2-E4" as to the abstract drum'n'bass of Photek and 4Hero. The most broken of Blaktroniks' three albums is instead "Mechanized Soul", from 2008: totally wonky lo-fi hip-hop in its derailments from the straight beat, but at the same time also quite keen on reshuffling accents, with more than a few echoes of the West London sound.

Another post-2007 scene has linked the different strata of the African diaspora and cultures in a new way: the one that developed in Portugal, centred on the Lisbon project Buraka Som Sistema. Formed in 2006 in Amadora, in the city's northern outskirts, the group grew out of founder João Barbosa's (Branko) passion for the West London sound and his fascination with the musical melting pot of Lisbon at the time: a place where communities of Angolan, Brazilian, Cape Verdean and Mozambican origin lived a few blocks away from young people of the most varied European nationalities, or from Portuguese expats returning after long stretches spent in the UK (with which Portugal cultivates an intense, centuries-old relationship). Barbosa developed an in-depth knowledge of London-rooted drum'n'bass and UK garage, and in the early 2000s took a strong interest in bruk and its evolutions, both in the future jazz direction and in what would soon become UK funky. Joining him in the project were producer Rui Pité (Dj Riot), Angolan beatmaker Andro Carvalho (Conductor) and Angolan writer and vocalist Kalaf Epalanga Ângelo, with further members added over time. Buraka Som Sistema's music, which won numerous awards and reached the top of the Portuguese charts (and, in one case, the Spanish charts too), carries kuduro, zouk and baile funk rhythms into the flow of European club culture – achieving a fusion that scrambles established categories and tries to reflect the multicentric nature of a world in perpetual sonic transformation. Their first album, "Black Diamond", is also one of the first released on Enchufada, a label founded by Barbosa and Epalanga Ângelo which has over time made room for other disruptors of the centre/periphery divide (cumbia/footwork hybridisers Dengue Dengue Dengue!, the bass/lusoglobalist blend of Pedro, the dubstep-inflected hip-hop of Macacos Do Chinês).

Buraka Som Sistema's visibility facilitated – when it didn't directly inspire – the emergence of dozens of artists, often of non-European origin, interested in redefining the canons of dance music in a global, re-territorialising sense. In recent years, two labels in particular have helped develop the field, both of them, incidentally, cultivating their own relationship with the West London sound. One is Príncipe, dedicated to supporting "contemporary dance music from Lisbon, its suburbs, its projects, its slums": since the release of Dj Marfox's first EP in 2011, more than seventy releases have explored possible electro reconfigurations of kizomba, batida, tarraxinha and kuduro, dismantling and layering rhythms in ways that often – whether intentionally or not – if they aren't full-blown broken beat, are really only a couple of accent permutations away from becoming it. "Não Fales Nela Que A Mentes" (Príncipe, 2020) by Guinean/French/Portuguese/Cape Verdean producer Nídia and the all-stars compilation "Verão Dark Hope" (Príncipe, 2020) are probably the most telling listens in this regard.
More recently founded, on the other hand, is Eclectic Beats Music, based 30 kilometres north of Lisbon in the small town of Mafra. Its founder is producer Rui Fradinho, long resident in London and decidedly broken-beat-oriented in his productions under the simple surname Fradinho (which in Portuguese also refers to the puffin). Both in his own releases (currently a twelve-inch and the 2022 EP "Broken Beach") and in the label's other output, the focus is entirely on the meeting of pure West London sound and traditional sonorities – with great geographic variety in the destinations involved. The involved artists' devotion to the early-2000s sound is evident in their project names: Afro Bruk Band (a self-titled mini-album in 2021), Peninsula Ibrukica (self-titled EP, 2023).
Not confined to a couple of newly opened labels, the Portuguese scene fascinated by the rhythmic layering of the African awakening includes other leading figures such as Portuguese-naturalised Angolan artist Batida (Pedro Coquenão), whose recent project Ikoqwe pairs him with Angolan rapper and activist Ikonoclasta (Luaty Beirão): "The Beginning, The Medium, The End And The Infinite" came out in 2021 on the historic Belgian label Crammed Discs, founded and run by Marc Hollander of Aksak Maboul. The renowned producer from Salento, Andrea Mangia, aka Populous, has also had a relationship with the Portuguese new wave, and his album "Azulejos" (2017) is explicitly inspired by his research into the scene during a months-long stay in Lisbon.

