Electronic music is, by definition, all about the electronics; the world of sonic possibilities that hitting wood and strings and skins cannot produce. Throughout the last quarter of the 20th century, as synthesizers gained acceptance, new styles and forms of music emerged, splitting and bifurcating into genres, sub-genres and sub-sub-genres. It looked for a while there like the old two guitars, a bass and drums line-up was dead forever.

And then something quite strange happened. Artists working in “electronic” genres started experimenting with traditional instruments—guitars, bass, strings, drums, woodwind, and brass. It was probably the influence of good old-fashioned jazz, particularly on trip-hop and drum ‘n’ bass, that did it. Synthesizers are great and sampling and tweaking old jazz records can give them a new freshness, but artists began wondering whether they could meld their own “live band” sounds into their electronic recordings.

Two of my favourite late-90s artists working in this field were the British drum/double bass/guitar trio Red Snapper (sadly defunct) and Austrian collective Sofa Surfers (still going strong). Both bands were vaguely within the genre of trip-hop, in that they derived a lot of their sounds from hip-hop, jazz, soul, and dub (although both have a strong affinity with the jazzy end of drum ‘n’ bass). Yet they never quite fit in with a genre beginning its steady decline into the realms of chill-out music and monthly Café Del Mar compilations.

Red Snapper’s debut album Making Bones has two guest spots by a rapper and two guest spots from a wannabe soul diva (so far, so trip-hop), but otherwise it’s almost an instrumental jazz album, albeit at the more experimental end. Unlike another Warp musician’s 1998 venture into jazz instrumentation, Squarepusher’s Music Is Rotted One Note, this isn’t free jazz—it’s actually relentlessly rhythmic and punchy. Songs such as “Spitalfields” may stretch, but they don’t meander—there’s not a wasted note or beat from the trio or guest trumpeter Byron Wallen. The fusion of the rhythmic kick of hip-hop with the smooth sounds of acoustic instruments isn’t new (A Tribe Called Quest and Stetsasonic did that years earlier) but it was new for “electronic” music.

I first stumbled across Sofa Surfers in remixed form on Kruder & Dorfmeister’s downbeat manifesto The K&D Sessions and was sufficiently impressed to check out the originals. Unlike the über-mellow K&D, however, Sofa Surfers make pretty scary music. The trash-can banging of Michael Holzgruber, the ganja-nightmare basslines and the mechanical noises and scrapes fuse into a menacing avant-jazz beast. They relent periodically, but as with Red Snapper, they use real drums to create stronger, more pummelling rhythms than most techno. “Yoyogi Uehara,” off their Cargo album, is quite clearly a drum ‘n’ bass track, but it’s mostly live and is all the more awe-inspiring for that fact.

When I started writing this piece, I wondered whether electronic musicians took up their drum sticks again to try and capture the freewheeling looseness of jazz, something machines are not good at replicating. And yet my two examples don’t use drums for that purpose at all. Red Snapper and Sofa Surfers seem to have realised that the resonance and fullness of a traditional drumkit sound can give a regular techno or drum ‘n’ bass beat a life of its own.

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