Soul Center

Cologne-based Thomas Brinkmann distilled funk to its skeletal core across his Soul Center output, merging taut loops and understated samples with the widely copied minimal techno aesthetic he helped shape. Rather than leaning on the obvious hooks that saturate countless 1960s and 1970s funk and soul recordings, he chose instead to construct entire pieces around fleeting details—a lone bass motif, an isolated snare crack, or a single shouted vocal fragment. The industrious and respected producer first presented the Soul Center alias in 1999 through a debut self-titled album issued on his own W.v.B Enterprises label, with a second identically titled volume appearing on W.v.B the following year. Although he customarily worked with modest imprints, Brinkmann made an unexpected move to the prominent Novamute roster for the project’s third volume in 2002. The resulting wider profile apparently prompted greater caution in his sampling choices, which on the earlier releases had drawn liberally from the Stax and Motown catalogs.