silverdollarcircle

2005-11-10T20:10:00.000Z

IT'S OVER NOW

silverdollarcircle terminates here. this is the last post. after getting on for 3 years, i've decided that this has run its course. i didn't start this blog with any firm idea of how it would turn out, but slowly it has kind of crystalized into being about some very particular things, written about in a particular way. and now, i'd like to try something new: i don't want to start repeating myself on here, and i think i've pushed this particular uh 'project' [ack!] as far as i can.

so, a clean break. but i still plan on doing quite a lot of writing, perhaps on another blog, perhaps in some kind of hard-copy thing. the major project for the next few months, though, is to get a website of mp3s of pirate radio tapes up and running, finally.

many thanks to everyone who has read this- i honestly never stopped being surprised and flattered that people did. through doing this, i've come into contact with some great people, and made friends with quite a few of them to. it's been fun.

special thanks to simon, scott, and matt who have been constant sources of encouragement and inspiration, and helped to make me feel a part of something, welcome in the 'sphere, when i was a younger in the game...

thanks everyone. it's been an honour and a pleasure.

p.s go here: pandarescue.blogspot.com

2005-11-09T21:03:00.000Z

further evidence that there was no crypto-racism behind the 'dirty canvas' ruff sqwad night: david moynihan, the organiser, told me that the event WAS advertised in rhythm division and at rwdmag.com. so efforts to get the 'grime kids' down were definitely made.

2005-11-08T20:26:00.000Z

MONSTER MUSIC.

so ruff sqwad last friday: i think everyone thought it was weird. and i think everyone thought it was great, amazing, fun, inspiring, intense. the weird first: grime in an art gallery was always going to be odd, but the almost uniformly middle class, twenty-something audience made it odder. it was a shame that there weren't (to my knowledge)any posts about the event on rwdmag messageboard or the rinse fm board, as that'd easily attracted loads of the grime core vote. and, contrary to lazy, predictable and sometimes idiotic accusations of crypto-racism that have appeared in certain places, everyone i spoke to there wished there was a more mixed audience- this wasn't a case of white middle class people wanting to listen to working class black music without working class black kids being there. and big up david moynihan for putting on the show.

but, the lack of rwdmag/rinsefm.com advertising did unquestionably make the night an odd, and occasionally awkward, event- most notably when Ruff Sqwad arrived for the soundcheck, to a few of us sitting against the back wall watching them over this small-but-massive divide of empty space. they didn't look at all impressed with us.

But once it all kicked off, to Tiny Prancer's mighty dancehall and grime DJ set, it was great fun. ruff sqwad mingled with the crowd, old friends and comrades met up (dave, derek and matt- chestle!) and i met a few lovely dissensus folk. things were loosening up.

ruff sqwad started with a few P.As, which were OK but slightly stilted and subdued. But when they moved into the freestyle section of the show it all went crazy- they kind of contracted into the tight knot of energy, bouncing lyrics off each other. fuda guy ['eeeeeeasy man!!'] and shifty rydoz were especially awesome: Shifty a cool-as-fuck MC who sounds as lean and pared back as he looks. his syllables snap and crackle over each other. fuda guy's more the grime-jester- a big, almost lumbering kid caught up totally in the moment, eyes staring into the middle distance, as these torrents and flurries of lyrics pour out in perfect form. he does the threatening-tantrum/choking back tears of anger thing like dizzee, and-if anything- is more exciting at the moment than dizzee. tinchy stryder has this star-quality thing going on, without a doubt: you can't take yr eyes off him any time he's on the mic, looking so relaxed and so vulnerable, doing that weird, hypnotic movement with his hands, like he's patiently explaining things to the class. but more that that, it's the sound of his voice, that croak that sounds frighteningly old and frighteningly young. However, the night was more about ruff sqwad working together, sparking against each other, than individual MCs: to be within 3 feet of them as they traded lyrics and mobbed each other, to see the intensity that they have as this close unit, was what made the night so special- there was this sense of everything piling up on top of each other, on top of itself, spilling out: bodies on stage, lyrics, tunes, bodies in the crowd.

best moments of the night, though, came from roll deep's roachee.
number 1 was when he started to spit his 'when i'm ere' lyrics and the whole place went totally mental in about 5 seconds, with ruff sqwad and the crowd grinning at each other, out of control.
number 2 was when rapid announced, 'we call this 'Monster Music'', and Roachee, quick as a flash, got on the mic and said, totally deadpan, 'Yes. I like that phrase. Very much.'

ha!

2005-11-04T10:59:00.000Z

"I'm not even at my peak yet. When i'm at my peak it's over. For everyone."

Sharkey Major is back!
:
sharkey major and Mac 10 rinse fm mp3.

this is a big MP3 AND it'll take you a while to download. it may even go wrong a few times. but i cannot stress enough how important it is for you to persevere and download this (it's been doing the rounds for a while now- first on dj lioness' blog, and then on rwdmag messageboard). 'aim high 2' was the definitive grime uh 'document' for the first half of 2005, and this Sharkey Major set does the same job for the second half of the year. Mac 10's in full attack mode, playing the most broken and fucked grime out there at the moment, with an overload of brand new tracks. he does his thing of divebombing ultra-stacatto grime rhythms on top each other- intense like driving rain.

but, even more importantly,: sharkey major is back! this is the best thing that could have happened to grime. sharkey was, is, the best MC that grime has ever had in every possible way- only Trim has recently come close. Here he sounds even more urgent and pissed off than usual, outdoing all the craziness that Mac 10 lays down underneath him with relentless storms of lyrics- they'd almost sound like streams-of-consciousness if they didn't sound so structured and on point. if you like Demon, well, i think demon got a lot of his style of MCing- that energy, that nerviness- from Sharkey Major, and Sharkey does it even better.

you might not be able to listen to this for more than 20 minutes at a time: it's mentalist stuff, and can feel like being punched in the face over and over. but, whatever, you really do need to hear this, cuz it's probably the best example of the flailing noise-energy that grime can have: think 'forward riddim' extended into an hour long mix (with better MCing!).

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my favourite bit of the rinse sessions boxset so far:
-plasticman's mix of a Crazy Titch freestyle with mariah carey's 'we belong together' instrumental. that's genius!

-also, my housemate pointed out to me the other day that on the first track of the roll deep CD, Wiley goes 'big up cambridge'. Eh?

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see you all at ruff sqwad tonight yeah?

2005-10-31T22:07:00.000Z

NO MATTER WHAT THE SITUATION, I GOTTA KEEP IT TRILL...

things that happened in londontown today:

-this morning, i overheard a man say, "i think, recently, i've become...a whole lot more complex". that's such a great thing to say.

-then i saw a man standing in the middle of oxford street perusing page 3 of the Sun incredibly closely and intensely.

-then i saw a man accost that cunt on oxford street with the mega-phone whose 'christian' views have taken a markedly sexist and anti-islamic tone recently. 'great' i thought- finally i'm going to see someone tell that bastard to shut up with his rightwing bullshit. but, no: on getting closer to them, within eaves dropping range, it became apparent that the man was actually having a go at mega-phone twat for not being right wing enough! Specifically, he was taking objection to the latter's calls for an end to world poverty: "it's not about the world, it's about britain", was the counter-argument. jesus christ.

-then i saw a tree surgeon [love that phrase!] on top of a really tall, spindly tree, chopping the whole of the top of the tree off. it looked well perilous so i couldn't bear to watch for long.

------------------------------
but forget london. the more important question is: what's been going on in sheffield recently? and the answer is: i've been visiting it. my first time in the socialist republic of south yorkshire (it's still called that, right?) and oh my days it's a lovely place. it's a bit like tufnell park multiplied by 100 and transplanted to moors and valleys and then filled with students. it's great and everyone's ridiculously well dressed and good looking for some reason. slash these bastard's student loans and force them back into cherry red DMs and rubbish Levellers t-shirts, i say. but i digress. why was i in sheffield? to see the mighty Vegetables. and they were ruddy special, to an arcane and resonant degree. you should see this band. they're funny and they write some of the only pop music that sounds like it knows we're no longer in the 60s, the 70s, or the 80s. and they write songs about interesting things that people actually care about, like george orwell and the history of psychiatry.

afterwards i went to a student indie disco, for a brief return to the indie nation. it's in good health, i can report. people are having strangely huge amounts of fun and kissing people who they think are pretty and getting drunk and forgetting about their essays. and steve lamacq's still the DJ. so, it's much the same as it ever was. to be honest, i found the whole thing a bit confusing and oddly overwhelming, but it was fun.

hang tight The Special One for peerless hospitality and kindness.

