Photo: Steve Knight from Halstead, United Kingd, CC BY 2.0. Illustrative, not from the story
Neurofunk came out of England in the mid to late 1990s as a step away from techstep. The critic Simon Reynolds coined the word in December 1997 in an article in The Wire.
What it sounds like
Reynolds picked out cleaner production, intricate basslines and an emphasis on small shifts in timbre. The rhythm moved toward regular two step patterns and away from the dense polyrhythms of earlier jungle. In later neurofunk the bass is the centre of the track: complex sounds that evolve over time, made with wavetable synthesis, frequency modulation, filtering, distortion and resampling.
The first records
Wikipedia points to Ed Rush and Optical's single Funktion, released in 1997 on V Recordings, and their album Wormhole, released in 1998 on Virus Recordings.
The people now
Producers cited as recent examples are Noisia, Phace and Mefjus, all known for the way they process and resample bass sounds.
Hear it
Our Fifty Cuts Deep list has a Neuro and Tech band, tracks 41 to 50, with Noisia, Black Sun Empire, Optical and Mefjus.
