What is drumfunk?

Drumfunk puts the breakbeat front and centre. Classic jungle breaks, the Amen and the Apache, get sliced into hundreds of micro-edits until the drums sound almost live. Minimal synth work, few hooks, all focus on the rhythm.

It grew out of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and Paradox is widely credited with pioneering it. Resident Advisor calls him the producer largely credited with inventing the genre, and the name comes from a track on his 2002 Reinforced Records album What They Don’t Know. Tracks like his 2002 cut “I Get A Kick Back”, the AA-side of an Alaska and Paradox split twelve on Offshore Recordings, set the template: hyper-detailed, restless drum programming built from chopped vinyl breaks. Paradox himself still prefers to call what he makes jungle.

Drumfunk is jungle’s breakbeat science taken to the extreme, a producer’s genre first. It runs straight out of jungle.