CHR Music Radar Vol. 2: The Groove Remembers
Six records. Six different routes through funk, disco, cumbia, Afrobeat, hip-hop and house. Put CHR Radar Vol. 2 on shuffle and see where the music takes you.
There is no correct way to listen to CHR Radar Vol. 2.
Hit shuffle.
A record made in Washington, D.C. in 1974 might suddenly sit beside house music, Brazilian jazz, Sade, GZA or something recorded on another continent decades later.
That unpredictability is part of the pleasure.
Because music doesn’t really organize itself the way streaming menus do. Sounds migrate. Musicians borrow ideas. DJs rescue records. Producers discover forgotten drum breaks. A song can disappear from the mainstream and spend forty years quietly becoming important somewhere else.
Here are six records from Vol. 2 worth following a little further.
The Soul Searchers: “Ashley’s Roachclip”
For most of “Ashley’s Roachclip,” you’re simply inside a beautifully relaxed piece of 1974 Washington, D.C. funk.
Then the band gets out of drummer Kenneth Scoggins’ way.
For about twenty seconds.
And if you know hip-hop, the past suddenly sounds familiar.
That break became one of the record’s extraordinary afterlives, sampled in Eric B. & Rakim’s “Paid in Full,” Slick Rick’s “Hey Young World,” Run-DMC’s “Run’s House” and many more.
You may have heard the children before meeting the parent.
That’s one reason sampling remains so fascinating. A few seconds recorded by musicians in one room can escape the song, cross generations and become part of somebody else’s musical vocabulary.
Crown Heights Affair: “Dreaming a Dream”
Yes, the name caught our attention.
But Crown Heights Affair already had Brooklyn dancing long before Crown Heights Radio existed.
Released in 1975, “Dreaming a Dream” reached No. 1 on the U.S. disco chart and the R&B Top Five.
The statistics don’t explain why it still works.
Listen to the horns. The bass. The little spaces left for percussion. Everything seems built around the expectation that eventually somebody is going to move.
That’s the side of disco worth remembering. Before it became an aesthetic shorthand, it was physical music, shaped by bands, DJs and rooms full of people figuring out how long a groove could hold them.
Afrosound: “Tiro al Blanco”
Now things get stranger.
Afrosound grew out of Colombia’s Discos Fuentes scene, inspired partly by Afro-Latin rock and the psychedelic tropical guitar music emerging from Peru and Ecuador.
Then Colombian musicians began playing with the formula.
Cumbia met fuzz guitar.
Wah-wah.
Echo.
Synthesizers.
Drum machines.
Jam-session improvisation.
By the time “Tiro al Blanco” arrived in 1979, Afrosound’s music occupied its own wonderfully unstable territory.
Don’t spend too much time deciding what genre it belongs to.
The uncertainty is half the fun.
Shina Williams: “Agboju Logun”
In Lagos in 1979, Shina Williams gathered Nigerian musicians whose histories touched Fela Kuti, SJOB Movement, Sonny Okosun and others.
The resulting African Dances mixed Afrobeat, electronics, boogie and disco.
And sitting inside it was “Agboju Logun.”
What makes the record exciting isn’t that African music suddenly discovered disco. It is hearing musicians take modern recording technology and international dance-floor ideas and make them answer to their own rhythmic language.
Nothing feels pasted on.
The electronics belong beside the percussion.
The past and the future share the groove.
Asha Puthli: “Space Talk”
Few songs in Vol. 2 arrive with a better backstory.
Born in India and trained in both Indian classical music and Western opera, Asha Puthli eventually landed in New York’s jazz world and recorded with Ornette Coleman.
Then her music wandered somewhere else entirely.
On 1976’s The Devil Is Loose, “Space Talk” floated through jazz, soul, electronics and disco without settling comfortably into any of them. The record became prized by disco collectors and later generations of producers and crate diggers.
Listen now and it still feels slightly untethered.
Sensual. Strange. Futuristic.
Some records age because they perfectly represent their moment.
Others survive because they never completely belonged to it.
Aly-Us: “Follow Me”
Then there is the beautiful simplicity of “Follow Me.”
Three musicians from New Jersey made the record in a basement using a four-track machine.
Strictly Rhythm released it in 1992.
And somehow that modest recording became one of house music’s enduring invitations.
The production isn’t polished into perfection.
That’s part of its power.
House music has always understood something technology alone can’t provide: the right repetitive rhythm, played loudly enough among other people, can turn strangers into a temporary community.
A basement record becomes a club record.
A club record becomes a memory.
And thirty years later somebody presses shuffle and the room opens again.
Let the records find each other
That’s CHR Radar Vol. 2.
Not an argument for one genre, one era or one definition of good music.
It’s a reminder that grooves travel.
Washington becomes hip-hop.
Brooklyn finds the disco floor.
Colombia plugs cumbia into electricity.
Lagos folds the future into Afrobeat.
An Indian singer moves through jazz and lands somewhere near underground disco.
Three guys in New Jersey make house history in a basement.
Different records.
Different places.
Different decades.
But put them together and something begins to connect.
Put CHR Radar Vol. 2 on shuffle.
See what finds you.