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it's gone now, so if you've not got it yet you might never have it, but Lemon-Red did a guest post of houston hip-hop on the stypod mp3 blog. it was a short mix of a type of music that i've never heard before, but i want to hear so much more, so soon. i like the odd clunkiness of many of the beats, as well as the day-glow trippiness of the rest- i swear one track features a cut up sample of the Crazy Frog. much of it is filtered to fuck, full of sonic warps and whooshes, which helps to make it some of the dirtiest, catchiest sounds around. in a way, it's a bit like super-confident grime, with MCs sounding like sales-pitching used car dealers rather than nervy teenagers, and the often skeletal sound you get in grime replaced by grand, over the top, american (?) gestures, albeit one's equally plasticy and focussed on melodic-brutalist ring-tone style riffs. and there's a similar sense of things being sketchy and lush at the same time. but really, more to the point, it's music that makes me want to sit outside in summer and get drunk. which is a great, important thing to have in yr life.
so, this autumn will definitely be time to track down some more...suggestions to the usual e-mail address if yr in the know about this stuff, please...

FASCISM IS THE ENEMY OF WOMEN

2005-10-22T15:31:00.000Z

there's a poster in the tate that says that.

Posted by: silverdollarcircle.

2005-10-18T18:56:00.000Z

RAVIN I'M RAVIN: BUT DO I REALLY FEEL THE WAY I FEEL?

hey i've been ill. bird flu. contracted it from feasting on raw chicken. a lesson learnt.

never let it be said that SDC is tasteful.
i really have been ill though. that bit wasn't a lie.
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dogzilla's taken to saying, 'i'll fuck up the next track, i'm CONFIDENT!'. ha!
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not only does dogzilla sound like a particularly fucked up and vulnerable/crazy ray winstone character (think nil by mouth) he actually looks like him! it's uncanny.
sidenote: ray winstone's daughter is the posh girl in that naughty hip hop crew Crack Village. or so i've been told.

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we went to Bangface the other day. if you go on their website you'll see some pictures of me and my 'crew'. an incentive, no? anyway, bangface... before it's just been kind of fun. but THIS time; oh my dizzle! it was like the best night of the past 2 years or something. absolutely insane fun. it's everything innit- the way everyone's blindingly drunk, the riot of xeroxed pictures on the walls, the fact that the phrase 'arthur fowler he loved this place' was stuck on the wall, the fact that it's in electrowerkz- which has it's own fake 'kitchen' in what is otherwise an apocalyptic concrete shell, the way it was the night i took to drinking neat whisky for the first time, the inflatable toys, cassette boy's impeccably rehearsed but very funny chaos, kid606's mohican, shut up and dance's sheer fuzzy blissiness, and ceephax's chest-cavity caving acid- even though it did get a bit pointlessly complex towards the end.

thing is about bangface, it kind of should be a bit awful, in that it's a bit of an 'IDM' pastiche of rave. but it's not awful at all, because the 'pastiche' isn't tongue in cheek, but a joyous show of genuine affection and an unwillingness to be self conscious. 'camp' doesn't have to be postmodern- 'pastiche' doesn't have to be arch and emotionally dead. having grown up in the 90s, these things are easy to forget.

and, perhaps more importantly, bangface never forgets that the dancefloor is always the main thing, and that you can't dance to smirking cleverness, nor to irony alone.

so, go to bangface and group-hug to rave like it's yr first time...

----------------------------

here's my theory about skepta: while he was a producer he spent a while coming up with lyrics, and so arrived on the scene as an MC with the best, most developed lyrics out there. but, it was all about the lyrics, rather than the tone. he was still in 'writing mode' rather than 'performing mode', so everything was too clearly enunciated and too clean. but now that he's an MC as much as a producer, he's no longer MCing from a writer's standpoint, but rather a performer's. so there's a lot more variation in his MCing now- the old monotone has gone, and he's getting more and more characterful as an MC all the time.

actually, when Wiley has loads of new lyrics he tends to lapse into a monotone as well- the focus is on the words rather than the sound. now, with skepta, there seems to be an acceptance that it's not just about reading out amazing lyrics with a perfect-time flow: it's about being, er, hype. or like dizzee would say... live-o.

what a great track that was. Skank OUT!
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I was thinking about how much i like ruff sqwad the other day and apart from all the romanticism and raviness to them, i think it's also cuz the beats sound kind of awkward and clattery. that rickety clatter used to be what most grime sounded like 2 or 3 years ago. now, grime tends to be very controlled and have a tightness to it.- everything sounds hemmed in, compressed: claustrophobic, almost. and that can be great, from the precision blare and bangs, shock and awe, of davinche productions, to the amazing pointillist cuts and chops of low deep and young.dot etc.

but a part of me misses that rough clatter that grime used to have- the sense that the beats were almost an after-thought- a sound effect, more than a rhythmic instrument. the looseness and madness of those early tunes. and ruff sqwad still have some of that, which is just another reason why they're the best thing EVER.

2005-10-13T20:54:00.000Z

'BE VIGILANT', WARN THE POLICE SIGNS...

pakistan's broken in half, southern USA is drowned, bird flu is on its way, the tube's down till further notice- causing total chaos-, the government want to lock people up without trial, and it seems to piss down with rain constantly...

is this what the apocalypse is meant to look like?

------------------

you know some people say, 'nah, i never vote. they're all the same, aren't they?' ?. well, i'm just guessing here, but i imagine quite a few of those people vote for stuff like pop idol, or big brother. but in what sense is the choice between gareth whatshisname and Will Fatface a real choice? or the 'choice' between two toni and guy robot-fucks on Big Brother?

--------------
anyway, that's enough.

ok, latest movements go like this:
-loads of grime MCs have stepped up their game since skepta's been MCing- hear wiley, or dog-z, or essentials* now, and the levels of lyrical complexity and humour have gone right up.

-bruza's done this track with terror danjah called 'so real'. it's soppy piano-led loveliness like target in one of his R n B moods. bruza does these very JME-esque lyrics, all about how warring MCs aren't real, and his conscious lyrics are realer than another MC's gun lyrics. and it's like, yeah, JME has made this point a thousand times, and it wasn't that interesting the first time.

-wiley shows a lyrical interest in my uh Manor in his new track with ruff sqwad- something like, 'i'll clap-'em, but i'm not from junction'.

-that lady sovereign tune about hoodies is bloody bonkers i tell you! the way she yelps, 'sheeeee likes, theeeey like, weeee like our three stripes!', in the kind of voice that 15 year olds on the piss at the back of the bus have, it's brilliant!

-crazy titch has done this track which is like the first (relatively) subdued vocal i've ever heard from him. can't remember what it's called, sorry. anyway, the new mature, pipe and slippers, come round the fire and i'll tell you a few tales my children, Crazy Titch is great. he even does his old lyric of 'old skool, rude boy, ruff neck soldier' and it's sounds kind of...relaxing. weird.

-a few weeks back i wrote about the new mini-trend for very riffy, head caving, almost belgian-sounding grime tracks. well, it turns out that one of the tracks i'm talking about is:
starfox- 'henry cat'.
you must hear this track. it's on slimzee's mix on the mighty Rinse sessions 6cd set.

-a nice lyric i heard recently: 'i'm real, like madrid FC'.

and with that, i'm off to see the boy David Cameron make a tit of himself on Question Time...

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*it never seems right to talk of essentials members singularly- they're like a group-mind thing. like the picture in Hobbe's Leviathan;

http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/image/leviathan.jpg

2005-10-09T16:51:00.000Z

Long Shadows.

hey, here's my favourite bit of writing ever, may be:

"He let the entire world press on him. For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organised power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multitude power of numbers which made the self negligible...At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do."

it's by saul bellow, from his novel 'herzog'.
reading saul bellow makes you feel and think like a conservative and a radical at the same time. 'radical', what an old fashioned word...

--

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an autumnal snap in the air and a sudden yearning to here nick drake: Summer is over. which isn't too bad: nowhere does the grey of autumn and winter like London: a leaden, stately grey. lady grey/earl grey.

but the end of the best season only makes it worse that i haven't written about the most summery grime track of this year yet. it's produced by chunky bizzle and as usual i don't know the title. i don't know the MC either, which is a more serious crime. my heart says that it's stamina boy, but that's just a stupid, reasonless hunch. anyway, if you heard the pirates over the summer then chances are you will have heard this tune, lighting up the dark corners of grime sets. it's the one with the chorus of, 'and i'm like, and you're like, and they're like'. you know it, right? ok, so this was kind of the 'boys love girls' of this year- a little bit of melodic mischievousness that arrived suddenly and hung around all summer. the MC, whoever it is, isn't great but he doesn't need to be- he's good just providing structure and minimal distraction to a typically wispy, weightless chunky bizzle production. it starts off with a sped up soul sample, 'i can paint a perfect picture, of our love...'. and you think: another kanye-grime track, big deal. but then a 'woo-ohh' vocal comes in and stays on, breathlessly, undulating throughout the verse. the chorus comes in, and the vocal sample sticks onto a single 'woooo' and doesn't let up: just about all there is, really, is this one, crystal note. and in its melodic simplicity, its pure-tone perfection, i fell in love with it. chunky bizzle realises that sometimes, all you need is a note. it's such a lovely, gorgeous note, too, sounding as dusty and golden as 'slow jamz' did, framed by these odd old drum machine creaks. a track for late-summer late-afternoon happy weariness.

so, the track kind of sounds like sachiko M playing an al green cover, and the MC does a little bit of al green-esque juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane, religion and sex, where he seems to say something about 'girls coming out of church, giggling and flirting'. love, sex, religion and ultra-minimalism. what more do you want?

