Diving Back Into Murk
Miami duo is so old-school, its sound is hip again
In the Latino inner-city, dance music was never the Next Big Thing. It was a constant part of life. Omnipresent Latin "freestyle" artists TKA, AfroRican, Trinere, Debbie Deb, Expose, Cover Girls, and Sweet Sensation rocked boomboxes and straddled the turf between Cheesy Street and sincerity, between toughness and gushing emotion, between strong-arm hip-hop and gay "Hi-NRG."
It was the '80s, and little Oscar "G." Gaelan was coming up in Miami's Cuban American Coconut Grove neighborhood. At age 12, he was DJing at massive house parties thrown by his older brother. Little did he know that jocks would reach rock-star status, while the percussive sounds of his neighborhood - and of his future production duo, Murk - would be heard at glitzy super-clubs the world over.
"There would be hundreds of people in our house," says Gaelan, now 31. "It was open invitation. Back then I was playing electro. It was really like the beginning of the whole breakdance era. Stuff like 'Planet Rock' and Cybotron's 'Clear' were the big records for me."
These days, the Murk boys - as Gaelan and childhood friend Ralph Falcon are affectionately known - are celebrating more than a dozen years in the global dance-music scene with perhaps their biggest release to date - a full-length, self-titled artist album, out Tuesday on Tommy Boy. The CD features a driving, progressive redux of the pair's first worldwide hit, 1993's Sound Factory-inspired "Some Lovin,'" perhaps the reference point for the current resurgence of tribal and Latin percussion in super-club music. The collection also goes back to freestyle fashion with "Believe," a simmering slice of deepness featuring the pouty vocals of Tamara Wallace. Murk is, however, more an ode to the re-ascendance of the dark drum in clubland. "True," also featuring Wallace, takes "I Feel Love" (once again) and relentlessly stomps Giorgio Moroder into a swirling, synthetic black hole. The pair then explores Romanesque grandiosity and circuit-party style debauchery in "Opera."
It's a long way from old barrios like Miami's Liberty City, which the duo used as an early production name.
"Back then, there was a lot of disco, Latin hip-hop, freestyle," says Falcon, 32. "Then we discovered house music. There was a DJ, Aldo Hernandez, at Club New. It was 1987. He was a friend of mine, and he introduced me to it."
Falcon and Gaelan fell in love with the four-on-the-floor sound and immediately started producing tracks using rudimentary samplers and Roland drum machines while setting up a label called Deep South Recordings. And soon, there was Murk.
"We wanted to come up with a name that represented darkness," Falcon says. "We're looking through the dictionary, and we saw murk, as in 'dark and murky.' We decided we could also use Murk as an abbreviation for Miami's Underground Recording Krew."
Early on, the Murk sound was "very gritty, very basic," he says. "Our songs didn't have very much more than a kick drum, a clap, a hi-hat, a bass line, maybe a little organ, then the vocals. The pressings were very crusty. It became like a novelty, the grittiness of the whole underground vibe. We didn't do it on purpose."
Indeed, by the early '90s, Murk had worked with Danny Tenaglia, considered by many to be dance music's greatest living DJ and perhaps its most influential. The New Yorker lived in Miami for a spell and was a frequent flier to South Beach into the early '90s. "I used to program beats for Danny when I was a kid," says Falcon. Murk, Tenaglia, Deep Dish, and Junior Vasquez - DJ acts who would go on to dance-floor supremacy - all recorded for the legendary Tribal America label by the mid-'90s.
"A lot of the people who were doing it were exposed to that Hispanic stuff," says Falcon. "We used to listen to a lot of salsa and African beats all the time. We tried to incorporate those kinds of rhythms into our music."
"Back then, there was just a small group of people doing stuff, and everybody was influenced by everybody," says Gaelan. "We were just friends putting out this music. Nobody thought it would be what it is now."Published: 10/02/2003
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