Grime time
I’ve had a lot of contact with the new school of instrumental grime recently, and it’s an area rife with possibility. It’s going to be absolutely fascinating seeing where it goes over the next year and whether it can capitalise on the opportunities presented or whether it will (no pun intended) shoot itself in the foot. What’s clear, though, is that it is rambunctious party music and buzzing with innovatory spirit. I’m not even going to mention riots or inner city anger.
Just released a couple of days ago is the Virus EP by Deset, on the Gobstopper label (which I have signed for finetunes distribution) run by the excellent Mr Mitch. It sums up a lot of the themes in the sound at the moment, with the influences of fairly straightforward electro, drum’n’bass, hard techno and dubstep being felt really heavily on the production styles and rhythms of the two no-nonsense original tracks, while the remixes of ‘Virus’ by Dexplicit and Mr Mitch show the genre is still capable of plenty of weirdness and sudden sharp left turns.
Mr Mitch’s own Advocate EP on the Boogaloo City label out of Bristol (which, ahem, I am also distributing) is laced with funk keyboard lines – and the as-yet unreleased material that he’s got coming up takes this even futher. A new EP by the brilliant Teeza coming up in a few weeks on Triangulum records (which… yes, you guessed) spans just as broad a range of influences. It’s illustrative of how much the young generation of grime are taking their inspirations not just from the lineage of rave, jungle, garage and dancehall which received wisdom has it are the source material for the genre, but from a longer, deeper history of electro-funk that comes in both via US hip hop (especially those 808-riddled durrty south beats) and via parents’ and older siblings’ record collections.
That funk continuum, linking back through 1980s b-boy electro and also to those buzzing keyboard licks in Stevie Wonder, Isley Brothers, Cameo and Parliament-Funkadelic records, has always been a major part of the DNA of grime. Looking back to early Geeneus 12”s recently I was struck by how close he brought 2-step rhythms to electro, there is Terror Danjah’s classic reworking of “Planet Rock”, and of course Joker and his Bristol compadres Gemmy and Guido have always collapsed grime and dubstep together into modernist electro-funk variants all their own.
But there seems to be a real upswell at the moment: as well as those already mentioned, check out how perfectly Pasteman and Tanka make Mz Bratt’s grime-derived vocal work with their booty electro beat on this bootleg, try to find Royal-T’s DJ set from Alex Nut’s Rinse show a couple of month’s back that blends 80s funk sounds together perfectly, and watch out for upcoming material by Mensah (another Bristolian on the cusp of grime and dubstep) who has a new track upcoming next month that is a direct tribute to the electro classic “Al-Naafiysh (The Soul)”….
The producer who has most completely adopted and adapted the electro-funk past, though, is Swindle – who has absorbed his dad’s record collection not just from the 70s and 80s but going all the way back to John Lee Hooker. I was very proud to manage to get Swindle to play the Sound Of The Cosmos (aka Cosmos Bass) tent that I helped Tom Middleton book for the Big Chill two weekends ago, and watch how he brings this pasts together with rave tricks old and new to make something genial, celebratory but also absolutely hard as nails. A few of my friends, fellow mid-30s old ravers like me, were in the crowd for his set and I watched them literally laugh out loud a couple of times at how preposterous his sounds and sudden switches are. “What IS this?” they asked me more than once. “What is he DOING?”
It’s his “Wot U Call It moment”, to use Alex Williams at SplinteringBoneAshes’s phrase. Just like when grime was not quite separated from garage, dubstep and all else around it, and its rules were as yet unwritten (as documented in Wiley’s “Wot U Call It”), so Swindle’s sound is in a state of wild flux, and ragingly fertile. Swindle himself doesn’t even call what he does grime any more, although there are plenty of elements – the abrupt mood switches, the use of jagged rhythms, the huge and harsh snares etc – which show his deep roots in that scene. He can throw in those funk synth lines, Moroccan percussion, hammond organs, drum’n’bass forward momentum, dubstep’s freqency manipulations, all sorts of old rave and UK garage beats, and make it all sound like a new thing… because it IS a new thing.
I should have Swindle’s Big Chill set available for download soon, but in the meantime you can hear him at the Butterz/Hardrive rave which happened the weekend after the Big Chill and which I was gutted to miss HERE. In fact you can download five more sets of hammering grime-derived music from that same rave by Butterz’s Elijah & Skilliam with MCs Blacks & Bruza, by Hardrive main man Terror Danjah with MC D Double E, by Royal-T with MC Merky Ace, by D.O.K. and by one of my current favourite producers, Champion. I’m going to write separately about Butterz, who have supported, mentored or even launched most of the producers I’ve mentioned, and together with Terror Danjah led the push for instrumental grime as commercially viable music in its own right, but these downloads should serve as tribute enough to how much energy the sound has currently, in no small part thanks to them.
Stuff like Swindle – and the new material we’re going to see over coming months from Teeza, Mr Mitch, Royal-T etc – is obviously going to be looked on by some as a betrayal of grime’s rawness and lo-fi roots. They will say that the increasing musicality and higher production values take it away from its basis as untutored rhythms for raging teenage rappers. These will probably be the same people who say that grime has lost its excitement because it’s not gangster enough these days and that the real innovation is in “road rap”. However this needn’t concern us here as these people are dickheads.
There is still plenty of rugged MC-friendly grime to go round, whether it’s the amazing vinyl-only Summer Sampler EP on Kiss FM DJ Logan Sama’s Earth616 label (only released a couple of weeks ago but sadly now unlikely to be had for love or money anywhere by the looks of things), the new mini-album from the outstanding G.Tank, or just about anything that DJ Spooky aka Spooky Bizzle puts his hand to…
A Bag Of Myths EP (click through for a free download of the whole EP)
Keep Watch Vol. XXVIII: Spooky - original Мишка NYC blog posting
There’s so much else going on. I’ve not even mentioned the directions Darq E Freaker is taking grime in yet, which deserves a whole story of it’s own, I think… or J Beatz… or Rude Kid… or the brain-twisting Finnish grime productions of Gremino… but I’m tiring. This is a notebook, I’m not going to be comprehensive, or set the world to rights, that’s not the point. More grime another time…
