Radio Utopia

People remember the Sixties pirate radio heyday, when the pirates were literally boats at sea.... and they remember the Eighties terrestial tower-block resurgence of reggae and soul and jazz and funk and early rap stations.... and of course they remember the Nineties onwards rave hardcore jungle UK garage grime etc explosion of piracy...

But what about the in-between bits? 

Even after the Labour government (Tony Benn specifically) squashed the pop-crazed offshore pirates in '67, and the big buccaneers accepted "pardons" and joined Radio One as its first roster of deejays.... some people carried on broadcasting outside the law. Via pirate radio scholar Rob Chapman, here's a roundup from May 1971, from an enthusiast's zine called Newsbeat Newsletter. 

Love the fact that a bunch of these are broadcasting from the Home Counties - Hertfordshire, Sussex, Surrey, Berkshire (where the intriguingly named Radio Utopia transmits from, or at least can be picked up in)

(Echo here of my repeated and enormous delight in the fact that Herts was something of a bastion for the Hardcore Continuum. Indeed there was a jungle pirate out of Luton  - Perception FM. Gappa G and Hypa Hypa were involved)

Radio Free Rhubarb feels more like a Home Counties type name than Radio Utopia... I'd like to imagine it was some kind of renegade counterpart to Gardeners Question Time, eccentric views on herbaceous borders and composting, the kind of horticultural heresy that Radio 4 wouldn't allow on the airwaves... but I imagine the name is goofy, perhaps a little Goonsy or Pythonesque. Or just the old slang meaning...

Also intriguing - The Voice of Freedom. A rare example of the political pirate in Britain? I believe there was some kind of right-wing pirate, opposed to the unions - I think this comes up in the Andy Beckett book. And then there were a few short-lived pirates from the other side of the struggle, started during strikes... This is all hazy memory, though. 

Check out Rob Chapman's pirate radio archive - he has recordings of 1960s pirates but also some prime 90s hardcore rave junglism action via a Manchester radio station (not actually a pirate, I'm repeatedly told by someone - it was somehow legal). 

A whole thesis - beautifully illustrated and designed, more like a book - on London Pirate Radio of the Nummy Nuum Nuum era, by Frederik Birket-Smith. Although as this blog post shows, the title should really be Not Just 4 U London.... 

Pirate radio zines and newsletters via Offshore Radio Museum

RIP Max Romeo

 

Romeo reaches rave through this unlikely conduit 

While we're paying tribute to Max, this tune is oddly topical - reusing the "War Inna Babylon" rhythm 

Would love to read something really probing on the Anti-Papacy subcurrents in Rasta 'n' roots culture. 

Given that Rasta is essentially Afro-Protestant - a  Caribbean cousin of the born-again, fundamentalist, Scripture-is-literal-truth offshoots of Calvinism in America - one explanation would be that it is simply sourced in the anti-Catholic paranoia that impregnates Protestantism from the start: the idea that the Church of Rome is an ungodly perversion of true Christianity.  It taps into the same wellsprings that led to the anti-Catholic secret societies in 19th Century and early 20th Century America, the nativist newspapers with their fears of an influx of Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, changing the fundamental make-up of the country. At its extreme edge, there were fevered fears of the Pope arriving at the head of a new Armada to conquer the USA. 

But perhaps there are some uniquely Jamaican ingredients involved.... 

I seem to remember reading that at dancehall events to this day (or at least whenever it was I read the piece) you would get anti-Pope shout-outs from the deejay

Here's another Vatican-themed tune - Lee Perry, no Max - about the Conclave itself

Here's a really sharp piece of writing about Lee Perry - specifically his way with a kick drum, but also his whole sono-spiritual project - by Nick Coleman at his Substack. There's also some great outlandish quotes from Scratch from an interview Nick did some time ago. 

A Number of Names, A Trove of Titles

Talking about futuromania, about phases when the chase to get to tomorrow ahead of the pack is the fiercest... oooh that first half of the '90s. 

Looking back, it feels like not just the music and the  beats but everything that surrounded them and was attached to them - the names and the titles, the record artwork and typography, the flyers, promo videos - all of it, the sonics and the para-sonix constituted a massive surge of urge-to-newness

A kind of concerted front of cultural patricide - an across-the-board push by the young to make an adventure out of their own time.  

A will to junk as much of the old still-lingering pop culture and to innovate, often gauchely, on all fronts simultaneously: sound, dance moves, fashion, graphics, slang...

Here are some of my favorite titles trawled from that fast-forward era: 

"Noise Bleed"

100HZ - LOW FEQUENCY OVERLOAD (HEBREPHENIC MIX)

"Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit (Hysteric Ego Dub)"

Lory D – "Allucinazioneacustica"

"Techno Cat (Dance Like Your Dad)"

"God Shave the Queen"

Generator - Belgium Calling (Clash Mix)

C-Tank "House Hallucination"

Brain Cycl - Mind Darts (1994)

Spira - Disturbulance (1994)

Babies from Gong

(Oink Oink Version)

Hardware - Heavy Metal (Doing! Doing! Doing!) (1994)

Zoomroom - "Black Fumes"

"Straight Up (Wris Spec)"

"The Mad One"

"Brutal Deluxe"

Two Terrorists - "Welcome to Jurassick Park"

Amethyst - Krakatoa

(Dharma Bums Mix)

The Bionaut - Octopus

Dee Rex - Gaia's Revenge

"Drum Fire"

Skinnybumblebee (Stingin Dub)

Flying Forest - Cyberlove

Amorph - Sunflow

The Paingang

Flange Squad - "Justice Juice (The Justice Jam)"

"Warriors of Mind"

Dos Deviants - "Sharkbyte"

London Tranceport - "Argon"

Genetic Waste - "Palace of Wisdom"

"Throw the Madness" 

Members of Mayday - "Endspurt"

Braincell - "Time Is Suspended"

"Sunburst" 

"Innerstream of Consciousness"

Public Art 

"Transpulsation"

The Dentist - "Arena of the Gods"

"Burning Trash Floor"

"Starkissed"

"Possessed By Fire"

"Stealth Sonic Soul"

Disgraced Rolemodel

Z-Plane - "Hopium"

"Under City Rave"

"The Devil's Dandruff"

Holocube - "Noizology"

"Uncle Bob's Burly House"

"Angel-Headed Hipster"

"Nude Restaurant"

Energyflow - "Thunderstorm"

"I Could Be Him, I Could Be Her"

Annexia  - "Escalation Fantasy"

"King of Death Posture (Attack Version)"

"Plasma Flights, Pt 1"