New blood

The most thoroughly contemporary names on the Portuguese scene have already led us into the thick of the last post-2007 branch: the one involving young musicians who, unable to have contributed directly to bruk's years of greatest visibility, later picked up its style and sound and carried the strand forward – updating it where needed. Some of them followed the genre's developments closely, but debuted once it was no longer the centre of attention: this is the case, for instance, of Londoner Aroop Roy, who released his first (and in fact also last) album in 2010 on Freestyle Records. "Nomadic Soul" leans toward the funkier end of the stylistic spectrum, with immediate songs and gleaming synth basses, capable of both pushing rhythmic intricacies to the fore and pulling them back when a more house-leaning approach is called for.
Opening a roll call of expats is Stuart Li, aka Basic Soul Unit: born in Hong Kong, he was effectively raised in Toronto, where under the moniker Basic Soul Unit he has released music since 2003. Over the years he has moved between techno and deep house, but his first album, "Motional Response", only came out in 2013, overlaying the two influences with a polyrhythmic, broken layer that makes his groove mechanical, engaging and thoroughly original. Yellowtail, meanwhile, is Hiro Awanohara, a Japanese musician who relocated to New York: for him too there is only one proper album, "Grand & Putnam", from 2009. The formula is varied and lush, with a dominant future jazz component that combines now with hip-hop rhythms, now with dazzling r'n'b, and often with beats broken in various ways. A slightly different story – but stylistically quite close – is that of Opolopo, aka Peter Major, born in Hungary but relocated to Sweden very early on, who as far back as 2003 released a first album in the deep house/acid jazz field. In 2009 he released the LP "Beyond Jipangu", combining his own compositions with remixes of other artists' tracks, achieving a personal fusion of hyper-technological funk, nu-soul and broken beat: an electrifying mix, and in some ways prescient of the Knower formula. A similar pattern would return, at least in part, in his later work too, particularly in the remix album "Mutants" (Tokyo Dawn, 2011), which features several new names from bruk's long tail.
Speaking of Tokyo Dawn: right around 2010, this label, founded in Frankfurt in 1996, was a key reference point for the production of broken beats and related sounds. Its catalogue includes the hip-hop beats of Berlin's Comfort Fit, the third and final LP by Positive Flow ("Flow Lines", from 2012), and above all "Evoluzion" by the Mainz collective Soulparlor – an effervescent, refined nu-soul album whose many notable features reignited, in 2011, the interest of bruk fans from a few years earlier.
Another label that carved out its own space in those same years is Futuristica Music, based in Bournemouth, on England's south coast. Its roster spans a wide range of jazzy tones, from instrumental hip-hop to downtempo, and in several of these the broken component plays a significant role. This is quite noticeable on "The Light" (2009) by Londoner Deborah Jordan, formerly a singer with Silhouette Brown and Robert Mitchell's Panacea: intimate, singer-songwriter-flavoured nu-soul, produced by Simbad, Atjazz, Aardvark, Colonel Red, as well as label-mates Rise and Electric Conversation. A further testament to the strand's continuity is the multifaceted hip-hop of "The Unclosed Mind" by American artist Replife (Daniel Gray Kontar). The record, reissued in 2008 after a Japan-only release the year before, features a roster of guests including Rise and Deborah Jordan as well as Mark De Clive-Lowe, Dego, Kaidi Tatham, Atjazz.

