(1.2.3 ) OG live @ belgrad am echo festival 2003
(4) mike t/zeb & cedric @ brooks

Organic Grooves

For info and location call: 212.439.1147

click on pic for large image

For the past 8 years the Organic Grooves Collective has been holding Friday night parties all over NYC. People come to these weekly gatherings to hang out and to dance, but they mostly come to experience the music. Created by a collective of DJs and musicians, the Organic Grooves sound blends live instrumentation with original tracks and mixes tribal drum beats with contemporary sample techniques and electronics to create music that is totally off beat and completely unique. It is a sound that gets under your skin and into your mind.

Organic Grooves 4

Those of you who are hardcore devotees of Quango Recordings and NYC's Giant Step movement can save yourselves some time by skipping the rest of this review and immediately buying this CD. Those of you still reading might be pleased to know that very few groups have ever chosen a name as wisely as New York's Organic Grooves, because that's exactly what they're all about.

An ever-evolving collective comprised of DJs, live musicians and producers, Organic Grooves is about as smooth a mixture of funk, Afro-Caribbean, dub, acid jazz and electronics as you're ever likely to hear, and despite the international spectrum of funky sound that they encompass, their sound evokes nothing as much as it does the urban groove of New York. This CD encompasses twelve original tracks in a live mix format specifically designed to keep you moving; there are no gaps or obvious bridges between songs. Instead there are subtle shifts in tempo, instrumentation and the layering of sound, so that you're literally carried away in the rhythms. And although Organic Grooves 4 isn't all that different from their three prior CDs, it doesn't matter. When you've developed a sound this good, you don't have to keep reinventing it.
- Peter Carbonaro, www.propellermagazine.com, May 2002

NYC-based Organic Grooves are an amazing musical entity whose metro-based roots, international experience, and revolving and evolving cast of players and contributors are responsible for a very enticing, grass root, not-your-typical-gimme-more clubbing experience. Comprised of artists, DJs and producers whose collective identity creates and promotes deep funk grooves, thick swabs of dub-infused backdrops, saucy freeform acid jazz through skillful electronic programming, peripheral neo-ambient backdrops and copious amounts of live horn sections, tribal, world-beat, Afro, and Caribbean percussion, bass and flamingo guitars, Organic Grooves provide a talented and unified performance platform for absolute musical experimentation. Delving deeply into the organic side of downtempo and psychedelic beat orchestrations, while drifting gently through pockets of Afro-Cuban and chilled out urban street rhythms, Organic Grooves have become quite the musical phenomenon which producers and labels around the globe have gained awareness of and association to.

Upon hearing Volume 4, in its divine continuous live-mix format, it becomes quite clear what exactly is so amazing about the Organic Grooves vibe. I'd have to comment on the liquid flow and blending of multi-tiered soundscaping, which reach many points throughout the 12-track mix where one becomes so relaxed that you feel your mind, body, and soul are undergoing a musical hypnotism. The music is so seductively and sublimely potent that your submission into is graces is based solely on how quickly you let yourself into the music's embrace. Fans of Bruno Guez's Quango Recordings and his recent string of diverse world-beat, global grooves compilations will fall immediately in love with Organic Grooves and their music.
- Alkemist, www.digitalartifact.org, May 2002