"The Trancequilizer" 

"Mantra of X-Tremism"

Force Mass Motion - "The Pressor"

Phrenetic System - "Concrete Box"

"Nut Haus"

"Drying the Tears of the Forest"

"A Sonic Fairy Tale"

(Puddle Mix)

The Desintegrators - "Perfumes of the Deep"

Dancing Dolphins

"Bad Moog Rising"

Syncrotron II

"Tekno Bangelang"

"Sunhump"

Encephaloid Disturbance - Magnetic Neurosis

Encephaloid Disturbance  - Renegade Ectoplasm

Encephaloid Disturbance - Spasmodic Fusion 

"Moments of Inertia"

(Exterminated in 3D Mix)

"Infinite Climax"

Stardate 1973 - Planetfall (1992)

Ramirez - El Ritmo Barbaro (El Flagelo Mix) (1992)

Tracid Posse - Vivarium (1992)

The Saucer Crew - "Ghost Star (Long Drum Mix)"

Edge of Motion - "Overvolt"

Jambo - "Drumattack"

Spirit of Adventure - "L'Hysterie"

"Monotone Sickness"

"Waiting 4 My Shell 2 Crack"

"Xabrax (Drill Mix)"

"Outermind (Glide Mix)"

"Percussion Overdose"

Dry Throats - "Acid Speed"

Cyberpsychose – You Will Die 

Generator - Narcomaniac (Adrenochrome Mix)

D.B. Hazard - Detro Mental

Mental & Dangerous - Xtrosy (Mary Poppins Hardcore Mix)

The Dead Kirks - "Mr. Kirk (Death Mix)"

Dry Throats - Acid Speed (1992)

DJ Dick - The Iron Raver (Part I) (1993)

Vauvenage - Flange Stereo (1993)

Nasty Django - Ey Loco! (Kinky Muthaship) (1992)

Phenomania - Phenothememia (1992)

i - Percussion Overdose (1992)

"Acid Eiffel"

Bi-Face - "Flota (Two)"

"Cyclotron"

"Lost and Intellect"

"The Realm of Spoo"

Aquastep - "Oempa Loempa"

Pot Cycl

"Franthic Thigh"

Sulfurex

"I Still Want Ya (the Nooshty Mix)"

Severe Damage - "Red Alert (Tremble Mix)"

"Afro Compressor"

 "Sugar Robots" 

"Megadrôme D'Yore"

"Jungle (Flappy Ears Version)"

Techno Trash Volume II - "Noise!"

"Mastercore (Brain Mix)"

Phase Phorce

"Industrial Metal"

"Face the Mastermind"

"Turntable Tribal"

4-Nu-Tek

"Locked in Madness"

Exoterrorist

"Microillusions (Day-Mix)"

"Illegal Consume"

"Hatt Flash"

"Victim of Hardware"

"Bash Your Brains In"

"Night of the Neon Maniacs"

Pultec

"Drugtrash"

"Psycho Drums"

Dutch Department of Techno

"Original Mix with Bats"

Force Mass Motion

"Feef Logic"

The Brotherhood of Structure EP

"First Fright (Video Mix)"

"Space Paranoia"

"Psycho Fly"

"Cosmonoise"

E-Rection - Colonisation Of Space (1995)

Gigi Galaxy - Interview with An Alien

Gigi Galaxy - Spores from Outer Space

Gigi Galaxy - Cosmic Forces As They Were Taught In Mu

Ilsa Gold

Emmanuel Top

"Moby Tits" 

Koenig Cylinders

Spastic Egg

"Entropy Step"

Public Energy

"Chronoclasm"

"Nightmares Are Reality"

Labworks

"Reptilian Tank"

Egma

"Stomach Basher"

"Korrekte Atmosphere"

"Trip to E-Land"

 Hypp & Krimson,

"Tibetan Jazz"

"Are Am Eye"

 Aldrin Buzz

Edge of Motion

 "The Glitch Relapse"

"Zombies in the Mist"

 "Sick (Dominator Is Dead)"

"Space Luxury"

 "Faces of the Moon"

Meng Syndicate

"(Heinous Scream Version)"

"Ravedrug"

"Rush Bubble Mix"

Pneumatic Distress

"Fulminic"

Tones Energy

"Tone Exploitation"

"(Fratty Energy Version)"

Master Techno

"Time Problem"

Problem House

 "Rhyde the Rithum"

"Twin Freaks"

80 AUM

E-Dancer

"My First Fantastic F.F."

"Tunnel Inspection

"Mindcontroller (The Obscure Mix)"

"The Kraken"

"Fairy Dust"

"Chiswick Days"

"Air Bounce"

"Cybernatic Noisefly"

"God's Percussion Dream"

"The Dove (Coloured Dream)"

"Planet Jupiter (Raggae Dream)"

"Acid Heartcore"

"Mutation Step"

"Technoblast"

"Biolunch"

"Single Minded People"

"Acid Creak"

"Trac-X"

Numbers & Feelings

"(Sexx Ambient Mix)"

Charlie Lownoise

Syncope

"Explosion of a Dancemode"

"X-Plosion of a Dancemode"

"Stronger Than Steel"

"Trance? Never Heard Before"

Xylem Tube

"Space Metal (Pt 1 and Pt 2)"

"Sulphur Stories"

"The Ravesignal"

"Demonomania"

"Walk on Base"

Spiritual Combat

"Lake of Dreams (Bay of Rainbow Mix)"

"Lake of Dreams (Dream of Drums)"

DJ Edge, "Bass Trnce"

Boscanese Hedgehogs Fall To Earth

Madame Xerox, "Fluxpod"

Cyberchrist

Sons of Aliens

(Sadcore Mix)

"Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit (Hysteric Ego Dub)"

"Techno Cat (Dance Like Your Dad)"

"God Shave the Queen"

Generator - Belgium Calling (Clash Mix)

C-Tank "House Hallucination"

Spira - Disturbulance

Brain Cycl - Mind Darts (1994)

Babies from Gong

(Oink Oink Version)

Hardware - Heavy Metal (Doing! Doing! Doing!) (1994)

Zoomroom - "Black Fumes"

"Straight Up (Wris Spec)"

"The Mad One"

"Brutal Deluxe"

Two Terrorists - "Welcome to Jurassick Park"

Generator - Narcomaniac (Adrenochrome Mix)

D.B. Hazard - Detro Mental

Mental & Dangerous - Xtrosy (Mary Poppins Hardcore Mix)

The Dead Kirks - "Mr. Kirk (Death Mix)"

Dry Throats - Acid Speed (1992)

DJ Dick - The Iron Raver (Part I) (1993)

Vauvenage - Flange Stereo (1993)

Nasty Django - Ey Loco! (Kinky Muthaship) (1992)

Phenomania - Phenothememia (1992)

i - Percussion Overdose (1992)

"Acid Eiffel"

Bi-Face - "Flota (Two)"

"Cyclotron"

"Lost and Intellect"

"The Realm of Spoo"

Aquastep - "Oempa Loempa"

Pot Cycl

"Franthic Thigh"

Sulfurex

"I Still Want Ya (the Nooshty Mix)"

Severe Damage - "Red Alert (Tremble Mix)"

"Afro Compressor"

 "Sugar Robots" 

"Megadrôme D'Yore"

"Jungle (Flappy Ears Version)"

Techno Trash Volume II - "Noise!"