2005-10-08T23:34:00.000Z

best recent variations on the 'are you dumb?!' grime-meme:

"ARE YOU TOTALLY BLOODY BONKERS?!"

"DO YOU HATE YOURSELF?!"

both by bruza, i think.

-----------------------------------
hey i went to FWD the other day. it was my first time ever, and MMS rightly admonished me for taking so long. anyway, it was great. skepta was on the Mic for ages and was wicked: he was even doing these D double style echo effects. skream wrecked my head and my insides. heartless crew were bouncy and fun. Ears stood around and kept looking like he was about to get on stage but he didn't in the end. jammer sat in a corner and slept. essentials milled about- jendor is bigger in real life than he looks on those DVDS, but that really isn't saying much. anyway, that's all i can remember cuz i had a few two many brandies...
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'TV psychologists' = lowest of the low. hearing them speak is like staring out into an grey ocean of utter banality. still, at least the decade or so that they each probably spent in higher education has stood them in good stead...

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in the Guardian the other day there was a survey about young people and 'new media' (urgh!). apparently 30% of teenagers have internet sites. more interestingly, though, 7% (SEVEN PERCENT!) don't know whether they have an internet site or not. jesus christ, how can you POSSIBLY not know? like, if yr not sure whether you've got one or not, it'd be a good guess to say that you haven't...

but teenagers are mental anyway. they all want to vote tory and hate drugs and want to criminalise abortion. i read it somewhere.

2005-09-29T22:10:00.000Z

so, we didn't really work out dylan did we. such an enigma. blah blah. very pretty though.

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oh apparently anti-social behaviour will be eliminated by 2010. how wonderful.

2005-09-26T18:02:00.000Z

Hang on to any history you have.

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no matter how many bad experiences i have, i'm still shocked and amazed by how shit Royal Mail is: stop losing/stealing my fucking records!

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oh of course i shouldn't have said that ruff sqwad's 'move' is new. cuz it's dead old. but in many ways it's similar to the new sound ruff sqwad are currently dealing in, so that's why i wrote about it in the post below. and cuz it's got guitars on it.

PROPERTY OF UKRAINE.

Treat yrself to an mp3 of ukraine (pirate?) radio rip of Tripwire founder and legend, dj Cuntfinger:

dj cuntfinger- 'sistah dick'.

this one's bonkers- especially the radio host's introduction to it. the hardest most fractured hardcore. and with weird folk samples too... so listen to it and rrrrrush like a fuck, as the tripwire kids (probably) say.

2005-09-23T16:29:00.000Z

it is always so surprisingly exciting when a dog is on the tube. more so when it's a really big dog.

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and with that out of the way, we go on to discuss: Guitars and Grime...

guitars and electronic music together are generally yuckish: like hiphop (after the debacle of that Blondie song, presumably...), 'dance music' is something that guitar bands, after a few years of misguided experiments, generally- and, perhaps wisely- steer clear of. be nice if they could do properly, of course, but most of them can't and sensibly decide to leave it at that.

but grime producers at the moment seem to be in love with the sound of guitars. may be because we live in a post-'Lean Back' age. dunno. anyway, fact is there's loads of guitar + grime tracks round at the moment, ranging from the rubbish [kano's 'typical me'], the ridiculous, [slew dem sampling that racist fuck clapton's 'layla'] to the really very good>>>such as...

NEW RUFF SQWAD STUFF!--- most grime producers use guitars to draw links between heavy rock and grime [and the two genres do have a lot in common i guess- both celebrating and reinforcing adoloscent male machismo and both featuring lots of shouting and noise. except heavy rock is by and large shit, and grime isn't...i do seem to be into making very sweeping negative judgments today don't i? apologies...]. danny weed's recent Sabbathy power-drones (e.g that first track on aim high 2] are a good example.
but ruff sqwad, cuz they work in their own unique stylistic world, use guitars to sound almost camply dramatic, or to sound thuddingly Krautrockish.

for examples of the former, check out Tinchy Strider's 'Move', where a guitar plays this lilting descending guitar line that's almost...fey. first few times i heard this, i didn't even notice it was a guitar, cuz it uses guitars in such an odd, unexpected way- to lighten and may be feminise the sound, rather than to bolster it with crunch and growl. that's the thing with ruff sqwad: because they're working from outside the rock tradition- and because they possess musical genius- they make guitars sound radical and startling. they're using guitars in non-rock ways.

for the more Kraut-esque stuff, check Shifty Rydoz's '1999', which has a stark 2-note riff that nags away, sounding jagged and brutalist. guitars here are used more as percussive, rhythmic tools than anything: a constant morse-code bleep.

another 2-note guitar track (lou reed would be pleased...) is by Ruff Sqwad affiliate and protege T-Boy (Rapid said on Rinse that t-boy'll be 'licking off heads' soon...). don't know the name of this one, but try to look out for it cuz it's huge: kind of gothic-grime, but not nearly as horrible as that sounds. the two notes drag away, dark and sludgy as contact-miked molasses. i've got a big soft-spot for these kind of dead-eyed sonic wastelands, for some reason. it's weirdly beautiful, [like the hazy glow from far-off foot-and-mouth fires...]. luvvit.

lastly, Dirty Danger has done a new track which i think Rapid just referred to as 'K' on Rinse [i hope it's named after Josef K...], and which combines the Krauty and the fey. Rapid reckoned this was a 'rock ting', but really it's not: the riff is too disjointed and sparse to be typically 'rock', and the high-pitched counterpoint, which is similar to the guitars on 'Move', sounds strangely medieval for some reason, like a little baroque flourish or something. anyhow, this is the cutting edge at the moment so, once again, get to know...

2005-09-20T20:46:00.000Z

there i was thinking lazily that 'gype' was the original orchestral-grime track. and then i thought, no- that's rubbish nonsense. it's been going for ages, this sound:

jammer and mr wong- 'chink rasta'.

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ah fuck it, i know that dog-z track sounds lighthouse family but i can't resist it- i love it. guilty pleasures...
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2005-09-20T12:36:00.000Z

"if you're going to quote the book of revelation
don't keep calling it 'the book of revelations'
there's no 's', it's the book of revelation
as revealed to St John the Divine
See also, Mary Hopkin
she must despair.

you've got a shit arm, and that's a bad tattoo".
-half man half biscuit on The Libertines.

wake up far too early, look out of the window, blink at the sun and listen to:

wiley-tunnel vision

cuz it sounds like new dawns.

then listen to:
tomas andersson-happy happy

to compare and contrast the 'woop woop' samples.

p.s anyone know what's the 2-steppy track that was played when flo-dan was first on the mic on sunday's rinse set, let me know, please...

2005-09-19T18:19:00.000Z

there's a new god's gift tune out, dunno the name of it- i hardly ever do. starts with a hyped flurry from him that's almost conversational, like the quick machine-gun of threats and shout outs that often begin grime tracks. but then, he doesn't let up- he doesn't end. just goes on and on in the same tone of voice, this weirdly levelled and controlled madness, smearing a decisive 'and you know!' at the end of each line. and you realise- this is the song, a whole 3 minutes of the kind of stuff that's usually just opening ceremony stuff. the beat's pared back to clicks and scrapes, forming a mildly disorientating backdrop to this perhaps awe-inspiring performance from god's gift, this voice that's viscous, and thin, taut, strung out at the same time.

listening to this, it's hard to believe that it's the same person who muttered and forgot in those DVD interviews. it's even hard to believe that it's the god's gift who did his cockney-baritone thing on the 'street beats' CD. here, he's got the kind of almost-but not-shrill urgency that much younger MCs tend to have and then lose. and that's great. maybe it's hanging round with tommy guns and brazen that's done it. whatever, i'm pleased that he's back.

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OK, let's talk Young.Dot...
there's only one young.dot release out- called the 'young dot EP', conveniently- and you need it. i don't buy many grime records at all but even i got this one. so no excuses.

it's interesting because it might be the first example of a grime classicism emerging: whereas other, previous, grime tracks often sounded like preparatory sketches and breathless experiments-and often this was a large factor in them sounding so good- the young.dot EP sounds like the finished article, grime-wise. lessons have been learnt and absorbed and here's the end-product from young.dot, a gleaming showpiece of grime tropes and idioms. honed and polished. perhaps perfect.

all of which might make the EP sound like it's horribly generic and dull- 'grime comes of age' etc. please lord no. but it's not dull at all. it's the best grime record for ages.

if young.dot is like anyone in particular, i guess he's like a little like Oddz, with a similar restlessly melodic plasticy sound. gloopy, but very stacatto gloops. the opening track, i think it's called 'bonanza [!], is that track that's been making you feel queasy listening to pirate sets these past few months...a hailstorm of dexplicit-style clacking with davinche-style brass blare. and then there's what's REALLY great about this track- the retching 'doonnnhh!' sample at the end of each bar, pitching the beat into sheer fucking evil hysteria. the middle two tracks are lovely takes on the orchestral-grime sound with all the lightness of touch you'd want. on the third track young.dot even throws in a bit of Wonder-ish dark-alleyway bass murk/merk to balance out all the melodic carousels.
it's the final track which comes closest to ridiculous greatness of 'bonanza', though. young.dot does that ruff sqwad/early jammer thing of folding interlocking melodies into each other, switching and chopping between flows of notes and stammering jabs of notes. and all throughout the main riff's on this aquatic synth that sounds crazy, squashed and pressured- and very similar to those plastic tubes kids have at halloween that make strangled 'ghost' sounds when you hold them upside-down. it's kind of horrible but gorgeous too.

so, two headfucks of tracks and two pieces of melodic loveliness: there is nothing that is less than fantastic about this ep.

