Re-mix. Re-interpret. Re-create. Innovate.

Funky Genes was composed using nothing but samples. But it is a bit more than that. It's an album about sampling as the new vernacular for the cultural changes of the 21st century.
Sampling is a tool for us to understand the current events in our society. We live in an era of collage, not only in the artistic field but also in all areas of information. We are shifting our ways of gathering knowledge, from a deep and narrow form to a broad and free one. Some might say that this will lead to shallower knowledge, but I think that this is the future for people to start making new mental connections.

Sampling is a result of media overload. And as elegantly described by Paul Miller aka Dj Spooky (2008): when recorded, adapted, remixed, and uploaded, expression becomes a stream unit of value in a fixed and remixed currency that is traded via the ever shifting currents of information moving through the networks we use to talk with one another.

Progression or reaction. Nevertheless, evolution.

This is an album about biology, about understanding music evolution as a process of phenotypic plasticity. This plasticity is the result of the evolution of society, the development of knowledge and the transformation of culture.
The mapping of the genome extends its principals to music in Funky Genes. After mapped, music's DNA becomes a collection of information ready to be reinterpreted and reorganized with the offspring being a bigger form than the sum of its elements.

Sampling is music quotation

Funky Genes is and ode to John Oswald's extensive debate about the need of a quotation system in music. Although the history of music presents a long repertoire of punctuation devices and techniques, it still does not get even closer of the equivalent system in literature. It's clear that without the development of a quotation system, the line that separates referencing and correspondences from fraud and plagiarism is very thin and blurred.

I believe that the need of a contemporary system of quotation in music should be something pursued not only by artists that use samples, but also by those who in general have inputs from some other artists in their work. In this remix culture that we are living, artists and content producers need to understand that their profits will not come directly from its materialized work, but from the knowledge that is generated by it.


Togetherness in motion.

Funky Genes is in its essence an album about Funk and its soulful and groovy music. It's an album that praises the funky attitude.

More than a musical style, funk can be seen and linked to old African behaviors and attitudes of uninhibited and soulful celebration of life and joy of self. The black popular music of the early 1970's was a consistent reminder of this affirming, colorful, ethnic aesthetic. So if we analyze and compare this black American expression form with the principals of the African philosophy, the African roots of rhythm, spiritual oneness with the cosmos, and a comfort zone with sex and aspects of the body, we will see that funkiness is an ancient aspect of life. (Vincent 1995) The conclusion that comes out of this statement is that funk in its modern sense is a reaction to the traditional Western world's concepts of formality and self-repression.

So to finish this conversation I'll sample Charles Wright and say: "Express Yourself".