"Mastercore (Brain Mix)"

Phase Phorce

"Industrial Metal"

"Face the Mastermind"

"Turntable Tribal"

4-Nu-Tek

"Locked in Madness"

Exoterrorist

"Microillusions (Day-Mix)"

"Illegal Consume"

"Hatt Flash"

"Victim of Hardware"

"Bash Your Brains In"

"Night of the Neon Maniacs"

Pultec

"Drugtrash"

"Psycho Drums"

Dutch Department of Techno

"Original Mix with Bats"

Force Mass Motion

"Feef Logic"

The Brotherhood of Structure EP

"First Fright (Video Mix)"

"Space Paranoia"

"Psycho Fly"

"Cosmonoise"

Ilsa Gold

Emmanuel Top

"Moby Tits" 

Koenig Cylinders

Spastic Egg

"Entropy Step"

Public Energy

"Chronoclasm"

"Nightmares Are Reality"

Labworks

"Reptilian Tank"

Egma

"Stomach Basher"

"Korrekte Atmosphere"

"Trip to E-Land"

 Hypp & Krimson,

"Tibetan Jazz"

"Are Am Eye"

 Aldrin Buzz

Edge of Motion

 "The Glitch Relapse"

"Zombies in the Mist"

 "Sick (Dominator Is Dead)"

"Space Luxury"

 "Faces of the Moon"

Meng Syndicate

"(Heinous Scream Version)"

"Ravedrug"

"Rush Bubble Mix"

Pneumatic Distress

"Fulminic"

Tones Energy

"Tone Exploitation"

"(Fratty Energy Version)"

Master Techno

"Time Problem"

Problem House

 "Rhyde the Rithum"

"Twin Freaks"

80 AUM

E-Dancer

"My First Fantastic F.F."

"Tunnel Inspection

"Mindcontroller (The Obscure Mix)"

"The Kraken"

"Fairy Dust"

"Chiswick Days"

"Air Bounce"

"Cybernatic Noisefly"

"God's Percussion Dream"

"The Dove (Coloured Dream)"

"Planet Jupiter (Raggae Dream)"

"Acid Heartcore"

"Mutation Step"

"Technoblast"

"Biolunch"

"Single Minded People"

"Acid Creak"

"Trac-X"

Numbers & Feelings

"(Sexx Ambient Mix)"

Charlie Lownoise

Syncope

"Explosion of a Dancemode"

"X-Plosion of a Dancemode"

"Stronger Than Steel"

"Trance? Never Heard Before"

Xylem Tube

"Space Metal (Pt 1 and Pt 2)"

"Sulphur Stories"

"The Ravesignal"

"Demonomania"

"Walk on Base"

Spiritual Combat

"Lake of Dreams (Bay of Rainbow Mix)"

"Lake of Dreams (Dream of Drums)"

DJ Edge, "Bass Trnce"

Boscanese Hedgehogs Fall To Earth

Madame Xerox, "Fluxpod"

Cyberchrist

Sons of Aliens

(Sadcore Mix)

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Other neophiliac fever phases

The original "neophiliac" era, the 1960s - that would be the real rival. But it had older sonic forms embedded within it - blues, soul, folk, country....  Although FX, electrification, amplification, and studio tricknology increasingly come into play, the instrumental line-up is largely shared with earlier forms of popular music like jazz: drums, guitars, horns, bass.  So not quite as a big a break as the digital 90s.

New Wave is another rival (especially with all the  inorganic fabrics and hair-dyes... the angular graphic language and dance-moves... the quirky vocal styles and herky-jerky rhythms and melodies). But New Wave was largely based in rock's well-established instrumental template (gtr-bs-drms)  and it had echoes and deliberate reach-backs to the Sixties in much of it. Rather than synths, New Wavers tended to use keyboards - 60s-style organs, Farfisa etc. So overall it doesn't match the tekno-rave era for full-bore futurism . The first half of the '90s had all these newness-enabling tools to work with (samplers, digital audio workstations). 

Eighties synthpop, yes - but it is still tied to the Song, and to the impassioned human voice - to the idea of  "soul"  and to actual influences from soul music (think of all those fire-and-ice singer + synthesist duos). 

Electro... yes, especially with the clothes and the dancing. But it was over a bit too quick. Perhaps it is like a preliminary stage, a dry run, for the '90s eruption (so many ravers had electro childhoods). Mantronix and Nitro Deluxe in particular seem like bridges between electro and the house-techno-rave moment. 

Theory of Names, aka Nameology. 

I've mooted this before, based on ample empirical evidence that the shitness /  non-shitness of a genre is in direct relation to the shitness / non-shitness of its artist names and track titles. (Same applies to the decline of a once-great genre - the canary in the coalmine is the enshittification of names, titles, graphics).  

To me it makes sense - the names and titles would be a textual efflorescence of the music, reflecting and revealing its inner essence. 

The milquetoast mildness of most postdubstep is given away at the pre-auditory stage from the aroma wafting off  the artist aliases and the opaque titles they come up for their tunes.... Ditto broken beat, ditto downtempo, ditto all the other tasteful, "good music society", cosmopolitan / cosmigroovy sounds.  

The you-won't-like-this-steer-clear of most contemporary music (not just dance, across the genrescape) alerts my antennae through the advance warning system of  names (the album artwork is also a fairly reliable giveaway - has it ever been shitter than the present era?).  