As we draw closer to the present, the odds increase of encountering artists who never came into contact with the West London sound at the peak of its spread, but rather later on, through musicians who carried the genre forward or by rediscovering the classics once they were already established as such. The (relative) resurgence of interest is also tied to some significant phenomena, such as the Bruk Up nights held bimonthly at Birmingham's Hare & Hounds as early as 2014, and the return, starting in 2015, of CoOp nights (as one-off events, the first ones in partnership with Boiler Room).
Other factors include Gilles Peterson's launch of the webradio Worldwide.fm and the emergence of several London labels heavily focused on the new bruk scene. The first is Eglo Records, founded back in 2008 and, in the early 2010s, busy promoting emerging artists like Floating Points (whose first singles do in fact show some broken traits) or pressing works by already-established producers with a solid jazzy edge (one example above all: Four Tet's DJ set "Fabric Live 59", released in 2011 and quite broken in its rhythmic choices).
The first explicit bruk incursions begin around the mid-2010s, with the release of two EPs by the Dego/Kaidi Tatham pairing (2014 and 2015), continuing with works by Steve Spacek, before arriving at names important to the new landscape: Henry Wu and K15. The former is none other than multi-instrumentalist Kamaal Williams (born Henry), who would later broaden his fame as part of the nu jazz duo Yussef Kamaal. The latter is Kieron Ifill, tied to the Tottenham neighbourhood to the point of including its postcode (N15) in his stage name. When "Wu 15 Ep" came out on Eglo in December 2015, a twelve-inch with one track by Wu, one by K15, and two joint ones, both already had several releases behind them: Williams, in particular, had put out that same year the remarkable twelve-inches "Negotiate" and "Good Morning Peckham" (the latter on the then-newborn Rhythm Section International). The record already marked out new coordinates between funky, polished jazz fusion, deep house, dubstep, hip-hop and broken rhythms. Ifill, by contrast, had previously explored mostly lo-fi hip-hop territory, but with the EPs "Theme Music For A Pariah" and "The Black Tape" (both 2014) he had decidedly brushed up against terrain close to his associate's. Despite counting only four tracks in total, the EP made together as a pair lays out some essential aspects of the new bruk course: rather than a continuation along previous canons, or a departure along new directions, what's at stake is an update of the ethos, a re-centring of freedom and hybridising drive. The early-2000s convergence arose mainly from acid jazz, drum'n'bass, hip-hop, deep house, downtempo; by the mid-2010s, however, at the centre of the scene stood wonky sound, nu jazz, grime, dubstep and various bass music derivatives, alongside of course the entire toolkit of the first-wave West London sound.
Wu's and Ifill's paths then proceed separately: Williams is already, by 2015, a guest on a Boiler Room session from which the duo Yussef Kamaal and a further career in nu jazz will be born; in 2019 his "Dj-Kicks" runs through a roll call of references ranging from Seiji, Kaidi Tatham and Phil Asher to Spacek, K15 and Tenderlonious – without shying away from a fair amount of house, funk and contemporary jazz crossovers. K15, meanwhile, continues his explorations in deep house and ambient-jazz territory. He returns to broken beat with the 7-inch "Sunbeams" (Eglo, 2018), and in 2022 co-signs on Futuristica, with Deborah Jordan, the album "Human", which, combining hazy tones, acid synths and jazzy inflections, offers solid proof of the breadth the musician has achieved.

The other key label of this small renaissance is the direct offspring of its symbolic event: CoOp Presents. Founded in 2018 by IG Culture and Alex Phountzi – the historic minds behind CoOp – the label positions itself explicitly as a home for artists in the field and as a collaborative showcase for their productions. At the heart of the catalogue, in fact, are the compilations: first the "Selectors Assemble" series (three EPs that, between 2017 and 2018, gather names from the scene), and then, in 2020, "Plug One", a double LP featuring contributions from seventeen artists, followed in 2021 by "Plug One Extras". Among the musicians involved, the most discographically active is undoubtedly Reginald Omas Mamode IV, with many albums, EPs and mini-albums under his own name, spanning jazz and nu-soul: the most bruk of them is "We Are The Universe", 2015 (Stevie Wonder at heart and a massive dose of wonky shifts).
Other figures with a notable release or two include Wonky Logic (nomen omen, as confirmed by the 2021 mini-album "Transdimensional Fuunk (Transformed For Human Consumption)"), Milanese artist Tommaso Garofalo aka Turbojazz ("Whateversim", from 2023, moves comfortably between funky and deep house, but slips in a couple of pretty solid broken-fusion numbers) and above all EVM128. The latter is Bristol's Clifford Luke Meads, a veteran of the new scene with EPs to his name since 2011. He recalls his encounter with CoOp back in the Plastic People days: "The first time I set foot in there I was stunned. A dark room lit red, with a huge sound system: it grabbed me instantly. I'd never felt that kind of energy before. It was so new. Jazz dancers were throwing themselves onto the dancefloor like b-boys, every now and then sirens would go off from behind the DJ booth. It was unlike anything I'd seen or heard. […] It inspired me so much that once the night was over I went back to the studio and started making broken beats". His first LP, "Nova", came out in 2015, and effectively shows the shifts in the new standard for broken sound: the bass, rough and synthetic, is pushed to the fore, the edge is tech-house with a dry, digital sound, the kick hits straight but is systematically countered by offbeats on the other percussion. Everything is danceable, melodic, engaging, contemporary but with clear early-2000s roots.
Besides a feature with Omar, the album includes a collaboration with another notable name on the scene, Shy One. Londoner Mali Larrington-Nelson began her path with encouragement from Scratcha Dva, producing grime beats that remained unreleased for a long time (and were only recently put up on the artist's Bandcamp). Her first and only LP, aptly titled "Bedrooms And Boomkicks" (2012), finds her wrestling with an imaginative grime/UK funky hybrid, as broken as one could wish but less effective than two later EPs, "Spoons" and "From The Floor To The Booth" (Eglo, 2022). The former, from 2018, was made with grime rapper Kwam and best shows the producer's ability to range across styles while always keeping a sharp, experimental sound. Still within the CoOp compilations one also finds Risa T, a young producer born in Tokyo but based in London: on her only EP, "Galaxy" (CoOp Presents, 2020), bruk's more electronic side seems to meet the playful, videogame-like creativity of Iglooghost.
The WheelUp project, formed by West Londoner Danny Wheeler, has instead made a name for itself with releases on Tru Thoughts. "Good Love" (2021) and "We Are The Magic" (2022) highlight their connection to the historic scene, featuring Afronaught, Bémbé Ségué and Kaidi Tatham, and reaching for a fluid, funky deep house that, predictably, earns applause from Gilles Peterson on Worldwide.fm.

