[Cover photo credit to Katherine Copeland Anderson]

André Cymone has announced that his new LP, The Resurrection of Funk will be released this August. As the title suggests, the album is a “bold declaration that a seemingly abandoned genre has been reborn.” Cymone takes on the persona of “a colorful character known as The Funk Forecaster” who guides listeners through a journey into the world of Funk. On the album, all songs are written, performed and played by Cymone himself. The track “The Revolution’s On Yo In “O” Net” is out now.

The Resurrection of Funk arrives “not as nostalgia or revivalism, but as response to the present moment.” It addresses “cultural amnesia, and the growing distance between music and the people who make it.” In this, it’s a kind of joyful protest music.

The record is deeply tied to Minneapolis, “not just as geography, but as ethos.” Funk becomes “protest without bitterness, resistance without despair.”

Cymone is an early collaborator of the artist Prince and both shaped the “The Minneapolis Sound”. Their first band, Grand Central, emerged from a convergence of two multi-instrumentalists.

Now, with The Resurrection of Funk, Cymone embraces the sound he helped give birth to, “as reclamation.” Playing every instrument himself, with no guest musicians and no AI involvement, he “asserts the irreplaceable value of human intelligence in music.”

Cymone states, through this album that “He is one of the architects of this sound, and this record is about placing that architecture back in view, in full context, where it belongs.”