2005-09-19T00:12:00.000Z

BIG BARS PART 4

joe
absolutely merks it with a discussion of that taxidermy documentary. the best piece of writing you'll read all year. "are you dumb?" as skepta would say...
BIG BARS PART 5

" Because i love you- but i don't recognise you!"
-spy vs spy.

-stuff on grime tomorrow i promise. things got in the way...

2005-09-13T13:47:00.000Z

BIG BARS PART 3

the biggest bars of all this time around, courtesy of shower man Tiny Prancer. i'm thinking, of course, about his immortal response to anyone who tries it, nothing long:

"why call out a brother's name? WHY CALL OUT HIS NAME?!"

...to reprise my recent obsession with drawing links between grime and cricket, if i somehow found myself playing cricket, and i was the victim of 'sledging', this would be my response, everytime.

--------------------
in a record shop the other day i found myself in an atypically indie mood, and so reached for Arcade Fire's 'Funeral'. and my word! it's excellent! i like the way it sounds so desperate and ragged in its ecstatic throes. and the way you can tell instantly it was recorded at the Hotel2Tango: sounding both murky and glittering. as a teenager, hotel2tango always seemed like the most romantic place and idea to me. the dense simplicity of this record is just great-- you kind of know how at once every song is going to pan out, how it's going to keep thudding away to its climax or cascade but it all sounds so right that it can often be beautiful. cuz it's done with belief that this is really important. and that, in itself, is important. also, "you change all the lead sleeping in my head to gold" is a lovely lyric.
a record i'll be spending much of my autumn with, i think.

--------------------
i was going to do a little rhapsodic piece about that new Dogzilla track. i mean, a grime track about looking down on city lights at night and star-gazing...it's made for me, innit! but then prancehall pointed out that it sounds like a Lighthouse family song. and you know what, he's right, so no rhapsodizing here. narrow escape!
--------------
tomorrow or the next day we will be talking about chunky bizzle, god's gift, and young.dot (i'm not going to stop talking about young.dot. Ever.) so bring yr notes and be there or be fucking square

xoxo

2005-09-11T21:30:00.000Z

correction no.1: 'young dot' is the name of the producer NOT the name of the retch-grime (with tripwire, THE new genre- be told) track that i keep going on about.

correction no.2: when i was talking about roll deep earlier today, i should have used the phrase 'grime empire', cuz that's what roll deep are now. it's no longer about individual crews battling it out- it's about a massive, constantly growing, roll deep empire, incorporating other, smaller, crews under them.

------------------------------
BIG BARS PART 2.
chris at the virtual stoa asks, regarding the Conservative leadership contest,
"Is the Dr. Fox strategy to be aggressively stupid in order to try to win support amongst the Tory grassroots?"

MERKLED!
(i'm guessing that's the first time Chris has ever been on the receiving end of that particular word of praise. let us hope that it's the first of many.)

2005-09-11T17:45:00.000Z

GRIME AND CRICKET.

flo-dan on his preferred fielding position:
"i'm a straight up gully man".

i have this fantasy that some day writing on grime will be like channel 4's cricket analysis, with a simon hughes-esque figure explaining just how trim was able to merk stormin so quickly, and giving an overload of statistics showing how wiley's flow has changed over the years.
Sadly, i am not that figure. but somebody should be.

2005-09-11T17:18:00.000Z

TOP BOYS- FOREVER.

the weird thing about grime at the moment is roll deep's total dominance of it. only about 14-18 months ago people were starting to write them off as nothing more than second division chancers riding on wiley's coat-tails. but now, no one can touch them. no one comes close. partly this is due to wiley's resurgence, both lyrically and musically, but ALL the old-hands have picked up their game- scratchy, flo-dan, breeze, target, and danny weed tower above others. and with Trim, they might have the best MC in the world.

so, roll deep are very good. duh. like you didn't know. but what's more interesting is that it's hard to see how they'll ever stop being the top boys. there's such a density and intensity of creavity and talent in roll deep at the moment, all pushing each other to higher heights- just hear how far jammer's MCing has come on, and syer's too, since they've become part of the extended roll deep family. furthermore, they've got youngers whom its hard for me to listen to and not think, despite the vague nagging sense that moderation is probably called for, that they could be the next dizzee. manga, brazen, tommy guns, devlin- any of these could step into that fabled, currently empty role given a few years and a bit of wiley mentoring.
but aside from all this, there's also some interesting economies of scale thing going on with roll deep and their place in the scene at the moment, in that they're so big and so good at the moment that they can cherry pick the best of The Others and recruit them to the roll deep family tree. look at who's they've managed to get over the past year or so- maximum, trim, zimbon, jammer (kind of), skepta, manga, jme, riko, god's gift, south agents (again, kind of)...
there's a possibility of roll deep (in the most extended sense) having a virtual monopoly over grime in a fairly short period of time, if their current exponential rate of growth in talent, influence and power continues. and right now, it's difficult to see how it won't continue- roll deep at the moment is like some kind of vortex, getting stronger and stronger as the best of The Others are pulled into it. so, top boys. forever.

-----------------------
which reminds me: back and forth. forever. love to those who know.

-----------------------------

2005-09-09T19:55:00.000Z

THIS AIN'T A GAME, IT'S TOO REAL TO BE A GAME

YOUNG DOT E.P YOUNG DOT E.P YOUNG DOT E.P YOUNG DOT E.P YOUNG DOT E.P YOUNG DOT E.P YOUNG DOT E.P YOUNG DOT E.P YOUNG DOT E.P YOUNG DOT E.P YOUNG DOT E.P YOUNG DOT E.P YOUNG DOT E.P YOUNG DOT E.P YOUNG DOT E.P YOUNG DOT E.P YOUNG DOT E.P YOUNG DOT E.P YOUNG DOT E.P YOUNG DOT E.P YOUNG DOT E.P YOUNG DOT E.P YOUNG DOT E.P YOUNG DOT E.P

and with that i'm off to Bangface to see luke vibert for the second time in a week, somehow.

god i miss sharkey major.

2005-09-08T20:06:00.000Z

BIG BARS

keith moline in this month's Wire:
"i'm waving my hands in the air, but i just don't care"

that's merkery!

2005-09-08T10:42:00.000Z

"ah, nice, Shane, noice..."

the new sound of the english summer. get to know.

2005-09-06T18:43:00.000Z

the realisation dawns: my generation is the least exciting, most conservative, generation since the 1950s.

some songs i can't stop listening to at the moment:

BEANIE SIGEL-FEEL IT IN THE AIR.

usually saxophones sound awful but not on this track. here they sound like the sadness of a night in a city in the pissing rain. taxis pulling out of the neon, away from failed dates. mist on the windows blurring it all. hairs stand up at the beginning when he goes 'spider senses are tinglin...something's goin on'. and also, for whatever reason, when he says '85% communication, non-verbal'. he's got a gift. lovely flutes too, but then flutes are always, always lovely.

ARMAND VAN HELDEN- WITCH DOKTOR.
oh my days! alarm sirens + ridiculous, incessant 'wooo!'s + oddly disjointed bass drums. a rave classic, standard.

ESSENTIALS- YOUNG DOT EP
'young dot' is the name of the grime track i was talking about the other day, the one with the retching sounds. the sound of nauseous machines trying to put up a fight. it makes you feel ill but that can be a good thing.

NANA + DEXPLICIT- ONE NIGHT STAND.
thank god dexplicit's seen fit to bring back the boing-boing to grime. it's been missing for too long and was always one of grime's very best sonic weapons. so, the bass line to this light + sheeny grimette tune is this absurd boing, but it never upsets the pop perfection of the track cuz grime doesn't work like that- the more cartoonish and video-game trashy things get, the better. and Nana's vocals are great, flitting round like the quickest quicksilver. i don't think she really is a nana, tho- she doesn't sound old enough. that would be amazing tho. geriatic grime is the future. get the olders involved. my nan had some big bars but she passed away.

