Skweee

Stuffed full of sonic invention, and powered by bone-shaking lo-fi electro-funk, skweee emerged towards the end of the '00s as dubstep's move-bustin' Scandinavian cousin, a platform for the kind of beat-chopping mischief from which clubland revolutions are spawned. Daniel Savio, the Swede who christened the genre, opens up our selection with the scene-setting "We Call It Skweee" alongside Finland's Eero Johannes, highlighting skweee's tendency to blend irresistible grooves with corny wordplay on "We Could Be Skweeeroes". Throw in the Fix's modular body-popper "Duck Butter" and the controlled chaos of Claws Cousteau's "North State of Mind" . . . and your skweee odyssey is underway.

The beat doctors of skweee triple the strength of their sonic tonic, in Next Steps.

Skweee, like many experimental genres born of digital tinkering, thrives on the thrill of possibility — and there's always the sense that something magical and alchemical is going to emerge from the beatmakers' kinked circuitry. That's certainly the case with V.C., packing a complex assemblage of clicks and scratches, all welded to a throbbing bass, into "Skweee On"; likewise Coco Bryce, who squelch-drills you a brain pan before plugging the gap with sampled flute on "Ghetto Freaks"; and so too Vakttornet, whose monumental "Tower of Murdor" rips a hilarious quote from cult movie Flesh Gordon and appears on the excellent 2011 Flogsta compilation, Museum of Future Sound 3.

Now follow the wonky trail of skweee into Deep Cuts.

Funky, volatile, electrifying — skweee has retained its pulse-quickening edge since emerging from the Scandinavian sound laboratory of the mid-'00s, the days when Spartan Lover used to go by the handle PJVM: looking for a new way to re-combine elements of breakbeat, ghetto and electro, he was tipped onto skweee by fellow pioneer Randy Barracuda, and made his first move into the fledging genre at 93 bpm, with the beautifully wobbled confection, "Rubarb Dream". Further down the line he'd deliver prime squelchers like "Illusion of Love" while his aforementioned cohort proved a master of old-skool R&B electronica with cuts like "Lajinsa Viimeinen".

Coined in the mid '00s by Sweden's Daniel Savio, aka Kool DJ Dust — who wanted to "squeeze the juice out of his Juno (synth) till the last drop" — and incubated in Helsinki clubland, skweee was first distributed with retrospective DIY relish on 7" vinyl. Sometimes referred to as Synthetik Scandinavian Funk, the genre combines the organic grooves of funk, R&B, hip-hop and soul with the experimental scope, digital adrenaline and malleable minimalism of electronica . . . which makes the hybrid style both highly adaptable (it quickly spawned a bunch of splinter sounds) and supremely groovy. What started out on the Harmonia and Flogsta Danshall labels has now spread far and wide, and the current matrix of "skweee heads" unites the world under a cleverly twisted banner of groundbreaking beat-making. Will the pun-heavy movement continued to gain strength during the second decade of the 21st Century? We'll have to wait and skweee.