grime
James Williams
It was a full house in Kentish Town for a homecoming show for grime pioneers Wiley, Skepta and JME. A far cry from the Sidewinder and Eskimo Dance parties that spawned so many of the scene’s main players, instead this was a night that carried an air of triumph, a "we made it" moment that inspired explosive performances and a fantastically receptive audience.Featuring a plethora of grime scene talent, from the up and comers, represented by the Azonto fixated Fuse ODG, who made the most of the stage space to whip the crowd into a skanking maelstrom, to appearances from scene veterans and Read more ...
joe.muggs
In six and a half years of existence, SBTV has redefined what youth culture broadcasting can be. It began as nothing more than a YouTube channel where Jamal Edwards would put up videos he had filmed of his favourite grime MCs – but his natural ambition and charm ensured it kept expanding from that base.Covering sounds that were just starting to form the basis of a new British pop music, Edwards not only built an admirable contact book, but demonstrated an understanding of branding which turned SBTV into the viewing destination for “urban” music fans – more so than any terrestrial or cable Read more ...
joe.muggs
End of year lists are, of course, wildly arbitrary – based on what raddled writers can scrape from their memory-barrels come deadline day, with half an eye on what we think our colleagues are going to pick so our choices will end up in aggregated lists too.I could easily find a way to argue that the rarefied ambience of Santiago Latorre was my record of the year, or sing the praises of Message To Bears's chamber music all day long. I could honestly say that I'd been playing the Jessie Ware and Norah Jones albums on repeat, or loving the off-centre electronic squonk of Mouse On Mars, just to Read more ...
joe.muggs
Tonight on Channel 4, a new music series begins with a fantastic premise. A group of music obsessives drive around the USA in a London black cab, finding interesting musicians and recording them performing and talking in the back of the cab. Sounds a little bit like the 2008 Stephen Fry in America series, doesn't it? Well maybe, except Black Cab Sessions has been broadcast online since 2007.Watch the Black Cab Sessions trailer:And there's the rub. BCS has now featured hundreds of acts in various cabs, from complete unknowns to top ten-bothering popstars, from gangsta rappers to Brian Read more ...
joe.muggs
I first heard Zed Bias's Biasonic Hot Sauce – Birth of the Nanocloud last autumn. He may have been one of the key players in the London-centric sound of UK garage, but he was never of that scene. Based in Milton Keynes through the first phase of his career, he releases through a Brighton label and is now resident in Manchester. This is key to understanding the connections in his tracks, which reflect the clubs in those cities that sidestep metropolitan scene micro-delineation and rave parochialism and lock into a wider soulboy set of connections.His sprawling album as Maddslinky earlier in Read more ...
joe.muggs
I've seen some genre intersections in my time, but gangsta ambient takes the biscuit. Baghdad born South Londoner VersA Beatz began as a grime producer, but like many has moved from that genre's hyped-up energy into the slower, more menacing electronic “trap beats” of hip hop. This in turn has overlapped with a current American style of melancholic leftfield hip hop sounds pioneered by Clams Casino (best known as producer to Lil B and current sensation A$AP Rocky) to produce, in this free album of instrumentals, a narcotic sound that feels as if gravity has been loosened and the imagination Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's become a fairly common trope for herbally enhanced rappers to hype up their individuality by referring to themselves as an “alien”, but with Wiley you could believe it. In “Can I Get a Taxi”, the odd extended skit that forms the centrepiece of this album, he inhabits various London archetypes – the yardie, the cockney wideboy, the posh bloke – but while his accents are hilarious, it all feels strange, curious, like a child poking at creatures in a rockpool, and his ever-wayward stream of thought keeps veering off course. As with so much in the decade-old career of the father of grime and Read more ...
joe.muggs
Against all the odds, I find myself going into 2012 with a strong sense of optimism. And the reason? I am a born-again rave zealot. I saw it at Outlook Festival in Croatia, I saw it at Sónar in Barcelona, and I saw it at the Big Chill where I was running a stage; participatory, constructive, creative partying, where the crowds go not just to be entertained but to plug into something bigger, to be part of something.Now, I love Kanye West's music with all my heart, but the sight of his latest whining pseudo-breakdown on stage at the Big Chill just seemed like the latest peeling away of the Read more ...
joe.muggs
If 2011 was the year when dance music's natural tendency to fragmentation was taken to extremes, this album was the one that bound those fragments together into one demented but scintillating vision. Russell Whyte – Rustie – comes from a very particularly Scottish club scene that is the perfect antidote to the idea that musical connoisseurship means nerdiness.From the very simple imperative of moving a dance floor in fresh ways comes an explosion of ideas and influences: retro video game soundtracks, obscure Japanese noise bands, the hyper-capitalist hyper-pop of 21st-century R&B, the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Joker, aka 22 year old Bristolian Liam McLean, is one of the most individual talents of the dubstep/grime generation. His long run of dancefloor-directed single releases, some originally recorded when he was in his early teens, showed natural gifts for finding the funk in the sparsest rhythms and for frazzlingly catchy melodic synth riffs which meant his productions leapt out of DJ sets wherever and whenever they were played. Now, following a quiet 18 months, his debut album shows that he's not content to rest on his laurels.The Vision is a high-gloss affair. McLean has always been a Read more ...