ISOLEE-FACE B
anyway...sorry for the silliness. this is my favourite track from one of my all-time favourite LPs, 'wearemonster'. it's destroyed, flayed and eroded techno- the looped sound of a speaker cone ripping with the bass pressure. but despite the violence in the sound, it's one of the most blissy things you'll ever hear, and makes me think of tired hands in the air at six in the morning. and when the bass falls away and a voice does a little whispered sigh, the sound you make when yr waking up contented, everything else around you seems to stop.

---------------------

jammer and skepta's -swag mc burial. hmmm. first time i heard it, it seemed almost comically bad, lyrically. 'nobody likes you!' 'You're totally swag!' 'you're the shittest MC in the whole wide world!' 'shittest MC in SLK!'. i mean i'm not really a fan of subtlety, but for fucks sake! still, after a few more listens the joyfully childish aspect of it kind of appeals. and i'm starting to really like skepta's voice, finally.

riko was great on slimzee's show at the weekend. he spent quite a while talking about football, as is customary, and then debated whether to have rice and peas or a roast for his sunday lunch. but, more importantly, he had this different flow going on, a clipped, but relaxed and easy stream that reminded me a bit of old skool garage MCs. may be it was just cuz it was sunny sunday afternoon and he was in a good mood, but it'd be great to hear more of that.

--------
here's an mp3 of jammer and stormin. it's not necessarily a great tune, altho the glitchy sound trails at the beginning are biggle, but it is the sound of a dreary rainy day on a bus in london. a day like today:
jammer and stormin- battlefield

2005-08-31T20:15:00.000Z

a respite from the usual grime and techno blogging here to talk about what is, or should be, the next scene to get excited about- Tripwire. i first heard of it from Martin, of the now defunct Beyond the Implode blog. in between stirring words of praise for 70's thai rock and roll, and 80's squat-punk, martin made a few brief, tantalising references to this recent development from the former eastern bloc- mainly the ukraine, i think. basically, it's speeded up gangsta rap samples- NWA seem to be favoured sound-donors-, with crazy, chopped up rave stabs over the top. this is punk-rave, finally. at its best, tripwire has a mentalist, feral energy to it, with shards of treble-noise roughly stitched together into a sprawling, but danceable, glorious mess. apparently the drugs of choice in the tripwire scene are Base (like speed, but totally head-fucking) and poppers (rumours abound of tripwire kids taking to using amyl nitrate suppositories!)and, listening to it, that sounds like a pretty perfect music-drug interface. cheap, nasty and fun, tripwire's a much-needed shot of mindless teenage thrills and violence. Its not hard to see why revolutions have shook both the ukraine and georgia recently- the youth are seething with nihilistic rage if tripwire's anything to go by.

now the bad part. tripwire's pretty impossible to get hold of if yr not within convenient travelling distance of a dodgy ukrainian market stall. however, a bit- ok, a lot- of trawling through Limewire has unearthed a few bits and bobs- such as the MP3 posted below, by dj Cuntfinger (!), who seems to be the founder of the scene, kind of like wiley. and like wiley, he has a younger, dizzee-ish prodigy in DJ 2 Phat-2 Fly- i'll post one of the latter's mp3s soon.
anyway, here you go- enjoy!

dj cuntfinger- 'she got da beef'.

2005-08-30T12:00:00.000Z

THE REALISATION SLOWLY DAWNS- PETE DOHERTY IS JUST ANOTHER FUCKING ROCK STAR...

apologies for the recent quiet. i've been on my summer holidays. the destination this year was Orkney. not orkney mainland though. we're more hardcore than that. so it was one of the northern orkney islands for us- Eday. there's nothing there except a shop. not even any trees. it's just grass and sky, green and blue. the minimalism of the landscape really grows on you. the kompakt lot would love it. may be. we saw seals and lots of rare bird life. we tried to fly a kite. we cooked for each other every night. we went to beaches that were like little slices of the carribean transported to the north sea to slowly freeze. it was lovely. however, Eday seems to have little or nothing in the way of a grime scene.

we also stayed in inverness to break the journey. inverness is a crazy place, full of ultra-exaggerated gestures- a person clearing their throat can be heard 50 metres down the street. people staggering around drunk at 3 in the afternoon- i was kept awake in the hostel at 4 in the morning by what sounded like a joyous riot outside. it seemed like a place on a knife edge, and i don't fully understand how it functions. but people were having fun.

now, however, holidays are over so i'm back, refreshed and happy, feeling better than i have for some months. a change is as good as a rest innit.

-----------------------------
it may be a little known fact, or a well known one- i'm not sure- but the Tawny Owl's call of 't-wit, t-whoo' is actually a call-and-response. the male says 't-wit' and his female partner replies, 't-whoo'. so some people find this sound creepy, or scary, but really it's just a conversation between lovers.
-------------

we live in infantile times. this much is obious from the dire, contrived nostalgia of those 'i love the 80s' TV shows, and the remakes of starsky and hutch and Dukes of Hazzard. Adults dressing up as schoolchildren for nights out, and reading children's books on trains- whereas a glance through an undergraduate's bookshelf in the 60s would likely have thrown up some Sartre and Camus, now you'll find harry potter and phillip pullman.
This strangely desperate and sad infantilism seems to have taken a new turn recently, though, with the rise of TV shows based around parental figures taking over someone's life and explaining to them where they've gone so terribly wrong in their misguided attempts at independent living... THIS is how to eat, what to wear, how to recycle, how to save money, how to spend money- can you not do ANYTHING right? and we love this stuff. it seems that now, for whatever reason, what we really want is a good bollocking.

What worries me most about this development is that it could pave the way for another Thatcher-esque politician to emerge, ranting at us lazy and degenerate masses for decades, as we find it oddly comforting and lap it up.
'Just rejoice in the news i am giving you...' etc.

2005-08-19T09:39:00.000Z

PHILOSOPHY AND ALT. COUNTRY LYRICS (CONT.)

yes, it's time to reprise that infamous role.

"The meaning of the world lies outside the world"
-Silver Jews on Carnap's rejection of metaphysics.

BONUS: PHILOSOPHY AND GRIME LYRICS.

"Everybody's talking but nobody's listening"
-Dizzee on Heidegger's concept of 'idle talk'.

"I'm no longer human- i've become an investment"
-Wiley on the Marxian concept of capital fetishism.

2005-08-17T11:24:00.000Z

if i was an astronaut, and the cables attaching me to my space station were somehow cut, and i was beginning my endless spiral through glittering, dark Space, i'd like to be listening to Villalobos' 'dexter', just have a little bit of perfect music + situation harmony before the oxygen ran out.

------------------------------
"you had your go, it's my go now. i spoke to you on the blower. fair's fair bruv. oh he's from Plaistow? East Ham, Plaistow, all the same..."

one thing i love is to hear MCs on pirate radio. not talking about MCs as in spitting lyrics here, but MCs as in hosts. there are many reasons i love hearing them. on one hand, i love the context they provide, with all these allusions and brief references and shout outs to other artists, djs, fellow MCs, station owners: you get the impression that yr listening to the milling hub of the scene. and you are, of course. i love the easy chatter of a good radio host- humanising the sound with stories of football in the park in the weekend, barbecues, girlfriends, school days. there's something compelling about unfiltered, comfortable addresses to an audience. this is partly why markets can be exciting. i love the exhausted, elated voice that ardkore MCs still have at the end of sets, reaching out through the airwaves like one huge "do you want a sip of this mate?". i liked it a few weeks ago when MC Twilight, who's with dj genocide freeze 92.7fm wednedays 6-8 pm, signed off with a happy sigh of, "London, it's been wicked." I found that moving. resolutions to journeys often tend to have some pull on the heart. the embrace and smile at the end of an 80s teen movie. i also liked it when Bossman on his Rinse FM set ruled approvingly, 'Shouts to the taping crew- you're VERY SMART'. that's funny.

i love the sheer weirdness, or at least lack of self-consciousness, of much pirate radio MCing. Riko talking about football scores for over 10 minutes with slimzee; that Real FM MC i was talking about the other day who twisted his rice and peas recipe into an extended analogy for the pain he would inflict on haters; MC Twilight conducting some kind of text-sex with his girlfriend on air; L-man deciding that that the miss-callers weren't doing their job properly and fucking off to a barbecue instead; someone on Delight FM challenging the DJ to play the worst song that he could, over and over.

mostly, though, i just love the sound of it. i love the new London accent- London's teenager's are the only group in Britain that i know of that have a radically different accent to their parents and grandparents. and it's such a good accent, the best accent in the world. one of the greatest British cultural innovations. i wish every day that i had it, but i never will, and obviously trying to acquire it would be grotesque. now, when i listen to grime or ardkore instrumentals without that accent over the top- generally punctuating the music with short streams of 3 digit numbers that are strangely soothing- it just sounds wrong. something important's missing. the music needs that accent. it's like it was made to sound good when the two were together. it wasn't, but it sometimes seems that way.

----------------------
this is an important song that i can't stop listening to- if you don't download the MP3 then you're in the wrong, sorry to say. it's by a top-boy gentleman and squire and it's a little bit like what would happen if a Victorian gamekeeper decided to make rave pop.