Documenting any renewed interest outside the UK is trickier: attention is scarcer, and while a small scene explicitly tied to historic bruk has been reborn around London, the same doesn't seem to hold true elsewhere in the world. Some Polish artists nonetheless deserve a closer look for their highly original reworkings. Mooryc, that is, Maurycy Zimmermann, actually operates out of Berlin: his first album, "Roofs", came out in 2013 and patrols the territory between tech-house, indietronica and synth-pop – naturally with a duly broken rhythmic approach. The follow-up, "Wiped Out" (Sonar Kollektiv, 2016), instead pulls off a well-judged folktronica turn which, while considerably lightening the amount of broken rhythms, here and there produces a genuinely fresh blend of jittery broken beats and the bright warmth of acoustic arpeggios and plinks. Taking the opposite tone is Zima Stulecia, a project by Marek Pędziwiatr and Marcin Rak, keyboardist and drummer respectively of Błoto and EABS, two of the leading names in Poland's thriving nu jazz scene (itself already noticeably shaped by broken beat tendencies). The duo's only album is "Minus 30°C" (2023) and, as the title predicts, presents a glacial sound fuelled by hazy synth pads and surgically fractured beats; the record's jazz roots emerge, however, in the vitality of its tones and developments, which manage to make contact with the tracks feel positively scalding.

Australia, too, offers material for analysis. In Melbourne, two nu-soul acts have been active since the early 2010s, Hiatus Kaiyote and 30/70, whose decidedly jagged rhythmic approach has become a model for other local artists, spurring a rediscovery of broken rhythms that goes hand in hand with a wonky-style attention to the (no longer quite so millimetric) beat shifts. Labelling the two bands outright as broken beat revivalists would be reductive, but both the acrobatic "Choose Your Weapon" (2015) and the more classic – yet equally fiery – "Elevate" (2017) pack in enough rhythmic tricks and fusion/soul/hop crossbreeding to make the elective affinity with the strand plain to see. The feeling is further reinforced when examining the debut albums of two local soul singers loosely associated with the two groups. Natalie Slade's "Control" came out on Eglo in 2020, produced and arranged by Hiatus Kaiyote keyboardist Simon Marvin. Compared to the bright colours of Marvin's original band, what's on offer here is a more subdued, intimate key: rhythmically, though, the record pushes even further toward a personal take on the most varied London models. Emma Volard's explosive "Deity" (2022), meanwhile, features 30/70 singer Allysha Joy as a guest and dives headlong into jazz-rock, with electric, enveloping tones that don't hesitate to catch fire in its most heated moments.

Back to nu jazz

The last few artists we've covered have by now waded fully into nu jazz with both feet, and that's no coincidence. Not only is nu jazz, straddling the late Nineties and early 2000s, the birthplace of bruk, but in no other current sphere do the three threads addressed in this final part of the article – the trajectory of the genre's historic names, its influence on neighbouring genres, its grip on younger musicians – converge quite so naturally. A large chunk of today's nu jazz in fact takes its cue from the broken beat of the early 2000s, reworking and expanding on its ideas, feeding into the present-day scene. Referring readers to the dedicated article for a fuller account of the genre's evolution through the 2010s, here it's worth zeroing in on the specific path the broken approach has traced within that field, rounding out the picture with some releases, mostly from around 2020, that give a sense of where things are heading.

