Cold light, clean lines, a bassline that twists like machinery in the dark. Neurofunk is drum & bass with the grit scrubbed off and the engineering turned all the way up: tightly built production, intricate low end and a science-fiction mood. The name was coined by a critic, and heads have drawn the border with neighbours like techstep in different places ever since.
A word from the outside, a sound from the lab
Simon Reynolds put "neurofunk" into circulation in a December 1997 essay, offering it as his own genre designation. He wrote at a moment he framed as troubled for jungle and drum & bass. Roni Size's Reprazent had won the Mercury Music Prize, speed garage had pushed jungle out of its place as the London underground (he said much of jungle's black audience had defected to it), and plenty of producers were walking away from techstep, the sound he tied to the No U Turn label. "Neurofunk" was his name for where those producers were heading instead.
Reynolds set the two sounds against each other. Techstep, in his ear, was dirty production and bombastic riffs: explosive psychosis. Neurofunk was obsessively clean, all eerie blips and complex basslines, an implosive neurosis, nearer to a stalker than a maniac. He also clocked a drift towards a plain two-step kick-and-snare pattern that, to him, no longer sounded like a breakbeat. It was no love letter: he said the style left him cold.
The first names on the board
Reynolds pegged Doc Scott's Nasty Habits tune "Shadow Boxing" as the prototype for neurofunk, and named Jonny L's "Piper" as the year's ultimate neurofunk track, singling out the Grooverider remix as a disconcertingly asymmetrical robo-funk groove. He pointed to Grooverider's Prototype label as a home for Matrix, Optical and John B, and to Source Direct as makers of full-kit funk that steered clear of the two-step. He placed Matrix and Optical in West London, noting that Matt Quinn (Optical) had helped Goldie construct Mother and was starting a Virus label with Ed Rush.
Virus and the Ed Rush & Optical axis
Virus Recordings is run by Ed Rush & Optical, and it is tied closely to the neurofunk side of the music. Early Virus releases include "The Medicine" (1998), the first tune on the label's first release, plus tracks from 1998 and 1999 by the duo and by Optical solo. Matrix is on the roster too, alongside Cause 4 Concern and Audio. Set against techstep's rougher, maniacal vibe, the pull here was something more clinical, a ghost in the machine.
Where techstep stops and neurofunk starts is still a live argument in the scene. The duo's album Wormhole is generally considered the moment the genre shifted into the aggressive, minimalist form of techstep, yet they have also been called the pair who spawned neurofunk. Same two producers, two labels for the sound. That tells you how far the border moves depending on who is drawing it. Their Fabriclive 82 mix is another one for the crate.
The Dutch and Austrian wave
Noisia: sound design as the song
Noisia are a trio from Groningen, and younger producers such as Mefjus and Hybris cite them as mentors. They ran their own label Vision Recordings and its offshoot Division, and later a third, Invisible. In 2008 they rolled out the FabricLive.40 mix, their dark brand of drum & bass. Thijs de Vlieger summed up the approach: "With us, the sound design is the song." Their album Outer Edges also takes in skullstep, a reminder that Noisia worked across more than one dark style (see also Skullstep).
In September 2019 Nik Roos, Martijn van Sonderen and Thijs de Vlieger announced they would split, saying "When Noisia becomes a compromise in itself, it's time to move on". The farewell tour was delayed by the pandemic and, as of August 2021, was due to end in December at Melkweg in Amsterdam.
Black Sun Empire
Black Sun Empire, also Dutch, count as techstep veterans and a neurofunk act at the same time. Their fourth album, Lights & Wires, came out on their own Black Sun Empire label and included dubstep-tempo tracks.
Critical, Neosignal and the Austrian and German axis
Kasra set up Critical Music in 2002. Mefjus and the UK's Emperor are counted as neurofunk specialists, with an obsessive pursuit of technical supremacy, in the same breath as Noisia and Phace. Kasra himself pushed back on the tag: "There's talk that we're just a neurofunk label, but I think we're one of the most diverse labels out there."
Mefjus works the darker, harder side of drum & bass, and he and Phace have a collaboration together. Their Blitz EP was lined up for Neosignal Recordings, founded by Phace and Misanthrop and marking its tenth year in 2019. The Neosignal catalogue runs through Noisia, Emperor and Current Value.
Current Value (Tim Eliot, from Germany) started out in the mid-1990s on Position Chrome. Biocellulose was his first album for Critical, and it sits at the neurotech end of the scene, with support from Black Sun Empire and Noisia.
More names to dig for
Renegade Hardware is another imprint worth digging for, and Konflict's "Messiah" got a Noisia remix. For more on this site, try Loud Sound and the Edge of Neurofunk music, NEUROPUNK: 10 Years on the Scene and the review Black Sun Empire - Driving Insane.
What it sounds like
Clean is the first word. Eerie blips, intricate basslines, clinical precision with a ghost-in-the-machine edge, moody atmospherics and sci-fi melody. Thijs de Vlieger of Noisia puts the emphasis in the same place: the sound design is the song. If jungle was all rave and amen, neurofunk is the lab, and the tune is the experiment.
Still rolling
The map keeps shifting. Kasra resists Critical being read as just a neurofunk label, Black Sun Empire were already bending the sound towards dubstep tempos, and the duo behind Virus sit on both sides of the techstep line. Mefjus's Fabriclive 95 mix was due in November 2017 and Neosignal was marking its tenth anniversary in 2019, so the labels and producers named above were still active in the late 2010s. Noisia's farewell tour was scheduled to end in December 2021. Neighbouring styles on this site include Techstep and, further back, Jungle.
