Groove may elude words, but singer-producer YELLOW (Huang Hsuan) knows it when he feels it. “Anything that gets me moving my neck and bobbing my head,” he tells Apple Music. “It feels like an electric shock from your head to your toes.” That current runs through YELLOW’s work. The Golden Melody Award winner has produced a unique brand of highly energised, soul- and funk-inspired music that defies categorisation, putting him right in the centre of a burgeoning soul and R&B revival in Taiwan. As this aptly-named playlist suggests, he stands out even among his peers for an obsessive focus on rhythmic propulsion rarely heard in Chinese-language music. While beginning on classical violin as a kid, YELLOW first felt groove while singing gospel at church. “My mom was a gospel singer, and I think she’s probably the first choir singer in Taiwan who ever sang like that,” he says. This later led to a high-school obsession with neo-soul artists like Erykah Badu, Bilal and D’Angelo, all of whom influenced his 2020 single “Post-Monologue.” “D’Angelo’s music has pain in it. You can feel him bring all his inner struggles into the music with true sincerity,” YELLOW says. In Black Messiah, “it’s not like the kind of hip-hop and laid-back neo-soul [as in Voodoo], and there’s raw, rock ’n’ roll stuff—but that’s still grooving to me because he’s being honest with himself, expressing pain in a different way without pretension.” Same goes for Prince, who crowns YELLOW’s playlist with his 2006 release “3121.” Even late in his career, “Prince was still experimenting with different types of music and that’s what I truly respect him for,” YELLOW says of the musical chameleon. “I can occasionally hear punk in 3121, and that punk is in his attitude.” “He doesn’t over-polish the edges, and leaves in the key element—his attitude.” He recognises this same sincerity in C-pop artists like A-Yue Chang. “No matter what genre he’s working in, he brings his own personality to the musical world he’s creating. As soon as you hear it, you know it’s him.” His playlist also includes tracks from other groove-masters like George Clinton and Don Blackman of Parliament/Funkadelic, Anderson .Paak’s patented mix of R&B and hip-hop and Fela Kuti with his combo of Afrobeat, funk and jazz. “Everyone thinks that jazz should be very comfortable and consumed with red wine and cheese. But I think jazz can also be very violent and ruthless,” YELLOW says, showcasing jazz’s surlier side with tracks from Japanese sextet Soil & Pimp Sessions, Detroit swing band The Atomic Fireballs and hip-hop producer Robert Glasper’s “Black Radio” featuring Mos Def. “[Glasper] can get this kind of fusion of jazz and hip-hop and then bring in pop and electronic elements,” YELLOW says. “I think it’s hard to balance something so solid and natural-sounding.” Another artist that strikes that balance is the versatile Japanese musician Daiki Tsuneta, who, from his work in J-rock band King Gnu to his experimental side project Millennium Parade, shows that groove is soluble in any genre, including classical. “Tsuneta uses classical music to combine electronic, rock and funk, and these things are integrated in it, which is something that I think is very, very different,” YELLOW says. “Then he can still translate to very avant-garde and iconic music realm.” To this end, YELLOW joins a growing stable of musicians finding a distinctly C-pop groove. From legacy R&B-pop fusion artists like David Tao and Jay Chou to relative newcomers Shi Shi, Julia Wu, LINION and L8ching, each bring new ways to convey groove’s universal feel through Chinese language, articulation and lyrics. “Everyone has some groove in them, otherwise the music wouldn’t resonate,” YELLOW says. “It’s like what Lao Tzu said about the Dao. It’s shapeless, yet it’s everywhere.”