A major shift from the early 2000s concerns the arrival of drummers on the scene. In its early stages, broken beat couldn't do without drum machines and digital audio workstations to build and perform its rhythms. The real obstacle for would-be players wasn't so much the sheer cerebral complexity, or any lack of technical skill, but the difficulty of sounding groovy and expressive when translating these patterns into performance, whether in the studio or live. Even once the circle of musicians widened somewhat beyond the Saga Centre crowd, the number of drummers with real experience in bruk rhythms remained tiny: essentially, Richard Spaven and Tom Skinner were the only game in town.
Time changes things, though. Other musicians, coming from a solid jazz background, began trying their hand at frantic jungle-style rhythms or broken patterns in the bruk mould. Americans Mark Guiliana, with his Now Vs Now and later with Donny McCaslin, and Nate Wood with Kneebody became reference points, proof that it is possible to sound funky, broken and gripping at once even on a real drum kit (see the self-titled 2009 debut by Now Vs Now, "You Can Have Your Moment" by Kneebody from 2010, and McCaslin's "Casting For Gravity" from 2012). More recently, Justin Tyson of Robert Glasper's R+R=Now has joined these models, bringing a more wonky touch (their debut "Collagically Speaking" dates from 2018). Their style leans towards the more fusion side of avant-jazz, and tends to sound more detached than what the first-wave broken beat players were after, but it's an important spark for anyone approaching the sound from the jazz side. And right around the start of the 2010s, there was a whole crop of young musicians, drawn to the rhythms of British club culture, who couldn't have asked for a better prompt.

We've already discussed Henry Wu/Kamaal Williams's role in fuelling the revived London bruk scene: in the following phase, the heady fusion of Yussef Kamaal – founded alongside drummer Yussef Dayes – acted as fuel for the already rich stylistic blend that is British nu jazz. Even before their sole studio album "Black Focus" (2016), Dayes had appeared the year before on "Two For Joy", the debut LP by Ruby Rushton, led by reedman Tenderlonious. The album, released on Tenderlonious's own label 22a, offers a less polished sound that's just as rhythmically intricate, showing the added value of broken drumming even to those after a rougher-edged take.
Meanwhile, Richard Spaven kept developing his own voice. With Rob Mullarkey and Flowriders keyboardist Vincent Helbers in the lineup, and Bugz's Matt Lord producing, he released the EP "Spaven's 5ive" back in 2010 on the now-prestigious – then newly founded – label Jazz Re:freshed. In 2012 he turns up again alongside Helbers on the album "Hear To See", released under the name Seravince and fully in keeping with both artists' airy style. His solo path continues across four albums, of which "The Self" (2017) reveals the most visionary, spiritual side of the drummer's music (and perhaps of bruk as a whole), pairing him with three notable artists whose careers intersect with Spaven's elsewhere too: New Zealand singer Jordan Rakei, Dutch producer Jameszoo and Swedish bassist Petter Eldh. Eldh in particular put out in 2020 the singular mini-album "Projekt Drums Vol. 1", pairing him on each track with a different drummer (including Richard Spaven and Nate Wood themselves); the bassist is also, in 2021, part of the band that records "Æ", a cornerstone of wonky jazz and, at once, the culmination, transfiguration and overcoming of the broken beat lineage. Alongside the bassist are the ever-present Mullarkey, Dan Nicholls (Strobes) and Matt Calvert (Strobes, Three Trapped Tigers), saxophonist Otis Sandsjö (another leading name in wonky jazz) and bandleader – as well as drummer of the hyperkinetic Phronesis – Anton Eger. Eger also plays on "Graviton" (2019) by London pianist Andrew McCormack, an album that, together with its follow-up "Graviton: The Calling", forms an evocative diptych in which broken sounds, nu jazz, minimalist cuts and academic jazz meet to striking effect. The cast of names involved across the two records testifies to the fruitful interplay between veteran figures and younger players with varied backgrounds (in this case, also afrobeat and math-rock): besides Eger, the first record features Eska, Rob Mullarkey and Shabaka Hutchings; the second instead brings in Tom Herbert on bass and Joshua Blackmore of Strobes and Troyka on drums.

