DJ Rob E - "Listen (DJ KJ's Bullfrog mix)"
ElectoAcidFunk3 by DJ Voodoo
Song released in 1999. Mix released in 2000.
Florida Breaks / Acid Breakbeat / Trance
It really sucks how Floridian dance music got warped into such a stupid Diplo-ridden bore and dominated by the likes of the Ultra Music Festival, because things really used to be so much more fun and innovative down there, but rarely did you ever hear about it if you weren't from the area itself. Pretty much unlike anywhere else in America, a coterie of Sunshine State DJs and producers during the late 80s to early 2000s essentially committed themselves to being little musical equivalents of Nintendo's Kirby. They'd suck up a whole bunch of the modern sounds that were in their immediate surroundings and then spit it all back out, blended into something that was so uniquely its own creation that it eventually received its own distinct name: Florida breaks.
Florida breaks represented a breakbeat-driven mishmash of all the sounds that were simultaneously defining Floridian party music at the time: Miami bass, electro, freestyle, house, and then with trance from Europe having found an audience in Miami as well, Florida breaks embraced that too. But the genre really never broke containment. None of the big names who shaped the sound in its Orlando-centric hub turned out to be all that notable to anyone who was living outside the state. If I said to you the name DJ Icey, you'd probably say 'beg pardon?'
And the super cool thing about Florida breaks was how efficient and economical it all was. Rather than clubs having to set aside separate nights for a lot of the different sounds that were coursing throughout Florida, here was something that could mix it together into not just the same set, but the very same song, and please everyone with its versatility as it neatly recognized different bits of local culture that'd helped to make the state so individually vibrant in the first place. It was like a beautiful mosaic, and I don't think any other place in America has ever taken such a consciously similar approach to creating its own brand of dance music. And everyone, including me, should really know so much more about it, because if you ask me, Florida really was the most innovative place for dance music in America for a good while, and while Chicago contributed house and Detroit contributed techno, there wasn't really any genre-cross-pollinating kind of growth and expansion within those localities like was later seen in FL.
So here's a trancey Florida breaks banger from 1999 for you all that I have on a mix called ElectroAcidFunk3 by a guy named DJ Voodoo that's on Spotify. Song I'm posting is something by a veteran named DJ Rob E that was remixed by another guy named DJ KJ. All these folks were entities in the Orlando area, and what KJ does with this remix is transform the original from an acidic breakbeat tune into an acidic breakbeat tune with a whole bunch of trance added to it, along with electro and freestyle melodies too. And it's specifically called the "Bullfrog Mix" because in addition to a looped-up sample of heavy human breaths that serves as part of the backbeat, KJ also throws in another extra bit of rhythm too, with a respirating acid-wub that sounds quite like a bullfrog. At the 2:40 mark, he cinches the whole track together, and whatever empty space was once on this acid-encrusted joint is now padded contrastingly with some lovely crystalline, electro-melodic strings, deepening the entire experience and making the product significantly more hypnotic, and thus allowing KJ to probe further deeper into the pits of each and everyone of our own previously uncharted inner-Floridian souls.
And as a smallish secondary city that's home to Mickey Mouse, NSync, and a whole lot of death metal, you might not expect O-town to have also been an oasis for uniquely cool dance music too, but if you'd taken a peek underground, you'd come to hear that this stuff, above all else, was pretty clearly the niftiest music that the whole place had to offer, and, more importantly, the most innovative form of dance in the entire country at the time as well.
