Deliciously slow funk your Saturday with: Little People – Seamstress #HipHop #Downtempo #Funk @LittlepeopleM

Something old and something new from the wonderful downtempo catalogue of Little People.

How times have changed. I first came across Little People back in the early noughties on the fabulous Instrumental Works EP. It was on one of those sites that would burn you a CD of selected tracks and send you it in the post. Usually from America which took ages and fretful waiting. But a name like Little People wasn’t Googleable so I never knew how to get anything further but the tracks stayed on my iPod and got regular play to this day. They had a lazy hip hop and funk swing. Like lost Kruder & Dorfmeister tracks. I rated them that highly.

It was only in lockdown that I tracked them down again and started to explore the relatively sparse output in the intervening fifteen years. And I found it wasn’t a group but Laurent Clerc, originally from France I assume but now living in London or perhaps Portland.

And he’s a new Threads EP out now, from which featured track Seamstress is taken. It’s been made according to a set of rules which Laurent has set for himself around the use of sampling (see bottom of this post). But he says the music should actually be good. And it is. There’s a lovely bassy swing to it all, with the shard of guitar giving it a funk edge. It’s all head noddingly sweet like you want it to be. It has a simplicity that allows the samples space to breathe and interact to give that more than the sum of the parts feeling. All that’s missing is a bit of sun to accompany it. Spring is feeling tardy here.

And I’ve also included an early track – Gravitas – because it’s a favourite.

Gravitas from at least 17 years ago

So here are THE RULES i set for the EP:

1. Each song can only have 1 melodic track, 1 drum track and 1 bass track.
2. For each track, only 1 sample can play at any time – no sample can overlap each other. So no layering – samples are played sequentially in monophonic fashion.
3. There are no limits to the number of samples used.
4. Samples used should be no more than 1 second in duration.
5. The source samples should be unrecognisable*

~ by acidted on March 20, 2021.