Tom Skinner, for his part, threw himself into the afrobeat field, converting his skill with rhythmic fractures into a reading of Tony Allen's lesson, laying it at the foundations of the new London scene built around Sons Of Kemet and Melt Yourself Down. We've already mentioned his contributions to Dave Okumu's projects, London Brew and Seven Generations, but on most releases from that crowd, the element stays under the surface. It comes to the fore, however, on records by two members of Ezra Collective: tuba player Theon Cross and keyboardist Joe Armon-Jones, who make extensive use of programmed beats on their recent "Intra-I" (2021) and "Archetype" (2023), giving their music a striking sci-fi, urban, Uk garage-inflected lift. Another Cross – Nathaniel, Theon's trombonist brother – appears on the ambitious "Earthbound", a "magmatic patchwork" of space-afrobeat spread across three LPs, released in 2020 under the name Likwid Continual Space Motion – itself just the latest of IG Culture's countless monikers. The project brings together a dozen members, including both founders of CoOp, and stands as the most fitting example of how past, present and future are thoroughly intertwined in today's British broken jazz landscape.

Moving into territory closer to electronic producing, the beats tend to straighten out somewhat, while still retaining, beneath the surface, recognisable accent patterns tied now to hip-hop, now to dubstep. Two well-established British outfits curiously share, in their very names, a nod to the sheer size of their line-ups: Submotion Orchestra and Hidden Orchestra. The former is led by drummer Tommy Evans and producer Dom "Ruckspin" Howard, both from Leeds. "Fragments", released in 2012 on Exceptional, is a clear showcase of the rich, luminous, enveloping palette created by folding horns, vocals, keyboards and hefty dubstep influences into their formula. The scores of Joe Acheson's "hidden orchestra" are more shadowy – a classically trained composer based in Brighton: "Dawn Chorus" (2017) is perhaps the album where modern classical, folktronica shadings and the jazz tones typical of his music meet the most fragmented beats.

Living instead in Saint Petersburg is Georgy Kutonov, who, with his project Long Arm, has since 2011's "The Branches" combined broken beats, instrumental hip-hop and jazz tones, creating strongly cinematic music whose mood recalls both Hidden Orchestra and the veteran Mustang of Alex Attias. His records come out on Project:Mooncircle, a Berlin label active since 2002 that in recent years has hosted several releases on the more IDM-leaning fringes of the field: the dreamy techno-hop instrumentals of Russian artist Pavel Dovgal on "The Aura" (2016) and the enigmatic atmospheres of Nicolas De Araújo Peixoto aka Takeleave's "Belonging" (2020) are just two among the many alchemies of subtly broken rhythms, downtempo pacing and jazz-tinged colour explored by the label's artists.
A number of bands, finally, have developed a further hybrid approach: using jazz instrumentation to play scores that closely echo those of electronic producers. The idea isn't new, and bands like Austria's Elektro Guzzi and Germany's Christian Prommer's DrumLesson (released by Sonar Kollektiv) have already thoroughly explored the possibilities of this sort of live techno. Not to mention the Squarepusher-esque reworkings by Shobaleader One (unsurprisingly featuring Adam Betts of Three Trapped Tigers, Dan Nicholls of Strobes and Chris Montague of Troyka, alongside Squarepusher himself), which, if not strictly bruk, are certainly very rhythmically fragmented.
Those working explicitly within broken beat who've steered towards similar horizons, however, have stayed less tethered to electronic models, building styles with their own added value, capable in other words of going beyond mere divertissement. The self-titled album by Berlin's Key Elements (2020), also released by Sonar Kollektiv, the near-post-rock EP "Different, Us" (2021) by Milan's Bo!led, and the latest LP "Pressure" (2023) by Culross Close – who perform music by Kieron Ifill/K15 – are, each in its own way, solid signs pointing towards a creative direction still largely unexplored.

By rough reckoning, a quarter century has passed since broken beat's first steps to today. Only in its first decade or so did the phenomenon receive any (niche) attention, and yet the innovations of this anomalous strand, never quite breaking through and never quite buried, keep on reverberating and sparking creative energy. Directly, or through the ripple effects felt across a whole range of styles and musicians. Nothing suggests this process is set to fade: like the introduction of odd time signatures into pop a few decades earlier, some breakthroughs are here to stay and, whatever ebbs and flows in visibility they go through, become part of the vocabulary of anyone – even in the most distant genres – curious enough to draw on them. Long live broken beats, then. After all, there will always be someone making music who wonders, as Kode9 put it in an interview a while back: "How much more can I fuck with this rhythm before it loses its groove?"

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12/03/2026