But that corny-yet-awesome spirit of the '90s survived in pockets into the 21st Century...  flickering in bassline, in donk, in brostep, a little bit in deeptech....   UK drill too...  and I daresay it is out there to be found even now. 

nuumiest of the nuum nuum

 

Well I did not know this existed until recently  (via Pearsall at Dissensus )

An almost remake of this just-pre-nuum classic 

the funk frontline: tribal vibes and family fervour

Fascinating 1980 program presented by Danny Baker, who fiercely argued in the pages of the NME at that time for jazz-funk as the real-deal music c.f. the constipated faux-funk of  A Certain Ratio and Gang of Four, and here takes the battle to the television screen. 

In the program, he just uses the word "funk", though. 

Bunch of things that jumped out at me

1/ The self-conscious organization of the scene around tribes - a local squad or crew like Frontline from Brixton - who then at the dances amalgamate into a mega-tribe, which deejay Chris Hill here describes as the Family. The tribes have their own regalia - sometimes T-shirts with the tribe name, sometimes some other goofy identifying element - and they also often bring banners that they drape over the balcony at the venue. 

2/ You would tend to think of  U.K. working class scenes oriented around black-music to be very much about style and elegance. What surprised me about the Funk All-Dayers captured here is how amiably uncool the dancing and the general larking about is....  It's very much not in the tradition of Mod, it's not about a Face dancing alone in this moat of personal space....  the deejays exhort and entrain the crowd to all kinds of daft behaviour that is collective and synchronised.... they seem to be consciously trying to create the crowd-body consciousness, like in spectator sports with the Mexican wave...  Then there's individual kids who take off all their clothes.... a wonderfully silly mass sing-along 'n' dance to the Ovalteenies theme (you'll recognise that from Mark Leckey's Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore - "we're happy girls and boys").  And perhaps most bizarre of all - a fad for building human pyramids on the dancefloor (something I've only ever seen at Enter Shikari shows).

As Hill explains - again it's interesting just how self-conscious he is about how it all works as a subcultural machinery - the get-away Weekends at Caister and other seaside resorts are about escalating this sense of the scene as a world unto itself. A world where normal rules of behaviour get suspended and overturned in a carnivalesque fashion (not to put too Bakhtinian a spin on it though -it is also rather  Club 18-30). "Pride and dignity", the soul-boy ethos, doesn't come into it. But it's also very different from how people danced and behaved on the Northern Soul scene.

3/ The other thing that came across was that the fervour seems to be somewhat out of proportion to the music...  Now I love funk, indeed particularly at this time (early 80s) I loved it with a convert's fetishistic passion - but while I wouldn't describe myself as a connoisseur, I always felt that the jazz-funk, especially the UK offerings but most of the US imports then too, tended to be a bit bantamweight.  There are some great tunes but there's a lot of slick 'n'  tepid.  I put that down to the same dynamic on the Northern scene where there's a fetish for obscurity. Instead of rare soul singles that were barely released in 1965 or whenever, in the jazz funk scene it seems to be about a deep cut on an import album, something tucked away on side 2 of a Tom Browne or Grover Washington Jr LP.  

But perhaps the music is simply a pretext for identity, a trigger for fervour, an excuse to mobilize. Still, it's a little weird when Hill says that after going to a weekend away in Great Yarmouth, the kids become fully committed, like "they've been on a campaign. And the music is a crusade". 

Once interviewed Randy Crawford, wouldyabelieve?

jump to 4.10 of Fiorucci for the Ovalteenies scene

and 19.18 mins for the Ovalteenies dancealong - singalong in Funk

Danny Baker crusading for the funk cause in the pages of NME - with "intro" from Chris Hill

Hi-Tension bringing the funk to the punks on Revolver

Punk discofunkafied by the Black Arabs, a scene  from Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Edmund in Comments directs to another film, from slightly earlier, about the scene - British Hustle -  tons of footage of fervid dancers and Chris Hill emceeing through echo FX

And isn't Isaac Julien's Young Soul Rebels a recreation of these times - what the Black British kids were into, as opposed to punk... 

"A mind with no ceiling" (RIP Roy Ayers) (It's "Daylight" Raving Time!)

I love Roy Ayers...

But when I say that I mainly mean I love RAMP, a Roy Ayers Music Project composed of other musicians and singers, with Roy producing and co-writing the songs, mostly with Edwin Birdsong.

And when I say I love RAMP, I mainly mean "Everybody Loves the Sunshine" and the title track of their single solitary album Come Into Knowledge. 

And mainly, even more so, I love "Daylight". Love it to the bone, to the marrow.

In the main body of his work I've not found anything I like as much as this tune - which I must have played hundreds of times at this point. 

Nate White's bass alone is miraculous... those keyb chords.... the whole track glows, it's like glistening honeyed strands of sound cross-hatching and wrapping round your head.  

My gateway drug for "this kind of thing" - the less-Milesy, smoother end of fusion, where it turns into  jazz-funk - was of course jungle.  

Jungle paradoxically enabled me to build up a tolerance for this kind of mellow mystical-tinged sort of warm-glowing softness 'n' slickness - rather than the other way around.

And with "Daylight", it was this specific track that was the gateway. 

Roni Size and DJ Die and the Bristol lot did this rather often - take a slice out of a rare groove / jazz-funk tune and build up a whole track around it. 

Here's a non-Roy example: 

Which became

It's like a combination of zoom lens and time dilation - the Good Bit is so good, but also so almost thrown away in the original track, or at least rapidly left behind - the track just goes off somewhere completely different, never to return to the Good Bit... instead it develops and builds and is, you know, good-bitty all through in its own right (stellar cast of players, arranged and conducted by Bob James, in this case)  BUT, if you've heard "Music Box" first, then you can't help wondering why does it never go back to the Good Bit? You can't help pining for its return.  Sampling and looping the Good Bit speaks to our desire to arrest time, to make a golden moment last longer.

This mode of sampling and the listening mode that developed out of it - it's a sort of anti-jazz appreciation of jazz. It subverts all the propositions and principles of the original music, the very process that generates the Good Bits in the first place. The sampler chucks away the improvisation and variations around the theme: all the lyrical unfolding and "going somewhere" that happens with the melody and the chords. Instead, the sampler fixates on a isolated section that's cut out of developmental sequence: a cutting (stem is the word, they use, right, remixers -  appropriately horticultural perhaps but is that even the right term, given that there's something axiomatically inorganic about digital logic?). The isolated bit is fetishized for its textures and warm tone, a chord shift maybe, and just the exquisite lightness of touch - but it's removed from where those original human hands took it next. It becomes mechanistic - a loop. Uncanny as a GIF.  It works through flow / anti-flow.

The souljazz sample is like a plush bit of a carpet fabric, a little patch of luxury, that is excised from a larger patterned rug.  