Vegetables- Butcher's daughter.

2005-08-14T12:07:00.000Z

i'm back.

there's a little bit of a Mac 10 show i want to tell you about. for the final track on a typically frenetic mix, he decides to play a new track by chunky bizzle, who's going to be the big grime producer of the last third of 2005 i think. the track is called 'reaching out for your love' and it could be a big paradigm shift. it isn't really an MC tool- there's hardly any beat or bassline to it. all it is is atmospherics. a disembodied old soul singer groans 'ohhhhlll' like his heart is ruined and bleeding. there's a few slivers of sonar-ish bass but they quickly drop out. a speeded up vocal sample whips in; 'reaching out for yr love, reaching out for yr love'. ardkore lineage etc. the beat, such as it is, is just a few cymbal splashes and stilted, slowed handclaps. a pathetic beat, in the good, true, 'pathos', sense of pathetic. then comes the 'chorus'. the 'reaching out for yr love' sample is slowed down to it's true speed and looped over this weirdly waxy, translucent lapping wave of melody that undulates louder then more quietly but always sounds like it's buried under some thick, but clean, fog- you never hear it quite as clearly as yr expecting to, or want to. Ghost-grime: it's not about rhythms or basslines, it's about tense, romantic little sound poems. this owes a lot to the hazy decayed ardkore of Ruff sqwad but in it's sheer lack of interest in providing anything for MCs to latch on to, or even try to counter-weight them with syncopated rhythmic tricks, it's something else entirely.

and then comes the really eerie bit. the show is from 8th july this year. the day after. and the MC goes :'my condolences to all those who lost loved ones yesterday. RIP charlotte' just as the old singer wails 'ohhhhll', in real pain, and the track keeps pleading away, reaching out for your love, reaching out for love.

---------------------------------------------

big up poplife blog- back and totally on fire. check out the imaginary wu-tang scenario especially.
derek- chestle!

2005-08-09T17:49:00.000Z

generator thieves fi dead.

--------------------------
no reviews of the mizzlefizzle #7 on here cuz others do it better
but i'll just say that dancing in our mini rave, wearing dust masks and white gloves was IT. and Ruthington 'perry' smythe and joseph 'joe' tooker as Vegetables was even more so.

-----------------------
back in london, sun going down, stroking zooey the cat, listening to wiley instrumentals, wearing a suit for no real reason. big posts come soon cuz this is the good times...

2005-08-03T22:16:00.000Z

BEFORE, NONE OF THIS SEEMED POSSIBLE, EVERYTHING WAS IMPOSSIBLE...

i'm too busy with this at the moment to feel like writing much here, but i'll write a little bit, just to keep my hand in, like.

big grime tunes:

that one that sounds like a clappy and cracky dexplicit beat, but with this weird retching sounds at the end of each bar. like, GRUUUGHHHNNHN. a massive computer slowly dying by throwing up everything inside it, then eating it again, and then throwing it up again. (someone should make a film based on that idea. actually, don't. obviously). anyway, the tune. it's wicked and queasily exciting. it'll make you feel ill, but in a good, satisfying, refreshing, wholesome way. AVANT!

yeah. when i heard The Entourage on this, god's gift seemed to suggest that this track is something to do with him, but that may be hearsay. don't trust me.

ALSO check out slimzee's new dubplates! rinse fm, sundays, 3-5pm. etc etc. he's playing crazy stuff at the moment, kind of breaky and grimm, but with this superfun hyperactive old skool Belgian vibe. this is the NEW SOUND, get to know. monstrous, evil + fun basslines going on like cartoon robots destroying cartoon cities. in the future. i think these tracks may be by geeneus aka wizzbit, but again, don't trust me on that.

-----------
also loving: triple r mix of My Best Friend releases. the mid point between expansive cologne techno and tight, claustrophobic Berlin electrohouse. and it's not afraid to get silly, which is a lovely trait. if i was in one of those volcanic spas in iceland, where yr really hot, but surrounded by icy mountains, i think this would be the perfect music to listen to. it's also great to drive to tho. and cook to. and dance to.

ok, i'm off. i'll do some long posts as soon as the dust settles from the MizzleFizzle...i've got lots i want to write about.

2005-07-26T15:27:00.000Z

making me smile today:
"nah we don't wanna clash, that's long
cuz we heard yr tracks and you sound swaggish".

no-lay, of unorthodox fam.

no one sounds more London than No-lay.

2005-07-25T22:40:00.000Z

amusingly, my mum calls grime 'numbers music', because of the shout outs to mobile numbers in the pirate radio tapes she overhears.
big up the 280!
240- your chestle!

------------------------
being back in the north west, where i grew up, is odd. i can go most places without having to think at all. i am a danger on the roads.
-----------------------
the smell of old books.

------------------------
this summer it's all about Ghetto's voice. get to know.
------------------------------
are owls intelligent, or do they merely look intelligent?
------------------------------

that's more than half the battle.
-----------------------------
the north cheshire accent can be the most beautiful sound in the world. like when the old lady in the shop down the road says 'hiya' to me. you should hear it. you'd love it.
----------------------------------------
best bit of risky roads dvd (or might be Practice Hours...they all just kind of merge into one...) is the recording of an old deja vu set, where Ghetto's doing one of his long fast streams, then he stops, rolls his eyes really theatrically and goes, 'mind works like my nine works, yeah that's ghetto, yeah he merked Flirts'.

the dj kills the record, and Ghetto breaks the silence with a muttered: '...and he's still merking him'

brap!
----------------------------
you cannot 'fight' a 'war on obesity' with dick cheney as vice president. you just can't.

--------------------------------------
we need more jokes about terrorism. apparently a female british-iranian comedian asks audiences 'does my bomb look big in this?'. that's funny!
-------------------------

2005-07-22T17:07:00.000Z

is it wrong to get romantic and ornate in writing on grime?

well obviously i don't think so. ruff sqwad can be sad and romantic, as can wiley's lyrics. i mean, when demon goes 'yr best friend could be yr worst enemy' there's at least some pathos there, right?
this whole thing has just been about me trying to write, as honestly and openly as i can, about how i hear this music. and yeah i tend to focus on the romantic and sad aspects of that music, but that's how an (ex?) indie kid like me will hear it. of course this can come across across as ridiculous and personal but i've never tried to make this blog, or claimed it to be, anything other than a very personal take on music- this isn't even close to a definitive 'grime blog'. like you hadn't guessed. i've never tried to intellectualise anything, or out do anyone.

fuck it, i don't know why i'm even defending this. it's not like anyone gives a fuck.

2005-07-22T13:53:00.000Z

DISCO AND HOUSE DISSECTED IN SOFT-FOCUS

ISOLEE is one of my favourite musicians ever. with his first album, Rest, he pre-empted the knotty psycheledic techno that has now emerged as a kind of scene- villalobos, steve barnes' cosmic sandwich stuff, may be robag wruhme- which still lacks a name. i think michaeL F gill suggested 'romance drones' a while back, and i loved that. with his new one, 'WEAREMONSTER', isolee initially didn't grab me in the same way as he did the first time round- the dazzling twists and folds didn't seem quite so dazzling anymore. but now it's all fallen into place. after the glorious sensory overload of The Glade, wearemonster is the most perfect album for me at this moment in time, because it sounds exactly as you feel after serious nights of fun and techno.

there's something totally cerebral about this record- synth lines and beats echo round like distant chemical memories of the dancefloor. shivers and tingles along the pathways of the mind. didn't virginia wolff come up with the concept of the 'time of the mind' or something? i think that that's what's going on here. this is isolee's disco-house record but it's so stretched out and a little elusive- a patchwork of suggestions and signs, but it all feels very naturally and easily understood. this is the chicago jack bit/this is the hands aloft bit/this is the electro bit/this is the blissy bit/this is punkfunk bit---fill in the blanks.

but most of all- not that you can really separate these things- this album sounds gorgeous. i love the way the bass always gurgles + squelches, matched with these little whispers of wilted metallic melodies. infinite gentleness! Sounds like early morning, a last dance and head back home, have a little contented chat. and everything's so human and charming, to the point of being almost clunky- but also kind of sexy and wholesome. As with 'rest', there's a level of detail in the music that swallows you, and it all teems with this dappled grace. unlike with a lot of techno, this can never be any form of background music: it has you, you have it, for an hour. my favourite moments are when it takes delight in a little bit of minimal jacking, and then wanders off, back into the undergrowth. where next?

some records bring out this sense of wonder in you, and wearemonster might be the sucessor to the 1st Selected Ambient Works in that respect. and, like that album, this feels like a crystallization of techno without being techno in any traditional sense. isolee is to techno what keiji haino is to rock, perhaps, which is to say, he's both part of and outside techno, without being in anyway 'meta'- techno refracted, not reflected upon.

but those are minor points, really. this record is beautiful. god i'm in love L U V.

