There’s a gravitational hum inside Duke Charelle’s new single, “Tangerine Sky.” It rushes at you in its raucous, sweltering glory and then lingers. Greg “G-Rock” Sanders coils his basslines like thick rope around Dean Ragland’s drums, which still echo with the ghosts of P Funk All-Stars’ cosmic cadences. Chavis Chandler’s verse arrives like a sudden temperature drop in a hazy sunset. The track grooves, of course, and then it swivels, dips, and then looks you dead in the eye. It’s the kind of song that doesn’t ask for space in your playlist. It builds its own orbit and threatens to pull equally unorthodox jams around itself.
Duke’s background reads like the syllabus of an alternative conservatory. Early choir roots led to jazz band brass, which turned into guitar explorations inspired by Hendrix’s chaos and Prince’s sartorial mischief. His single “Liquid Galaxies” made the top 20 on Billboard’s Funk Compilation charts and nudged past iTunes’ top ten. But what’s more interesting is how that track became the foundation of a newer project. AMGCorp’s artist OKTaeler took “Liquid Galaxies”—not as a sample, but as material—and created something genetically altered. There’s a difference between borrowing and decoding, and OKTaeler went full Rosetta Stone.
In “Tangerine Sky,” Duke Charelle doesn’t sample the past so much as provoke it. The arrangement feels like a conversation with ghosts: ragged brass memory, sub-bass philosophy, and rhythmic interrogations. You can sense Duke asking not “How do we honor the old?” but “How do we haunt the new?” His sound palette here is imposing and wild, definitely raw and edgy, to the point where you start to see glimpses of old Iggy Pop or David Bowie in there, at least in the way the whole piece carries itself with that irreverent, grandiose attitude. It’s not “funk rock” per se, but it’s not your grandma’s radio-friendly funk cassette either.
“Tangerine Sky” smolders. Its warmth comes from the friction it causes by pushing so intently against boundaries. This is just a new axis, a recalibrated tilt. And with collaborators like OKTaeler bending his frequencies into new forms, the future isn’t revivalist. It’s recombinant, borderline experimental, and incredibly generous.
