Funk, with Beards

| 13 Aug 2014 | 06:10

    New York City has been the progenitor of myriad music scenes: punk rock, No Wave, noise-rock and more recent fads like dance-punk and Ivy League rock.

     

    Indeed, something is amiss when the sound filling Issue Project Room’s cavernous courtyard isn’t aping the usual. Instead, a long-haired stoner beardo, draped in an ancient guided by Voices T-shirt and clutching an oboe, announces to the crowd gathered under the hot summer sun: “It’s OK if you want to dance, we’re a funk band!” Such is the universe according to CSC Funk Band, an ever-expanding crew (at press time, a 10-piece) comprised of all white dudes and one brave lady defying the requisite post-punk retreads and avant-garde noise-isms and inciting a DIY dance riot by channeling not Eno or Bowie but James Brown.

    Like its generic moniker, CSC Funk Band offers no apologies for its ostensibly unhip aesthetic and lack of linkage to any movement.

    “CSC has no affiliations to ‘scene,’” explains keyboardist Matt Mottel. “We are our own tribe, happy to exist and spawn with friends who have good minds and hearts in whatever genre and style. Funk has and always will be rad. If you are ready for any house party or good time celebration and want to enjoy a concert, be ready to dance and boogie. There’s no problem for CSC to keep Brooklyn funky.”

    Mottel (also of avant-jazz weirdos [Talibam!]) and his spread-the-love jargon mirrors CSC’s all-instrumental rollicking and addictive jammage. But consider the lineage: its architect, noise hellion guitarist Colin Langenus, was formerly one-half of psych-freakout progger duo the USA is a Monster. As CSC’s clean-shaven bassist Jesse Lent and drummer Jimmy Thomson (who spent “about two minutes” in Gwar! under the tastefully demented pseudonym Hans Orifice) explain over beers at Soho’s Lucky Strike, Langenus was “burnt out on eight million changes in a four-minute song. He wanted to get back to basics.”

    To Langenus, basics meant the opposite of his old band’s wigged-out complexities, replaced by CSC’s blustery, horn-driven grooves, outer-space keyboard nuances and percussive overload. Goodtime jamband chuggers such as “Bad Banana Bread” and “Funk Shoppe” inflect what Thomson has dubbed “music for soundtracks for unmade cop shows based in North Brooklyn with car chases under the BQE.”

    Langenus, once paired only with a drummer, is now flanked by a drumming twosome, keys, bass, sax, trombone, oboe and yet another horn. Enter CSC’s “minimalist” M.O.

    “Colin always said the thought that he wanted to have a funk band was when he was driving in his car and heard ‘Givin’ Up Food for Funk’ by James Brown,” Lent recalls. “It was so weird, simple and nasty to him and that’s where the minimalist thing comes in. The more people you have, the less everyone needs to play.”

    Despite the wealth of players in CSC, the group has become assured that making money is off the table—there are just too many members. regardless of cashflow, it’s clearly Langenus’ P-Funk-ified, afrobeatfused party band vision according to Lent. Live, he plays the role of catalyst, incessantly bouncing and swaying, ricocheting dirty funk riffage. “Colin is the official but reluctant leader,” explains Lent. “He cues the songs; the band was his concept. I told him there needs to be a leader because there are so many people and it’s going in many different directions.”

    When it comes to putting out CSC’s records, it’s Thompson who’s taken the reins, releasing the band’s output on his vinyl-only label, [Electric Cowbell]. While it has created a pipeline for CSC, releasing three killer funk 7-inch slabs to date, he snubs the idea that his label be boxed in with a specific agenda. In other words, it’s not all funk. Thompson’s already released records by Antibalas side-project Superhuman Happiness, a Talibam! 45 and a single from ex-Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn, amongst other neat chunks of wax.

    As for CSC, the band seemingly has a plan for its inaugural long-player. “I would think our whole album would come out on 45s before the full-length,” Lent says. “It’s nice to concentrate on just one song at a time, especially with instrumental music. It’s hard to walk that line of sounding too controlled.” But like Electric Cowbell, CSC won’t be pigeonholed. “I would say we don’t feel obligated to any genre or to sound experimental because of Colin’s and Mottel’s affiliations, except that it should feel funky.”

    >> [CSC Funk Band]

    Aug. 6, The Rock Shop, 249 4th Ave. (betw. Carroll & President Sts.), Brooklyn, 718-230-5740; 8, $8.