2005-07-21T16:10:00.000Z

first things, you really must listen to Mac 10's Rinse FM show (fridays 7-9pm). crucial biznizz. he tends to play stuff that falls outside the roll deep/ruff sqwad/ fire camp hegemony that you often get on the pirates, so each show is a treasure of unexpected delights, with nasty jack quickly emerging as a new grime hero. and he's returned to the superfast cut and chop delerium that i wrote about a while back in that post on grime DJs. also nice is that he seems to be currently favouring the quicksilver melodicism style of grime- music for the post-gype, post-str8 flush age. there's hardly any of that jammer/davinche dulled brass sound peering out from dark corners anymore. to paraphrase sharkey major, things are getting livelier. so lock in and shock out.

------------------
the media love all this terrorism stuff, don't they. feel the gravitas!

-----------------------
sometimes, a single is released which is not just a great single, but an all time classic EP. roll deep's 'the avenue' is such a single. the A side i guess i don't really need to talk about. but aside from the main event, there's two pieces of genius. first, the danny weed refix of 'the avenue', which, following the honourable tradition started perhaps by dizzee's i luv u remix, sounds nothing at all like the original. We get a sad-clown wheezy stagger of a bassline that's lovingly rickety. what's holding it up? dunno, but it stays up and together, somehow. i like it when danny weed gets all charming and minimal, like he did ages ago with salt beef. riko takes the chorus that i've been singing in my head ever since i first heard it. it's particularly good when they play this on roll deep's rinse sets, cuz they get to shout, 'heartache!' at the end of each line with the Mic Tutor. scratchy is amazing on this tune. sometimes he's easy to love but hard to really admire, if that makes sense, but here yr just blown away by his dexterity. he lifts up the track and twists it any way he feels like. often when people talk about how good riko is, they focus on his skills as a war/hype MC, but i've always preferred his more conscious, introspective stuff (check 'critical', 'don't want you back', and 'chosen one'). there's something about that combination of the nobility in his voice and the very direct, almost blunt lines with corruscating detail that tears yr heart out. 'i don't wanna hurt no more, and you don't wanna hurt no more, it's never gonna work no more'. ach!

finally, there's the wiley remix of when i'm ere. anyone else, you wouldn't want them to fuck with the perfection of the When i'm ere/shank riddim, but wiley is, and always will be, the special case. he twirls the accordions even further off into the merk, and gets all liberal with the gunshot samples. listen to this on speed and you might have a heart attack. the best bits are the occasional 20 second snatches where this almighty bass cuts in, sounding like a DJ is chopping Surgeon-esque flailing techno into the mix for a little while. On this track, and on 'firefly', wiley has crafted a unique stutter-style of bassline, that's so restless but so precise. i imagine insect legs moving in kinda jerky but liquid-perfect waves. and oh yes, the lyrics, too: they're all new for the remix, with my highlights being Trim getting all weird talking about horse rallies, wiley kicking his bit off with a fire-and-brimstone 'It's BAIT!!', biggie pitbull again being thrillingly angry but with top boy skills to back it ('again', cuz of poltergeist relay...), and tinchy strider doing that thing he does of somehow calming everything down while also sending tingles down yr spine.

yr morally obliged to buy this single in order to help roll deep go to number 1, but thanks to b-sides you'll have fun doing it. it's a hit!

2005-07-20T21:27:00.000Z

I'm back! from the half mad-max style apocalypse/half pastoral utopia that's the Glade Festival. dazed and frazzled, i feel nice. too many good things for me to bother putting them into some coherent form, but i liked: the psy-trance dust bowl caving in heads in the baking heat, the techno-tim burton stylings of the chillout area- complete with giant dandelion seeds hanging above us magically-, the party grime of virus syndicate, the chance encounter with man like MMS, luke vibert's piano rave medley, andrea parker bomping righteously and mightily despite playing through monitors facing the crowd cuz of the fucked PA, carl craig playing detroit classics, sancho panza being the most blissy thing EVER, richie hawtin taking a journey from bare 909 clack and click to jacking techno and back again and looking ever so cute with it, cassette boy being joyfully puerile, the way the stewards were on way more drugs than anyone else, and the halloumi sandwiches.

but most of all i liked feeling so part of the modern world. many festivals you go to hark back to a mythical golden age that no one my age can remember. but the glade felt like Our Time.
hippy bollocks fi dead! (sorry)

-----------------------
talking of eski, which we weren't, but we kind of always are on here. in the background, somewhere. anyway, talking of eski, scientists have found a way to freeze dogs, effectively killing them for a few hours, then bringing them back to life! they reckon they'll be able to do it to people soon, to create real life eski-boys.
---------------------
best grime lyric ever:
crazy titch's little used hype chant of:
'old skool
rude boy
ruff neck
soldier
as i get older
heart gets colder'

it's on that sidewinder rave tape that i occasionally get all over the top about here.

----------------------
MAY BE THIS IS THE END.

occasionally, perhaps more frequently of late, people start wondering when grime is going to change into something totally new and radical and different. come on, it's been 3 years, people think: when's the revolution on the hardcore continuum going to happen? surely we're due?
in a way, this is all a bit odd. grime is still some of the weirdest, most unpredicatble, passionate and fun musics out there, so why the impatience? but i am, and a lot of people are, impatient for the new, for whatever reason. i blame it on being a child of late capitalism, and that might be a cop out, but who cares.

that's not the point of this little piece. the point is: grime doesn't feel like it's going anywhere anytime soon. it feels like it's here to stay. the skeleton/prototype of this theory is that the rapid turnover of the 90s hardcore years might be the anomaly- the more natural, usual, pace of change might be much slower. there might be nothing new round the corner, and to expect that there will be is to generalise too much from a very particular set of circumstances in musical history.

i guess i see the 90s hardcore continuum as being this quite unique odd marriage between two very different musical traditions or, uh, paradigms: house and techno culture on the one hand, and what could be called- however loosely- 'urban' culture on the other, where that encompasses hip hop, R n B, and dancehall. the hardcore continuum was a time when these two musical cultures and approaches (and audiences) came together, with radically destabilising effects. because this marriage was so new, and so unique, with no established ways of combining/reconciling the two traditions, there was a great deal of opportunity and freedom to break new ground, with few constricting expectation- hence the short lifespans of jungle/jump up/speed garage/two step- there was just too much space for new ideas for a style to become all conquering for any great length of time.

other reasons, stemming from this 'odd marriage', for the rapid turnover might be suggested: one enticing one is the possibility of disatisfaction in the massive, with its different components all wanting something slightly different but still being wedded together- jungle and jump up rejected as too moody and not ravey enough/ 2-step emerging to appease those who wanted the slick and sexy glossiness of R n B from their raving.

but now, with grime, the hardcore continuum seems like it's finally settled on the 'urban' side of the fence. the destabilising effects of the odd marriage no longer exist, because of the odd marriage no longer exists. instead, the hardcore continuum has eventually become a strand within hip hop, with all the established ways of doing things and expectations that come with falling under such an umbrella. of course, i don't want to get all fukuyama-esque about this and say that things will never change. but i think that things will now change much more slowly. there's now an identifiable set of musical traditions and institutions that grime/the continuum belongs to, and inevitably that will shape the direction of change. unlike, perhaps, in the period where the odd marriage was still extant, anything doesn't go anymore.

that's my bare-bones theory, anyway. of course, it needs much more work and it may be/probably is largely wrong. but something to think about innit.

------------------------
going to bed now. tomorrow i will talk about roll deep, mac 10, and isolee. see you there, hellcats

xoxo

2005-07-14T07:53:00.000Z

ok i'm off to the glade festival now for 4 days of raving, so i'll just do a quick run down of what i like at the moment and then i'm gone:

-roll deep, 'heartache refix'.
-new low deep and imp batch, as heard on Mac 10's friday night rinse show.
-bossman, 'bongo v.i.p'.
-sick sense cru, 'real sound' [hear it here: the orchestral-grime micro-scene gets some new recruits].
-Real FM, 99.1FM- great south london grime pirate, which is very adamant to point out that it lives up to its name. when i was listening a few days ago the MC started discussing rice and peas recipes, which then became a kind of allegory for the vengeance he would serve to haters!
-Triple R mix; 'flashback' (a collection of recent My Best Friend Records stuff).
-vegetables, 'trompettes de la mort'
-tomas andersson, 'washing up'.
-einmusik, 'jittery heritage'.
-martha wainwright- s/t
-isolee, 'wearemonster'
-the juan maclean- 'less than human'.
-get physical 2nd anniversary comp.
-dominik eulberg, 'flora and fauna'
-dj rolando, 'aguila'.
-vitalic, 'ok cowboy'.
-animal collective + vashti bunyan, 'prospect hummer'.
-ellen allien, 'thrills'.
dj genocide (ardkore) and tony vibes (88-89 house) freeze 92.7 fm wednesdays.

and that's it. you'll note there's a lack of soca and dancehall in there- come back dave and tell me what to listen to!