I wonder if Roni + crew heard "Daylight" first as an element in "Bonita Applebum" by A Tribe Called Quest? (A group I've never really got into). 

Here's something I don't recall hearing before - A Guy Called Gerald versus A Guy Called Roy. 

It appears to be  the title track of The Sunshine EP from 1991 - was this ever properly released? 

3/12 update - answer provided by Ciaran in comments: 

Here's a track sampling Roy's own version of "Everybody Loves the Sunshine"  with that thin reedy ecstatic synth-line that 4 Hero and their aliases spent a lifetime chasing... 

Another external project that Roy had a hand-in as co-producer and co-writer is Sylvia Striplin, whose "You Can't Turn Me Away" is another "Daylight"-level favorite of mine. 

This has also been sampled - I think by 4 Hero (a tiny snippet of the blippety groove) and more famously by Junior M.A.F.F.I.A.

Great name, Striplin

She was once a member of the group Aquarian Dream....  which is very Roy Ayers-ish.

Did not know about Roy's team-up with Fela Kuti

Ah, well that's where 4 Hero got the name for their broken beat label 2000 Black, then...

Oh and then there was this team-up with the Man himself

This is where it breaks down for me, as something that holds the ear...  the sampling procedure produces the new.... but just trying to do fusion, to play like the 70s bods they revere, or play with them.... it's redundant.  It (re)covers historical ground already covered. And after peak junglizm, it can only sound like a depletion in intensity. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

It's funny that the transmitter of such positive vibes played as his principal instrument the vibraphone. 

RIP Gwen McCrae

Gwen McCrae  - my favorite of the two formidable Gwens in soul and funk.

She had two great phases and a pretty nice moment in the middle. 

A titanic performance in the soul blasting Sixties-style (although actually released at the start of the '70s).

 I heard "Ain't Nothing You Can Do" through the Lost Soul series that Joe McEwen compiled and Barney Hoskyns reviewed. 

She actually has a track on each of the first three volumes in that series. 

Jump ahead a decade to this postdisco / boogiefunk club classic 

And this one, more straightforwardly uplifting, fantastic too.  

Stubbs the Deejay had them but instead of just taping off him as I mostly did with the import 12-inches, for a series of cassettes I played endlessly,  these were tunes I picked up myself on vinyl. 

A much later MAW remix

Some fan's superextended mix

And then the pretty nice middle phase?  That was when she was married to George McCrae and did some things similar to his smash "Rock Your Baby"

Right down to having "rock" in the title 

I actually interviewed Gwen McCrae -  this must have been around  1988. 

She was warm, vivacious, everything you'd expect. 

This was in London - presumably she was over promoting this single she had out on Rhythm King, since there seems to be no album around that time that she did. 

amapianuumo

I am honestly not particularly invested in whether the hardcore continuum, er, continues * 

But it is funny - and delightful - that things like this still happen: an amapiano remake by DJ Eastwood of "Cape Fear", the dark garage classic by KMA.  

A tune that came out in 1996 - almost 30 years ago!

Blimey, here's an earlier prototype, I think done as a pirate radio show ident. From 1995 - fully 30 years ago!

The mighty original, meaning the record that was actually released 

Such a thick, humid, balmy, sticky, swimmy, brimming, subaquatic sound. 

Flipside 

The mighty follow-up - breakbeat garage but much more enticing than what that term later came to signify

Another dubplate prototype - again a pirate station ident for Six's brother DJ Maddness - his partner in KMA. Track titled "Kaotic Maddness" with the extra 'd' at this point. 

Here's a handy playlist I made of the almost complete works and various refixes

And here's one DJ Maddness made that has various oddments in its, some decent remixes they did for various units.

On the basis of "Cape Fear", "Kaotic Madness" and the Re-Con Mission EP, I thought of Six as potentially a Goldie-type auteur. (KMA even did a dubplate track titled "Kemistry"). 

He certainly talked a good game.  (But then it all fizzled out...)

"This is a line to the future" 

This stuff does have that soul-smeared edge-of-atonal quality of prime Reinforced, when they were "jazzed" but not yet actually jazzy or jazzual

Here's DJ Maddness operating as a YouTube UKG historian with the series Pirate Chronicles 

KMA - just one of those outfits who come along, have their moment, make their contribution.... and then that's it.  Operators at that cusp between genius and scenius.

The Nuum is littered with them. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

* on the continuum's continuance and not being that bothered whether it does

It had a really good run there....  20 years plus...  covered a huge amount of ground....  laid down a legacy, comparable in richness and duration to reggae's prime or hip hop's heyday....  to expect another convulsion or major-phase would be almost greedy...   

And in truth nothing really seismically major has come along since funky - i.e. fifteen years plus ago.

For sure, there are diasporic tendrils still wriggling out there.....  DNA flickers in otherwise completely other genres. 

And yes the people who came up during its different phases and are still active, they do "continue" - refining and extending their thing 

But for the most part Nuum is now a site of memorialization and archiving (as with the Pirate Chronicles series) 

And then there's the much younger artists who extract juice of varying pungency and nutritional content out of fundamentally settled styles that originally emerged out of unfolding dialectical becoming...  in much the same ahistorical way that a current band can describe what it does as "postpunk" when it is a/ blatantly not - simply because of chronology, how much has happened in between b/ contra the originating spirit of postpunk.

Some young-people-of-today juice extraction that is fairly blatantly squeezing "Cape Fear"

Footberk

Jan Błaszczak tells me about a Polish musician who has come up with a mad twist on footwork: Piotr Gwadera, recording as Gary Gwadera, combines the Chicago sound's convulsive rhythms with the complexities of the oberek, a dance style from Polish traditional music.  

The release is titled Far, far in Chicago. Footberk Suite and it's been out for a few months now on the  Pointless Geometry label.

Release rationale: 

“It’s nothing else but a Chicago-style oberek!’ – that was my first thought when I heard the compilation ‘Bangs & Works’, an album that introduced the footwork style to a global audience. At first I was drawn by the triple, syncopated rhythm, based on the iconic sounds of the Roland TR-808 drum machine. My musical explorations have long been centering around triple rhythms of rural Poland. The clash of this archaic, distinctly Polish form with the freedom of the underground, electronic sound from the Black suburbs of Chicago seemed to aesthetically hit the perfect spot. As an anthropologist - dreamer, I also imagined that the presence of a triple rhythm in Chicago – the largest hub of the Polish diaspora in the USA – was not a coincidence. It was a result of a meeting between our native musical tradition and the musical sensitivity of the Black community in the United States. I must admit that this hypothesis was, and still is, purely my musical dream, unsupported by any scientific evidence. However, regardless of the actual roots of this fascinating phenomenon known as footwork, it is hard not to notice certain correlations between footwork and the Polish oberek tradition. This is in both cases music rather meant for dancing than for listening. It’s supposed to present a certain musical and rhythmic challenge to dancers, who can test themselves in a fun-oriented setting, where competition is an integral part. In Polish villages, these are traditional battles of village bands, while in Chicago, they are footwork battles in underground clubs. Both in the oberek and footwork, the most important are a sense of community, energy, and excitement built around dance, accompanied by a characteristic triple pulse.

