Kraak & Smaak

A bigger, brighter future is dawning over Dutchmen Wim Plug, Mark Kneppers and Oscar De Jong. Over the last few years, Kraak & Smaak, as a collectively, have slowly funked their way up the currency ladder, notching up Bestival, Coachella, SXSW and Pinkpop along the way. The year 2008 is primed, ready to catapult them into the orbit of triumph.

Speaking from his hideout in Leiden, Holland, Vim Plug tells Base that the distinguished Kraak & Smaak moniker is not as conspicuous as it might first appear. “It’s a Dutch proverb” he explains, exuding a prolific Flemish accent, “it means ‘crunchy and tasty’. It seemed to reflect our music”.

Late in 2007, the Dutch trio spewed forth the double headed, club-funking EP beast, Funk Ass Rotator/Mad As Hell. Where as Funk Ass Rotator was heritage - “the Kraak & Smaak breakbeat club song” - Mad As Hell was grittier, dub-smacked house. Plug sees Mad As Hell as “not your sweet house music”, but “very jumpy, very itchy” and infested with “heavy basslines”. Basically, it was “underground stuff. The stuff you hear at parties”.

And now, K&S are at it again. Wafting huge hints about the content of their forthcoming album, Plug & co have launched another direction-distorting EP. It’s name is That’s Our Word and it’s a three-pronged attack of vocal dexterity. The eponymous title track is funk-heavy hip hop delivered by Dudley Perkins’ (Stones Throw) “stream of consciousness flow of rapping”. Plug reveals there was a concerted effort amongst the group to focus this new work more on songs and vocalists. “We’re not very good at lyrical writing and singing ourselves. So we thought of the people whose albums we’d bought and then we came up with people like Dudley”.

This simplistic approach also lead K&S in the direction of Carmel, the popular 80s boogie jazz vocalist. They were very keen to utilise her dynamic voice so as to balance the EP’s leftfield track, Why Do People Fall? According to Plug, Carmel’s singing “has a very meloncholic timbre of it” which is why the track has been likened to Massive Attack, Portishead and the darker, seedier elements of David Lynch’s cinematic world.

It is no surprise to learn, therefore, that K&S are no strangers to celluloid distraction. Producing and DJing are just part of the story. They also supply scores for films (I Embrace You With A Thousand Arms), TV (Grays Anatomy) and computer giants (Microsoft Zune music and video player). Asked if these alternative money-earners are intrinsically linked with a career in DJing, Plug insists “most DJs would hope so. What we’ve learned as DJs is that we wouldn’t have that status if we didn’t put out records ourselves”.

The addition of the K&S live band has broadened their appeal and is key to protecting their rank. “It sort of all intertwines from that” says Plug, “all these other things come because our interests are quite broad. We’ve come to learn that being a DJ these days is not enough”.

Parameters are obsolete in the K&S domain, which is a catalyst for developing new and exciting things. Debut album, Boogie Angst, was widely regarded as a fine piece of futuristic breakbeat. That was followed swiftly by The Remix Sessions, an anthology of their emphatic recrafting of artists like Jamiroquai, Junkie XL and Richard Dorfmeister.

The new album is set for release any day now and Plug promises “more electronic sounds” and featured collaborations. “For the very traditional K&S style of funky breakbeats we got Ben Westerbeech” he says, adding, “this was also something where we thought ‘let’s just try it out and see what happens’”. Thankfully for us all, “it worked very well”.

Plug, De Jong and Kneppers each have their own field of expertise and provide elements that produce raw broken house beats and rolling energetic grooves. “Only one of us, Oscar, is a real musician who knows the studio technical stuff inside out” explains Plug, “he’s a very good keyboard player and studied musical production so knows his way around”. Kneppers and Plug himself, however, are DJs and, as such, both are habitual vinyl junkies. “We’ve DJ-ed for quite some time and we are enormous record collectors. We still buy every dance style from D&B to hip hop to house to breakbeat, but also alternative stuff”. Allegedly, Kneppers’ collection has already reached the 50,000 mark.

Plug sees the consumption of these styles as pivotal to “the sounds in the record”. The procedure is self-evident and involves simply messing around a bit. “We contribute to it further by looking at arrangement, putting in the samples and trying it out” he confesses, even going so far as to use the “organic” word. “One way or the other, that seems to work”.

The trajectory of Kraak & Smaak’s success appears to be calculated, yet in actual fact it only ever began just for kicks. “It all started just as being fun and seeing what happened next, nothing serious” Plug remembers, concluding, “from the first album onwards it has just gone up all the time”.