There’s a record by an American electro-funk duo called The System called Sweat released in 1983 that I always find myself putting on often… in the car, on the stereo, during an afters gathering of friends and so on. So much so in fact that I sought out a vinyl copy of it from Discogs a couple of years ago and that is something I don’t do as often as some people. It’s a fun record with some amazing synth sounds, really good musicality and is generally a fun record to get the mood elevated.
I’ve got a love for that era of early electro-funk and dare I say it — electro R&B — and at times I’m finding myself watching old episodes of the American music disco/soul revue shows like Soul Train and The Scene, which showcased a lot of new artists working in that style, as well as clubbers and super fit dancing enthusiasts filling out the TV camera frames, coming from Chicago and Detroit respectively during the 70s through to and including the 90s.
It’s a style of music that I’ve got into relatively later in my travels although I can’t really pinpoint when exactly, although I had a friend in Vancouver I met through the techno/club scene that I played some music with a bit in the last two years I was living in Vancouver — when I was a bit “lost” in a way musically — that I think was probably instrumental in that. He was (and still is) an avid collector of old synths and not only was he pretty knowledgeable in the history of those old beasts and programming them, but he was also a pretty shit hot keyboard player as well. During this time when he had some of his synths fired up, he was often playing these blazing electro-funk style leads and bass lines, complete with making use of the modulation wheel to add a bit of stylish finesse to what he was playing.
He was also a person that loved driving at night, and would often be playing random synth/electro stuff through his car stereo. “Jack, I think you’re gonna love this next one,” he’d say, and then after a gap in between tracks through the car speakers the music would jump to some funky synth bass riff and you couldn’t help starting to move your head around to the beat while sitting in the back seat.
So the seeds were planted there so to speak, and sometime after moving to the UK I started gravitating more and more to finding out more music in that style, discovering many gems — including used LPs of key records in random record store bins — along the way.
If anything I loved the familiarity of the synth work that often parallels a lot of synth pop, minimal wave and other styles I was listening to already, but something that was coming from a different place and rhythm, and more to the point — I was realising that a lot of musicians working with synths in the electro-funk genre were also really skilled keyboard players. With a lot of these tracks I was starting to listen to coming out in the first half of the 1980s when MIDI was still very much in its infancy, a lot of the flashy synthesizer bass lines, chords and leads were far too styled to be pumped out of any sequencer that was available in those days and was most definitely played by hand. At least for me it’s certainly a breath of fresh air to listen to, which is sometimes welcome in contrast to a lot of electronic, underground synth in which increasingly sees the machines and sequencers doing the “playing”.
Such is the case with David Frank, the composer, programmer and keyboard player for The System , who apparently was already a pretty skilled piano player from a young age. He was also a fresh musician that landed in New York from Boston that was already keenly interested in emerging music technology, as outlined in this article from the musical instrument sales site Reverb.com below. His interest move him into applying it to the music he was looking to do at the time, more specifically using a pre-MIDI system by Oberheim called Parallel Buss.
Frank ended up finding a musical partner with vocalist/instrumentalist Mic Murphy, whom he’d met in the touring circuit years prior working with a band called Kleeer . The two got to work and the result was their debut album Sweat, which is arguably one of the first purely electronic “funk/R&B” records that as mentioned earlier. Their main single from the record, “You Are In My System”, which became a top ten hit of which the promo video has been included below which features Frank playing a very interesting keyboard set-up with what looks like a Fairlight screen in the background.
The opener “Sweat” has some great bassline work and some notable drum machine programming fills, and with that track and the side A closer “It’s Passion” I keep finding a lot of parallels with music that was more coming out of Europe at the time with things like new wave, minimal wave, italo, etc. If anything “It’s Passion” is probably the track on this album that aligns with a genre like minimal wave the most, with it’s sparse, mechanical breakdowns and spoken word vocals that feature in the more stripped down, er, minimal parts of the track. If anything there’s an interesting fusion between traits that I’ve registered with American funk and disco but with influences from what was happening in the discos of European cities at the time. It’s likely Frank and Murphy were keeping abreast with electronic music in the old country at the time and if anything like a lot of urban musicians at the time into electro and hip hop, Kraftwerk was one artist they could all get into.
In the previous entry here there was a mention of a connection to pop star Madonna, in which Ike Yard‘s Ken Compton was romantically involved with her at that time. In the case of The System, David Frank — just starting out with his electronic ambitions — actually worked with Madonna as a vocalist on some his early versions of tracks that would become The System. However, it’s documented that Frank was looking to keep the music purely electronic while Madonna‘s partner at that time, drummer/producer Stephen Bray, was looking to get involved and incorporate more “rock” instrumentation into the procedings so in the end Frank ended up connecting with Murphy who shared the same vision.
In fact, “It’s Passion” was originally called “Crimes Of Passion” with Madonna actually handling the vocals, of which the audio of that demo is included below.
It’s definitely a record worth checking out and following the release of Sweat the duo went on to record more four more albums in the decade, each one generally following the stylistic trends that developed as the decade went on, eventually closing out on 1989’s Rhythm & Romance which incorporated more digital sounds pulling from genres like house and the bizarrely named new jack swing. The band then split and re-convened on various occasions in the decades to follow. Frank himself got more into the production side of things with other artists starting more heavily in the 1990s, producing hits for artists like Christina Aguilera, Phil Collins, Chaka Khan and many more.
As with discovering the The System I’ve since come across many other gems in this electrofunk genre which in the past couple of years I’ve compiled into this playlist below.
As a final note, one of the few modern bands I’ve actually seen play working in this sound, and with that skill level of keyboard playing, are probably a group called Galaxians from Leeds (UK). What most listeners would assume was a sequencer playing all though synth lines is actually mostly done by hand and live it’s pretty hypnotizing and impressive to watch. There’s a brief clip of the band live below, and I had caught them a number of years ago playing a small basement venue in London on one my return visits down there after moving away from that city.