Therefore, the footberk suite “Far, far in Chicago”, is intended as an imagined musical journey through time and space, where the Polish oberek and Chicago footwork find a common ground in dynamic, triple rhythms. I aim to show that the syncopated rhythm of the mazurka (or of the oberek) can sound just as contemporary and bold as the beats created for Chicago dancers. The composition is meant to be an auditory tribute to both cultures’ dance spirit and their sense of community. It is an attempt to capture the emotions that accompany both footwork dancers and participants of rural dance parties – spaces where music and dance become tools of self-expression.

To connect these two seemingly distant worlds I use a specially designed rhythmic machine. At its heart lies a rural jaz, with build-on Lem-esque pads packed with samples from the TR-808 and TR-909, as well as other electronic sounds."

Gary Gwadera is the solo project of Piotr Gwadera, a master drummer from Łódź originally hailing from Kielce. Gwadera has the unique ability to infuse any music with an exceptional and surprising character. He is renowned for his involvement in rock, punk, experimental, jazz, and free improvisation projects. For several years, he has also been a leading drummer in the Polish traditional rural music scene, where he is celebrated for his exceptional fluency with triple rhythms on the jaz* drum. Gwadera has a passion for vintage drums and cymbals, as well as VHS tapes and all types of magnetic recordings.

Piotr Gwadera was awarded the second prize in the Polish Radio Folk Music Competition – New Tradition 2024 for his "magnetic personality, musical imagination, and unique blend of avant-garde and traditional influences," as well as the Golden Gęśle award for Best Instrumentalist for his "virtuosic approach to mazurka rhythms on unconventional (percussive) instruments."

*jaz (pol, “Dżaz”) not jazz. A minimalistic drum set that appeared in Europe after WWI along with American jazz artists. It became popular in the Polish rural music scene after WWII.

garygwadera.bandcamp.com

soundcloud.com/gary-gwadera  

RIP Terror Danjah

Saddened to learn that Terror Danjah - grime's greatest producer  and co-founder of the Aftershock  label - has died. 

Here is the liner note tribute I did for Gremlinz - the Terror Danjah compilation that Planet Mu put out in 2009. There's also a longer length version of the Q + A with Terror that appeared in Gremlinz . There's also some Danjah-related entries from the Grime Primer I did for the Wire in 2005. 

TERROR DANJAH: THE ALPHA PRODUCER

By Simon Reynolds

Ninety-five percent of grime beats are strictly functional: they're designed as launching pads for an MC's skills rather than as showcases for the producer's virtuosity.  These tracks don't tend to go through a lot of shifts and changes but instead loop a drum pattern and a refrain (typically evoking an atmosphere that mingles menace and majesty, with melody and "orchestration" pitched somewhere between a straight-to-video movie score and a ring-tone).  And that's fine, you know: it's a perfectly valid and valuable craft making this kind of basic MC tool.  It's okay if the tune doesn't go anywhere, because the pirate deejay's only likely to drop a minute-and-a-half before cutting to the next track.  It's alright if it's  thinly textured, a bit 2-D and cheapo-sounding, because  it's going to be largely drowned out by MCs jostling for their turn to spit sixteen bars.  But it stands to reason that few of these tracks are going to be things you'd want to buy and listen to at home.   They're just not built for that purpose.

Out of the handful of grime producers who've made some beats that work as stand-alone aesthetic objects--Wiley, Target, Wonder, Rapid from Ruff Sqwad--the undoubted ruler is Terror Danjah.  But this 29-year-old from East London is not just grime's most accomplished and inventive producer.  He's one of the great electronic musicians to emerge in the first decade of the 21st Century, a figure as crucial and influential as Ricardo Villalobos or Digital Mystikz. Someone who's kept on flying the flag for futurism at a time when recombinant pastiche and retro-eclecticism have taken over post-rave music just like what happened with alternative rock a couple of decades before.

Like earlier artcore heroes such as 4 Hero and Foul Play (in jungle) or Dem 2 and Groove Chronicles (in 2step garage), Terror Danjah knows how to walk that perfect diagonal between function and form, how to maintain a tightrope balance between rocking the crowd and pushing the envelope.  He has made plenty of MC tools, tracks like his "Creepy Crawler" remix of "Frontline" or "Cock Back" that have become standard beats of the season on the grime scene, enabling MCs he's never met, on pirate shows he's never heard, to show off and sharpen their skills. Terror has also crafted beats tailor-made to a specific MC's talents, like "Haunted" (the instrumental for Trim's classic "Boogeyman") or "Reloadz", whose speeding-up and slowing-down-again rhythm is a perfect vehicle for Durrty Goodz's quick-time style.  (That track is also a kind of living history lesson, cutting back forth between grime's stomping swagger and jungle's breakneck breakbeat sprint, between 2008 and 1994.)

But on this all-instrumental anthology, with the pungent charisma of MCs like Bruza or D Double E removed from the picture, you can really hear all the work that Terror Danjah puts into his tunes.  On tracks like "Code Morse" and "Radar," the intricate syncopations and hyper-spatialised production, the feel for textural contrast and attention to detail, are comparable to German minimal techno producers like Isolee.  But all this sound-sculpting finesse is marshaled in service of a gloweringly intense mood--foreboding and feral-- that is pure grime.   This is artcore: a stunning blend of intellect and intimidation, subtlety and savagery.  Street modernism, in full effect.

Gremlinz is named after Terror Danjah's trademark:  the grotesquely distorted, gloating laughter that makes an appearance in all his tracks, a poisonous giggle that makes you think of a golem, some horrid little homunculus that Terror's hatched to do his bidding.  The gremlin audio-logo crystallizes the essence of Terror Danjah's work and of the London hardcore continuum of which he's such an illustrious scion. It's at once technical (the product of skilful sonic processing) and visceral,  funny and creepy.  Like the catchphrases and vocal-noise gimmicks that MCs drop into their sets or tracks (think D Double E's famous "it's mwee mwee" signal), the cackling gremlin announces that this here is a TERROR DANJAH  production you're listening to.  When a pirate deejay drops one of his tunes, when a crowd in a club hollers for a reload, that slimy little goblin is Terror marking his sonic territory like the top dog, the alpha producer, he is.

