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Every once in a while, a record drops that reminds me why I fell in love with funk-driven house in the first place. “Feeling Wide” by FSQ is one of those gems, it’s got that 80s downtown New York energy, wrapped in a warm, modern groove that hits straight to the soul. When Chuck Da Fonk and the FSQ crew team up with Moniquea, XL Middleton, and the Soul Clap family, you know you’re in for something special. This whole collaboration feels like a bridge between eras, from Compass Point’s golden shimmer to MoFunk’s California bounce. In this Track Talk, I caught up with FSQ’s Chuck Da Fonk to talk about the making of “Feeling Wide,” the late-night studio magic at Empire in San Francisco, and what keeps the FSQ sound evolving after more than a decade of deep, cosmic funk.
Hi, thank you for having me and checking this music out. I’m Chuck Da Fonk Fishman, the creator of the music production team, Funk Style Quality, aka FSQ. FSQ is myself, G Koop, Matt Coogan (the artist known as One Era), Tate Masimore (the artist formerly known as Chas Bronz), Sa’d The Hourchild Ali (RIP), and Morgan Wiley.
I’m also the record label manager for Soul Clap Records and with FSQ, I have been an artist with the label for over 10 years. Soul Clap Records has collaborated many times over the years with MoFunk Records label boss, producer, DJ and keyboard virtuoso XL Middleton. For this EP, “Soul Clap Records versus MoFunk” EP the idea was to reunite and make some more new music together between the artists at each of the labels.
We convened at EMPIRE Dance’s recording studio in San Francisco, California and XL brought his partner, vocalist, songwriter, producer, and DJ, Moniquea. EMPIRE Dance represents Soul Clap Grecords for global distribution, and they have other dance music record labels under their division, like the mighty DIRTYBIRD Records. EMPIRE hosts writing and production camps at their studio in San Francisco, and they are cool because you rotate rooms and join other artists for only a certain period of time and you try to make as much music as you possibly can during the window. Soul Clap had a room in the studio and FSQ had our own room too during the camp.
For this EP, I wasn’t in the room when Soul Clap’s Charles Levine (aka Charlie Soul Clap, Lonely C) was working with XL and Moniquea on the track “Brand New” which is a unique and special gospel-tinged house anthem led by Moniquea’s uplifting and optimistic vocal and XL’s churchy piano. I can only imagine the vibes were high, and it’s a high energy kick off to the EP.
Eventually XL and Moniquea got sent into the FSQ working room, where they added to “Feeling Wide” which was already in production as I brought it as an instrumental to the EMPIRE writing camp. I had recorded quite a bit of the music with FSQ’s Tate Masimore and Matt Coogan who are such talented multi-instrumentalists. You don’t know where Matt and Tate’s guitar and bass parts begin and end as they are playing both of those instruments on “Feeling Wide”. Matt Coogan has live drums and layers of percussion on the song. Matt is a drum and percussion buyer for one of the world’s largest drum shops, Steve Weiss Music, so he has all the toys I could ever want to make a thick rhythm for an FSQ track.
At EMPIRE, Moniquea recorded vocals to the lyrics I had written for the track. She just gave the song so much life with a deeply heartfelt vocal delivery that also has some sass and punk funk to it, evoking that early 80s NYC downtown disco style. It’s a song about self-deprecation with lines like “I can’t get out of my own way, I’m feeling wide today. Walking down the street, I can’t get around myself” as if to say we are our own worst enemies. XL replayed a lot of my keyboard parts that I cut on the demo, really tightening up the song and he put this blazing fat synth solo on it at the end. FSQ’s G Koop was also there to add his part, an unexpected ukulele placed smartly in the mix.
To get the sonics I wanted for this song, after these sessions I brought Joe Caserta (aka Caserta) to mix and master “Feeling Wide”, and he wound up turning in his own dub that really leans into the sound of one of my favorite audio engineers from the 1980s, Alex Sadkin of The Compass Point All Stars and who engineered and produced for Duran Duran, Bob Marley and The Wailers, Grace Jones, Thompson Twins. I feel the track is one of our greatest accomplishments as FSQ.
We are probably 60 tracks deep now in terms of the FSQ music catalog. If I feel like “Feeling Wide” is one of our best efforts, what other tracks are in that rarefied air and how have we evolved as a production team? We produce a lot of remixes so sometimes those are a bit harder to find, and I think this is the perfect place to highlight our most intricate productions and deepest remix cuts from the start of our efforts as FSQ back in 2013.
This one of the earliest remixes FSQ produced, where we were really trying to establish our Caribbean Disco remix style, that tries to capture the magic of the Compass Point All Stars. The Blockheads would be one of the best bands to apply the style to considering Ian Dury recorded with the Compass Point crew and Chaz Jankel is in the Blockheads today. This was only released in 2014 for Record Store Day and there’s no digital version.
Produced completely at G Koop’s studio, together we recorded an entire Motown band behind Nick Monaco’s “Naked Is My Nature” for our FSQ remix, totally transforming the song from an ethereal electronic leftfield house track into a big Northern Soul production without losing any of Nick’s original riffs or melodies. We are the proudest of this remix which was our first for Soul Clap Records so it’s a bit of a deeper dig to find this one.
