Numero Group

When Duster were recording their space rock mini-epics on wobbly four-track in a makeshift San Jose home studio in the late '90s, it's likely they weren't imagining that their records would someday be fetching exorbitant prices and that a classy reissue label would someday issue a box set. No doubt they were just having fun making music, expressing themselves, and exploring sound for its own sake, but history has a way of taking strange turns, and in 2019 the Numero Group's Capsule Losing Contact was released. The lavishly packaged set gathers the two albums (1998's Stratosphere and 2000's Contemporary Movement) and one EP (1999's 1975) they released for Up Records and adds the Transmission, Flux EP, the Apex, Trance-Like single, and a handful of rare and previously unreleased tracks. The collection finally restores the music of Duster to people who can now afford to own it and every fan of slowcore, lo-fi space rock and unassumingly brilliant indie rock should plunk down their money and get this set.

So what is funk? It’s sometimes difficult to know. In the 1950s, the piano style of both Ray Charles and Horace Silver were described as funk, and the word itself has long associations with black music, going back even further into history. Clearly the success of James Brown at the tail end of the 1960s—say from “Cold Sweat” onwards—established the funk era, but the Godfather of super-heavy funk had already set out his stall with “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag” and “I Got You (I Feel Good)” in 1965. At the same time a series of productions he recorded with Bobby Byrd, James Crawford, and others saw him slowly perfect his groove.