Q/A with Terror Danjah

You started out in the late Nineties with Reckless Crew, an East London jungle/drum'n'bass collective of deejays and MCs. How did that come about?

I formed Reckless in 1998. The other members were D Double E, Bruza, Hyper, Funsta, Triple Threat, DJ Interlude and Mayhem. We came to fame from being on Rinse Fm and playing at local clubs and raves including One Nation, Telepathy, World Dance, Garage Nation, and Slammin' Vinyl.

What did you learn, as a producer, from those drum and bass days? Who did you rate at that time and would consider an influence?

I wasn't much of a producer back in them days. I was absorbing the musical sounds from Roni Size, Dillinja, Shy FX, Krust, DJ Die, Bad Company, Andy C and DJ SS. I learned a lot from listening to their music. Jungle was the first British music we could say was ours. I'd grown upon on reggae, R&B, soul. And also house music, on account of having an older brother. I was deejaying on the pirates and I got into producing drum and bass, because I wasn't getting a lot of tunes from producers. They'd be giving me one or two dubplates, but they had the big DJs like Brockie to service first. So I started making my own  "specials" and did loads of tracks. But I didn't put them out, just played them on the radio. My own personal sound.  But DJ Zinc and a few others cut my tunes as dubplates.

When did you make the transition to UK garage and that MC-fronted 2step sound that was the prototype for grime?

 I did two garage tunes and they blew up so I decided to stick with that. In 2002 I did "Firecracker" b/w "Highly Inflammable" on Solid City, Teebone's label.  For a while I was part of N.A.S.T.Y. Crew,  because I'd been at St. Bonaventures [a  Roman Catholic comprehensive school in Forest Gate, London E7] with a couple of members of N.A.S.T.Y.  But all the time I was doing my own thing and eventually just branched off. 

Then in 2003 I formed Aftershock with this guy called Flash, who I'd met at Music House where everyone goes to cut dubplates.  The first two Aftershock releases were Crazy Titch's "I Can C  U, U Can C Me" and N.A.S.T.Y.'s  "Cock Back".  That got the label off to a flying start--everyone was buzzing after those two releases.  Then it was Big E.D.'s "Frontline" and then in 2004 I put out the Industry Standard EP. That’s the one where people thought "this label is serious".

Industry Standard is where you can really hear your three-dimensional "headphone grime" sound coming through, on tunes like "Juggling" and "Sneak Attack".  With those tracks and all through your  music, the placement of the beats, the way sounds move around each other in the mix--it's very spatial.

Some of that comes from listening to a lot of Roni Size and Andy C and producers like that. Lots of abstracty sounds rushing about, coming out of nowhere.  There's a sense of more life in the music.  That’s what I do in my tunes. Drum and bass gave me ideas about layering sounds and placing sounds. But it also comes from studying music engineering at college, doing a sound recording course.  I learned about mic'ing a drum kit and panning.  You've got the pan positions in the middle of your mixing desk, and the crash should be left or right, the snares should be slightly panned off centre, the kick should be in the center. So you've got a panoramic view of your drum structure.

Obviously I went beyond that, started experimenting more.  The bass stays central but the sounds always drift. So each time you listen you’re not just bobbing your head, you’re thinking  "I heard something new in Terror Danjah’s tune". So it always lasts longer.

Industry Standard was the breakthrough release, in terms of people realizing that here was a producer to reckon with. What came next?

Payback was the biggest.  That EP of remixes was one of Aftershock's top sellers. It was getting caned the most, especially my "Creepy Crawler" remix of "Frontline".   That cemented it for us.

Basically you took Big E.D.'s "Frontline" and merged it with your own "Creep Crawler" from Industry Standard.  It's got a really unusual synth sound, harmonically rich, with this sour, edge-of-dissonance tonality. It makes you  feel like you're on the verge of a stress-induced migraine. A sound like veins in your temple throbbing.

It's a normal synth, but where many people would just use it straight out of the module without any processing or texture,  I’ve learned some techniques to give it more.  I add that to it. I can’t tell you how, though. Certain producers might go "ah!"

Those sort of wincing tonalities are a Terror Danjah hallmark.  Another are the bombastic mid-frequency riffs you use that sound a bit like horn fanfares, and that sort of pummel the listener in the gut. They've got  this distorted, smeared quality that makes them sound muffled and suppressed, like their full force is held back. But that just makes them more menacing, a shadowy presence lurking in the mix.  Like a pitbull on a leash, growling and snarling.

That's like an orchestral riff.  Again, it's all about the effects I put on it. If you heard it dry you’d think "Is that it?"  It’s the same techniques I use for the giggle.

Ah, your famous hallmark:  the jeering death-goblin laughter.  How did you come up with the Gremlin?

I had a lot of drum and bass sample CDs back in the day and I had that sound from time.  I used it a couple of time in tracks, just to see how it sounds.  Then I stopped using it and everyone was like, "Where is it?!?". I was like, "I don’t want to use it no more".  But everyone was going like "That’s nang! Use it!".  So I switched it up, pitched it down, did all sorts of madness with it.

But Terror Danjah music is not all dread and darkness. You do exquisite, heart-tugging things like "So Sure," your R&G (rhythm-and-grime) classic. Or "Crowbar 2," a really poignant, yearning production draped in what sound like dulcimer chimes,  a lattice of teardrops. That one reminds me of ambient jungle artists like Omni Trio and LTJ Bukem.

I used to listen to Omni Trio and all that, when I was 14 or 15. That R&G style is more me.   Everything you hear is different sides to me, but that sound, I can do that in my sleep.  One day I can be pissed off and make a tune for deejays to do reloads with. And another day I'll do one where you can sit down and listen and relax, or listen with your girl and smooch her.

Do you see anyone else in grime operating at the same level of sophistication, in terms of producers?

I don’t think none of them really. [Aftershock producer] D.O.K. is the closest in terms of subtle changes, and DaVinChe. You've also got  P-Jam.   But I don't really look at anyone and think they’re amazing. Wiley at one point was the guy whose level was what I wanted to get to.  But I don’t think there’s anyone now who’s doing anything different. They’re being sheep.

After the very active 2003/2004/2005 phase, Aftershock went pretty quiet. There were just a few more vinyl releases and then a couple of full-length things.   What happened?  And what have you been up to in recent years?

