DJ Funk – Pumpin’ Tracks EP (1994)

Alternative title: How to blow an entire tour’s fees in 2nd hand 7th heaven

In the beginning of 2025, Young Lychee and myself spent 1.5 months in Asia, playing gigs, visiting friends, having lunch, and running to catch our planes – classic DJ business. The last stop of our tour happened to be Tokyo. 

Going to Japan at all wasn’t necessarily an intuitive choice for a variety of reasons. For the longest time we didn’t have any tangible gigs planned, and even when we ended up securing a really fun gig with the ATM fam alongside local legends like Kanse or Seimei, the fee certainly didn’t justify the type of money we were spending staying in Tokyo for a week – especially when compared to other stops on our journey. India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and China allowed for pretty affordable living. Tokyo did not. On housing alone we blew around 1k€ for a cozy Airbnb in Kita for a week, which felt like a bargain given that a capsule hotel would have been like 700€-800€ for the two of us.

So why had I pushed for this Tokyo detour? Why was I so keen to go to Japan? Why did I object to my friend’s carefully worded warnings that spending a week in Japan for a modest fee might be economically inefficient and borderline irrational? I mean it’s not like I had any deep-seated weeb-tendencies beyond a surface level appreciation of Japanese cultural exports like DragonBall, Nintendo, Ramen or Soichi Terada. A now deleted tweet sort of sums it up: “to be a white guy is a constant struggle where you think a lot of things about Japan are interesting but you don’t wanna be all weird about it”

Need for Heat – Tokyo Dig

Well, beyond a general interest I knew there was one reason why I wanted to visit Tokyo, and why I wanted to do it right before traveling back to Europe: I wanted to purchase some records. I’d heard so much about Japanese record shops, about meticulously curated nerd dungeons filled with neatly packaged rare records in pristine conditions for decent prices. I remember watching episodes of Crate Diggers in which people were sharing their stories of visiting Japan and coming back with suitcase-loads of otherwise unfindable gems. And that’s not even mentioning the listening bars.

Obviously, reality as a one week tourist with little guidance can hardly live up to my imagination of Tokyo as a digger’s utopia, as vinyl Valhalla, as 2nd hand 7th heaven. I have to say that a lot of the more specialized cute stores are very much geared to people that aren’t me: There’s lots of rare US hip hop, lots of US disco and boogie – very happy to have snagged a copy of the NYC Peech Boys album. The few stores I found that were focused on 2nd hand electronic music were very firmly situated in the realms of soulful US house. UK genres were not very strongly represented in the stores I hit up.

However, we did end up having a great time haunting some amazing record stores, and I did find some real gems that I’m still truly excited about more than year after picking them up.

We arrived in Tokyo late on March 7th 2025, so on the 8th we had our first outing. We saw Shibuya crossing, ate our first bowl of Ramen, got overwhelmed and hit up the Disk Union in Shibuya. I believe it was the homie Thabo, who, among lots of helpful advice and connections, recommended we try our luck with the larger record chains rather than the small shops. I really couldn’t envision a big commercial record chain stocking 2nd hand 12”s, especially not stuff that I would actually like, but once that elevator door opened, we were fully entranced by the massive selection of exactly the kind of stuff we were looking for. Apparently the 2nd hand electronic music section of the Shibuya Disk Union has a good reputation, but generally there was not a single Disk Union I left disappointed.

We quickly noticed a large section labeled “Chicago” that stocked anything from Rockin’ House to Trax to huge numbers of Dance Mania records, and an especially significant number of DJ Funk records, pretty much all of which we bought. This was not just because DJ Funk was a legendary DJ and producer whose tracks had a profound impact on both of our musical development as well as the development of Raiders, the label we founded. 

We also wanted to buy pretty much every DJ Funk track on sight because it was March 8th, and DJ Funk had sadly passed away just three days prior. After Deeon and Paul Johnson, he was the third famous originator of Chicago’s ghetto house sound to pass away within just a few years from each other. None of them lived to be 60. The impact of any of them truly cannot be overstated. But DJ Funk – who I saw live at this night at Ipse, to which neither Deeon and Paul Johnson ended up making it, leading to some angry Facebook posts, which was the style at the time – was the one that I always played the most songs of.

Teachers / Learners

Sadness and tragedy aside: Out of the 6ish DJ Funk records I bought in Tokyo, “Pumpin’ Tracks” is probably the most classic. It’s an amazing EP, whether you’re into this sound or not. Released in 1994 as one of Funk’s first, the EP probably qualifies as part of the early days of what people would later call ghetto house. The stand-out track – often sampled and remixed but rarely done justice – is of course “Pump It”. With its repetitive and encompassing bassline, its densely layered vocal chops, and its tight drums it rightfully qualifies as a foundational classic of the genre. 

“Pump it” is really raw with all that the word entails. If you’d want to be critical you could say: Funk is still finding his footing – especially given that his later contributions have perfected this exact type of track, hold your attention firmly and still sound futuristic today. You can still hear the echos of late 80s TRAX records and the Hip House wave in it. If you’d want to be charitable, though, you could say: This track bangs! It is bursting with energy and innovation, and still works well in DJ sets today.

Beyond “Pump It”, I find the remaining tracks on the EP even more interesting. They are the kind of distorted, repetitive, functional, jackin mid-90s drum machine workouts that get less shine than the hits with the well-known vocals. But they truly embody the rough essence of this era in Chicago music. “Happy Feet” and “Low Energy”, which delivers anything but, follow a classic Dance Mania formula: Distorted drum patterns combined with simple bleeps, occasionally pitched up or down, sometimes thickened with a 303 bassline. A recipe as simple as it is enduring.

“Knock Knock,” my favorite of the bunch, even forgoes the rudimentary notes and derives all its head-nodding potential from a short loop of swingin’ percussive hits that should get old but somehow doesn’t. Rarely does a track without a melody become such a favorite of mine, but this one made it.

“Knock Knock” is a good symbol for that entire era of early unpolished ghetto house: It does a lot with very little, because it knows that very little can be enough. While there is obviously so much more to say about the legacy of these Chicago legends, their significance to me, and also about Cosmic Records – the UK label that released this EP and a few others by Chicago OGs in a rare and fruitful burst of early transatlantic cooperation – I have to let myself be inspired by the holy ghost of DJ Funk on this one and not overdo it. This text is rambling enough as it is, and you hardly learned anything about digging in Japan. Oh well. Like and subscribe.

RIP DJ Funk!