I am currently watching The Land Before Time 2 because it's on TV and I've never seen it before. I literally loved the first one when I first saw it when I was like, however old, 3 or 4. To see Littlefoot and Cera and Petrie and Spike and Ducky together again is making my heart bounce a little bit. And what else is making my heart bounce right now is this track right here.
It's a strange soundtrack for small dinosaurs running away from a scary big dinosaur, but it kind works in a strange way. What's this track? It's by Saitama, Japan-based producer Yu Uchida aka quietfunk and features LILI on vocals (I can't find any info on her) and a guy called flatcastle – v cool name (irl: Daisuke Hirajo) – on slap bass. It's entirely groovesome, founded on a smooth popping bassline courtesy of Mr. Hirajo and gradually more accented disco-style beat with shuffling hi-hats and the occasional stroke of a cymbal.
Called 'house of loaded people' it takes its name from the samples it uses. Well, more correctly it takes inspiration (and samples) from 'Loaded' by Primal Scream and aside from a bit of brass that hazily fades in and out every now and then, the quietfunk track also uses the dialogue that appears in the Primal Scream original, "We wanna be free… we wanna get loaded!" – itself a sample taken from weird film Werewolves On Wheels. It's an exploitation film in which an outlaw bike gang stops off at a church in the desert, parties, falls asleep, one of them gets drugged by the satanic cult that actually runs the church, wakes up as a werewolf. Normal.
I keep thinking about the bassline, robust and silken at the same time, but there's more to this track than just this fragmentary funk. Thin tremolo synth begins to wiggle pulsar-like overhead, swathes of white noise building to a whispering crescendo, and LILI's voice sings gently and with nocturnal party-time longing what the vocal sample proclaims throughout. Everything culminates in echoing intensity towards the end, like the frenzied end to a sweaty imagined party as wished for by the song itself.
- quietfunk has featured on semi-illustrious underground compilation FOGPAK twice before (that I know of), most recently on FOGPAK #10 – check it out!
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