When I first heard Navid Izadi’s knocking staccato beat on his track “Hard 2 Say” I knew FSQ had to remix it. The original version has this high-pitched synth solo thing in the middle of it that reminded me of the theme for that TV show “Stargazer”; that synth line was super fun to build around. We added a creamy thick layer of mid-tempo funk on the track – Tate Masimore came with a bubbling disco bass line, and G Koop and Tate trade off on groovy rhythm guitars before the song takes off into duelling jazz guitar solos from the pair, followed by a flute solo and ARP synths that takes the track into 70s fusion territory.
G Koop and I worked ourselves hard on this remix and you can hear the quality from the added guitars, drums, salsa styled percussions, trumpets, warm synths and a walking bass line. Heck, we even recorded live handclaps. With our production, we were really thinking about Joe Bataan and FANIA All Stars and how they adeptly brought the disco and funk to Latin music.
With Jamaican David Marston circulating around the New York City music community at the time, we used him to expand the sound of our reggae disco production styles, including on this remix. FSQ’s Morgan Wiley pushed me to really get into drum programming for this one, which led to this really cool beefy electronic subsonic tom tom drum breakdown we have on the track. Morgan is also providing the plunky reggae pianos that are layered in the track. Marston’s guitar solos are absolutely romantic when the song hits its more subdued bridge.
This remix I have really no idea about how it came about or how the remix work was sourced but it got us some good press. Looking at this rare cuts list I’m sharing with you all, chronologically, apparently a lot of our remixes were coming out in 2017, but I think that was due to release schedules, not because we recorded all of these that year. I’ve become good friends with the vocalist on the original of this track; that’s Lisa Cork-Twiss, who now is with her own project Glass Slipper. I like this dub because it really showcases One Era (Matt Coogan’s) flair for Nu-disco production while it’s also a showcase for Tate Masimore’s memorable and melodic guitar solos. It’s probably one of our most rare cuts, hard to find even in search.
The original version of this Balearic classic featuring Chris Coco is so dramatic, but slow. I’m not sure how we pulled off this funky remix. We really emphasized the simple, memorable piano line from the original while adding a percussive and funky backbeat and lots of room for Matt and Tate’s soulful guitar playing. I rinsed the track in layers of new wave synths. This was a challenge and one of our finest moments, that’s unfortunately often forgot about.
Lonely C is Charles Levine, ½ of Soul Clap. Right away this is hard to find because he’s going by Charles Levine now, so our FSQ remix is kind of buried in the back catalog and it was released in early 2020, just 3 weeks before the pandemic shut everything down. This is an analog funk jam version of Charles’ more electronic pop original from his album “Charles & Tribulations”. We are back on our Caribbean Disco style here for this production and are aping the sound of The Tom Tom Club a bit. This remix is perfect for an island sunset especially at the end. There’s a different version of this remix called the FSQ Funkadelic Touch remix – it’s totally wild, psychedelic and 8 minutes plus – it only appeared on remix vinyl EP for Lonely C, so if you really want to go deep you’ll seek that one out.
Picking your favorite remix production is like trying to choose your favorite child, but I might dare say this is THE ONE at the expense of offending my entire family of productions. Bad Business Club was a supremely talented Yacht Rock / Nu-disco that only made it a few years – which is a shame, band leader Alex Vans has such amazing flair as a songwriter and performer. Andrew Raposo of Midnight Magic / 79.5 engineered this remix at his studio and gave me all the help in the world to craft the perfect 80s soundscape I wanted here. Tate Masimore delivered all the guitar brilliance I demanded of him (wait until the song’s coda for his shining melodies), then Matt came in with the perfect beat for this after a few times of us failing to track the drums with drummers outside the group. Our inspirations here were The Rockford Files (IYKYK) and several of our favorite Parliament-Funkadelic songs and of course Miami Vice’s amazing soundtrack music.
Recorded just before the pandemic, I was so lucky to be able to bring original Funkadelic member Billy “Bass” Nelson into the studio to cut new bass and guitar tracks for this remix. We heard the funk that Kraak & Smaak had in the original version and just riffed off that bringing Billy’s trademark Funkadelic sounds to our remix. With Matt’s drumming and organ cut on a follow up session, we had a remix that we think as close as we will ever get to authentic Funkadelic sound. The Kraak & Smaak album this is on – “Pleasure Centre Remixed” – has 27 tracks on it with heavy hitter remixers like Yuksek, Aeroplane, Tensnake and more, so again this FSQ remix is a bit off the beaten path.
Website: https://fsqofficial.com/hub
Instagram: https://instagram.com/fsqofficial
Facebook: https://facebook.com/fsqofficial
SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/fsqofficial
Mixcloud: https://www.mixcloud.com/fonksquish/
Massive thanks to Chuck Da Fonk and the whole FSQ crew for keeping the funk alive in 2025. “Feeling Wide” is out now as part of the Soul Clap Records vs. MoFunk EP, make sure you add it to your playlists, spin it in your sets, and let those layered vocals and synth lines carry you somewhere good. You can stream the full release now on Soul Clap Records and follow FSQ for more musical gold.
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DJ | MUSIC CURATOR & SELECTOR | PODCAST MAKER | BLOGGER Professional online interpreneur. Coffee practitioner. Electronic music culture maven. Total music guru. Infuriatingly humble problem solver. Food & sports fanatic.
Introduction: More Than Just Another Mix Welcome to Dirty Disco 617, Bridges of Funk & Frequency. This episode isn’t just a playlist; it’s a statement about how sound connects us. […]
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