All funked up: Japanese trio Cro-Magnon mix it up

Describe Cro-Magnon's musical style and you end up sounding as if you've swallowed an encyclopedia of music. The uber-cool Japanese trio's unique sound is influenced by everything from jazz to soul, house to funk, prog rock to space rock and dub.

Add the fact that the band members met while studying at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in the United States, and Cro-Magnon may start to sound like an overly cerebral affair. In reality, and particularly live, the band bypass the brain and aim squarely at the hips: it is impossible not to dance to them.

"We treat our live shows more like a mix, like something a DJ would do," says guitar and bass player Tsuyoshi Kosuga, who also dabbles with samplers. "We only have one or two short breaks in a 45-minute set. We don't need to talk about the songs."

Kosuga and his bandmates, keyboard player Takumi Kaneko and drummer and percussionist Shigekazu Otake, met in the mid-1990s. They jammed in a tiny studio without electricity, eventually forming a six-piece band that played on the street, gigged at college and became the house band for a small club.

The band's members found their way back to Japan around 1999, and evolved into five-piece hip hop outfit Loop Junktion. They were signed by Sony and went on to record three albums. But not everything was heading in the direction that Kosuga and his friends wanted.

"Sony were good, but we found some difficulties retaining control. Doing music with a major label for so long, we kind of struggled for a while," he says.

The pressure of being pigeonholed as a Japanese hip hop group and being persuaded to record uptempo tunes eventually led to the band splitting up. Three of its members went on to form Cro-Magnon.