The label went quiet due to the change of the climate--the introduction of CDs in the underground market place. Because we were so successful with the vinyl format, but it was time to move with the times.  So I released a CD called Hardrive Vol 1, which had ten vocals and ten instrumentals and featured artists like Chipmunk, Griminal, Wiley,  Mz Bratt, Wretch 32, D Double E, Scorcher, Shola Ama.  I also put out an instrumental CD called Zip Files Vol. 1. And I've been working on Mz Bratt's album.

I'm told this compilation was selected out of some 80 instrumentals. Which means 62 weren't used! Does this mean you are sitting on a vast personal archive of unreleased Terror Danjah material?

Definitely. I got billions of tunes stacked on a few Terra Bytes hard drive.

You have Industry Standard Vol 4 on Planet Mu soon, and you recently returned to deejaying with the Night Slugs appearance -- does this mean you are back in the game full force? Do you feel like grime is still an area you want to work within or are you being drawn to other areas, like funky, or the more experimental end of dubstep?

I've always made music what I like, and most of the tracks on 'Gremlinz' were made before there was a genre called  'Grime' or 'Dubstep'.  I started off in Jungle, so I'm not afraid of change! 

Talking of the wacked-out end of dubstep, I can see a lot of your influence with the nu skool producers like Joker, Rustie, Guido, and so forth. Can you hear it yourself and what do you think of this sound people are calling things like "purple" and "wonky"?

 It doesn't bother me, but I personally think a producer/artist should just make the music and let the record/marketing company name it whatever!

from the Grime Primer (The Wire, 2005)

TERROR DANJAH

INDUSTRY STANDARD EP

AFTERSHOCK 2003

VARIOUS ARTISTS

PAY BACK EP (THE REMIX)

AFTERSHOCK 2003

 

Judging by Industry Standard, you could justly describe Terror Danjah as one of the most accomplished electronic musicians currently active. On tracks like “Juggling” and “Sneak Attack,” the intricate syncopation, texturized beats, spatialized production, and “abstracty sounds” (Danjah’s own phrase) makes this “headphone grime”--not something that could be claimed for too many operators on the scene. Yet all this finesse is marshaled in service of a fanatically doomy and monolithic mood, Gothic in the original barbarian invader meaning. The atmosphere of domineering darkness is distilled in Danjah’s audio-logo, a demonic cackle that resembles some jeering, leering cyborg death-dwarf, which appears in all of his productions and remixes. “Creep Crawler,” the first tune on Industry Standard, and its sister track “Frontline (Creepy Crawler Mix),” which kicks off Pay Back, are Danjah’s sound at its most pungently oppressive. “Creep Crawler” begins with the producer smirking aloud (“‘heh-heh, they’re gonna hate me now”), then a bonecrusher beat stomps everything in its path, while ominous horn-blasts pummel in the lower mid-range and synths wince like the onset of migraine. From its opening something-wicked-this-way-comes note-sequence onwards, Big E.D.’s original “Frontline” was hair-raising already. Danjah’s remix of his acolyte’s monstertune essentially merges it with “Creep Crawler,” deploying the same astringent synth-dissonance and trademark bass-blare fanfares (filtered to create a weird sensation of suppressed bombast) but to even more intimidating and shudder-inducing effect. 

JAMMER featuring KANO

BOYS LOVE GIRLS

HOT SOUND 2003

WONDER featuring KANO

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE

NEW ERA 2004

TERROR DANJAH featuring KANO and SADIE

SO SURE

AFTERSHOCK 2004

 

The backing tracks are fabulous--Jammer’s frenetic snare-roll clatter, Wonder’s tonally harrowed synths, Danjah’s aching ripples of idyllic electronics--but it’s the MC who really shines. With some grime rhymesters, the flow resembles an involuntary discharge (D Double E being the ultimate exponent of MCing as automatic poetry). But even at his most hectic, as on “Boys Love Girls,” Kano always sounds in complete control. All poise and deliberation, Kano invariably sounds like he’s weighing up the angles, calculating his moves, calibrating which outcomes serve his interests.  That’s blatant on “Boys” and “What Have You Done”, both cold-hearted takes on modern romance that depict sex in transactional terms, a ledger of positives and minuses, credits and debits; a war of the genders in which keeping your feelings checked and maintaining distance is strategically crucial.  But it comes through even in the gorgeous ballad “So Sure,” on which Kano blurs the border between loverman and soldier drawing up plans for conquest: “ain’t got time to be one of them guys just watching you and wasting time/next time I’m clocking you I’m stopping you to make you mine.” As much as the acutely observed lyrical details, it’s the timbre of Kano’s voice that’s enthralling: slick yet grainy, like varnished wood, and knotty with halting cadences that convince you he’s thinking these thoughts aloud for the very first time. 

TRIM

BOOGIEMAN

AFTERSHOCK 2004

BRUZA

NOT CONVINCED

AFTERSHOCK 2005

 

Like most producers in most dance genres, grime beat-makers typically invent a striking sound, then wear it out with endless market-milking iterations. Terror Danjah has often approached that dangerzone, but on “Boogieman,” he shows how much scope for inventive arrangement remains in the “Creep Crawler” template. You can hear the cartoon-comical wooh-wooh ghostly touches best on the instrumental version, “Haunted” (on Aftershock’s Roadsweeper EP). “Boogieman” itself is a showcase for rising star Trim, here honing his persona of  scoffing imperturbality: “I’m not scared of the boogieman/I scare the boogieman.”

 

On “Not Convinced,” Danjah draughts a whole new template that reveals the producer’s roots in drum’n’bass (the track’s futuristic tingles vaguely recall’s Foul Play “Being With You” remix). Again, though, the MC makes it hard to focus on the riddim. More than anyone apart from not-grime-really Mike Skinner, Bruza incorporates British intonation and idiom into a totally effective style of rapping, in which the not-flow of stilted English cadences becomes a new flow. It sounds “brutal and British,” as Bruza puts it. As his name suggests, the MC has also perfected a hardman persona that feels authentically English rather than a gangsta fantasy based on Compton or Kingston. He exudes a laconic, steely menace redolent of bouncers. “Not Convinced” extrapolates from this not-easily-impressed persona to create a typology of character in which the world is divided into the serious and the silly, the latter lacking the substance and conviction to give their words authority.  Bruza addresses, and dresses down, a wannabe MC: “I’m not convinced/Since you’ve been spitting/I haven’t believed one word/Not one inch/Not even a millimeter/To me you sound like a silly speaker/Silly features in your style/You spit silly.”