- Drumfunk, choppage, whatever you want to call the subgenre of drum & bass that centers around jazzy, chopped drum loops (think early Coldcut) often gets lost in its own showy virtuosity, sacrificing funk for pointless precision. London producer Paradox could probably be credited with the genre's birth (certainly for naming it), and the recent dearth of material under this name from him is probably symptomatic of the health of the style as a whole. Ramifications is Paradox's first album in nine years. You'd never know it though. Paradox has made a record that has this style sounding more refreshed and relevant than ever.
Ramifications largely continues where What They Don't Know left off, but with a crucial difference: where Know was permanently cloudy, Ramifications shakes and jitters welcomingly. The album starts off rather playfully with "The Last B-Boy," directly referencing Paradox's most prominent influence, old hip-hop and b-boy music. What's apparent through track after track of strangled funk and well-oiled drum loops is how he's managed to open up the sound, vibrant and effervescent where previously they sounded like locked grooves.
Paradox pads the toughened tracks with gleaming chords, droning synths and reflective surfaces. Hinting at his work as Alaska, "Antilogy" marks the album's flight of fancy into jungle territory, traversing arctic climes into the darker realm of "Yasaka," ragga jungle built with surgical precision and aerodynamic edges, and eventually landing in the Far East mirage of "Manjira." No matter how high off the ground Paradox takes us, though, Ramifications is always grounded by its relentless feeling of exactitude and steely clangor, a lingering penchant for rigidity reflected in track titles like "Fake Funk."
Even at his best, in the past, a Paradox album could be a chore to get through: stuffed to the brim with percussive slogs, it's enough to wear even the most hardcore fan down before the end hits. But Ramifications avoids this fate with its late-album jaunt into the jungle and a stunning stretch of drumfunk tracks too imaginative and lively to ignore. Ramifications is more than a drumfunk album, and, in fact, more than a drum & bass album (very little here even approaches speeds of 160 BPM): it's a celebration of the possibilities of percussion.
Tracklist 01. The Last B-Boy
02. Fake Funk
03. Consonance
04. Legacy
05. Black 69
06. Ghost Notes
07. Antilogy
08. Yasaka
09. Sample Me #18
10. Manjira