2005-07-11T18:18:00.000Z

Roll Deep Entourage were just on Top of the Pops, like 2 minutes ago. performing 'the avenue', of course. it was...charming, and slightly embarresing too. watching them dance along to the chorus was difficult, and i had to do it through cringing hands covering my face a few times. and i kept thinking of tigers performing demeaning tricks in the circus. but, really, who cares: riko's now been on top of the pops!

and hopefully, this is all just the groundwork for a paradigm shift if/when When I'm Ere gets on there.

------------------
sometimes, as someone once said, all it takes is a song...

it's been a weird and difficult week, because of the obvious and also because of matters non-bomb related. but here are 3 songs that mean a lot to me right now, and have helped. like Trim says on Practice Hours, 'music's helping, it's helping...'. i love that bit.

anyway:

tori alamaze- don't cha.

philip sherburne has already written about this, and done so better than i could. so i'll keep this brief. (i try to keep everything brief, but it rarely works out). this is dark side lunar R n B- pock marked with craters of salty dissonance and surrounded by endless space. bomp bomp bomp goes the drum. that's the main melody: yeah it's a minimal one, this one. there's the odd bit of scratching and a few slivers of machine-grind synth but it all sounds so isolated and devoid of any meaning or purpose- it just Is, and it could go on forever. but that's what makes it so great, a uber-eski cut of ice-cold numbness, that's almost totally removed from The Human World. She sounds like a superhuman android in a coke and lust-crazed trance, and without being all weird and male and geeky about this, that's got to be cool, hasn't it? it's the most steely, odd, and sexy song you'll hear all year, unless you have very strange listening habits- the thought of something which goes beyond 'don't cha' scares me a little bit.

And here's the mp3.

----------------
kano, demon, ghetto- Mic check 1-2 refix.

i'll do a little list of the things i like about this record, just for fun:

-it's far better than the a-side, the dire 'remember me'.
-the brass and strings that have this pathetic wounded grandeur about them, like those bulls that have to stagger around while matadors spear their necks.
-the bitter sweet glimmers and pings that flit over the top.
-the itch-and-scratch clackclackclack of the beat.
- kano's slurred opening lyrics- he should get smeary and sloppy like this more often. all those verbal smirks and winks he sometimes does get tiring.
-kano's line of 'it's kano, and the nigga with the best verse on Forward'. Yes!
- the head-rush effect when demon comes screaming in, while the track switches instantly to this other, cardiac stutter thing.
-demon has the most exciting voice in the world.
-the nonchalence of the chorus: 'fucking with the team, fucking with the team...'
-Ghetto's awe-inspiring pointillist MCing, in which he sounds like he's literally spitting. With disgust.
-ghetto's use of the word, 'div', if i'm hearing correctly. it's like grime's gone all 70's grange hill!

ok, i've just had the idea to do something on, 'which grime MC would be which old skool grange hill character?'. that's a terrible idea, isn't it? or, perhaps, is it, might it be, a fantastic idea?
no, it's awful. but god...how tempting...

----------------
enough! on to the next tune. which is:
Nasty jack- unknown.
i heard this a few weeks ago on Mac 10's friday night Rinse show, which is THE grime show you must hear, along with the roll deep one on sunday. i don't know the name of the track, i rarely do with these ones on radio, but i feel like i need to write about it anyway. Nasty Jack's been around for a while- he did that 'i'm the hackney kid, not from hackney, but i like to hack knees' lyric, er, 'back in the day'. he's even better nowadays. he has this odd gimmick of going 'oh, okkaaay' in a strained voice. i love these little funny grime gimmicks. it's the Music Hall Continuum, may be? i dunno. i know fuck all about east end music halls, or any other kind, for that matter. but i know what i'd like them to be, and that's full of verbal tics and gimmicks that make no sense but are loved by the crowd. 'where's me washboard? etc. does anyone else feel like this 'review' is losing it's way?

ok, so back to the music innit. the track's a pleasing and basic grimey pummel. nothing really radical here, but that means no distractions so you can listen to Nasty Jack properly. he goes through three stages of merkery. first, he gets higher and higher in pitch so by the end of each line he's almost squealing. ooo, what a rush! then, he settles a little bit, but it's still wantonly intense, as he cracks the last syllable of each line over the snare. third, it all gets a bit more circuitous and confusing, like he's tying himself up in knots, re-iterating again and again why he 'hates this yoot'. and then it's over, and you start to catch yr breath.

2005-07-09T18:43:00.000Z

"marching on, marching on,
life goes on,
man just march on"

-Breeze.

2005-07-06T18:37:00.000Z

first things first: you should all go to this, cuz Bardens Bar is a wonderful, lovingly decorated, place, and current kings of the cologne sound Triple R and steve barnes will bliss you out (cut and pasted from an e-mail ambrose, the organiser of the night, sent me):

Trapez/My Best Friend/Traum Schallplatten Showcase
http://www.non-sense.co.uk

Barden's Boudoir (http://www.bardensbar.co.uk, 38-44
Stoke Newington Road, London N16 7XJ
9th July 2005, 10 pm - 3 am

Triple R/Riley Reinhold Dj
Process (Steve Barnes) (Live)
Burnski Dj
Michael Fentum Dj

Riley Reinhold AKA Triple R, the head of the German
label Traum
Schallplatten,
with sub-labels Trapez and My Best Friend, is due to
make his first
London appearance, in the first of a series of planned
parties,
aimed at bringing the sound of Cologne, Detroit,
Barcelona and Paris to
the UK. Our aim is to provide Londoners with the
chance to see what is
happening in the rest of Europe and America,
the new wave of house and techno that seems to be the
dominant force in
dance music at this time, the sometimes minimal,
jacking tech-house
sound that is most closely linked to the great Kompakt
label,
but is also being pushed by myriad smaller labels.

The first party will be a showcase of talent from all
three labels:
Burnski has just released a new 12", "Coldcut" on
Trapez, Steve Barnes
has released records on My Best Friend as Cosmic
Sandwich, and as
Steve Barnes (with Riley Reinhold), put out the killer
tune "Odyssey"
on MBF. He also records as Process, and has released
on Fat Cat, Traum
and Trapez.
------------------------------------

today i have been greatly enjoying the death rattles of terror danjah's beats, echoing and shaking out of themselves. he also goes 4 a.m techno on 'sonar', so check that out.
---------------------------------------------

micheal mayer and ada and jennifer cardini at fabric was ultra biggle. the crowd was actually friendly and smiley and chatty for a change, which was lovely, even tho i can't be bothered to chat to strangers on drugs any more. slowly, bit by bit, the cliches become less appealing, don't they? but anyway. Ada was exquisite and mournful to begin with. it was like being in a huge rave cathredral or something, this reverberating mountain of notes piled on top of each other. she does this odd thing of kind of grinding her hips against her synths. in some ways it's uncomfortably sexual for an old prude like me, but it's a cool move really. nice to have a bit of show, isn't it? the best bit was when she prolonged the start of THAT bit on 'the red shoes' for ages, repeating the opening notes for a few minutes and then suddenly sinking us into the sunlight of that lovely little melody (you know, that bit...) as it was revealed in full. when songs blossom after a long build it can be so beautiful, can't it.
micheal mayer was a lot harder than i expected. bosh bosh bosh. he didn't play air guitar, disappointingly. at first it was a bit odd, nothing seemed to make sense. 'where's he going with this?' you thought. i thought. but gradually a kind of narrative, or pattern, was built up and things started to fall into place. he did these long arcs of creeping intensity, but offset with funny tangents of more frivolous, neo-disco sounds. in an interview once he talked about how he sees his djing as almost touching the crowd, and i think that's true. there's a very gentle, unhurried, friendly side to his djing- everything's in the right place, and he's going just where you want to go. but more than that, his sounds had this odd, gauzy quality that you could almost feel: little silky wisps of high-end floating over you and teasing out goosebumps.
he played a remix of baxedale's 'built this city', with i presume was his remix, out soon on Kompakt Pop. it's a HUGE track, exploding unexpectedly from minutes of low-end reveries into this glorious, high-camp chorus that had me and Jack exchanging 'this is fucking amazing!' grins. and i finally got to know the name of the track which has been providing me with a great deal of pleasure over the past few months: it's tomas andersson's 'washing up' (on bpitch), which michael mayer also played. it's a cartoonishly febrile piece of techno pop, that sounds like being trapped in a very small room full of computer game characters who are on poppers and ritalin. does that make sense? perhaps not. perhaps i better stop there.

oh no, can't, sorry. not before i tell you that after the night and the morning's raving, me and jack went to the 24 HOUR (!) 'Tinsel town' diner, for milkshakes which we drank in the blinding sun, saying hello to passing office workers on their way to keep this country afloat. i can highly recommend this as a way to spend the morning after.

--------------------
"what's the word, a yiddish one i think, that means 'standing on the stairs, leaving the party, and just realizing the devastating reposte you should have made to some jibe at the party'?" i asked, a few days ago.

well, Matt, who does the excellent and very much recommended U Mean competitor blog, which is a little like prancehall, but dealing in screwed and chopped stuff rather than grime, was kind enough to tell me that i was probably thinking of the French term, "l'espirit d'escalier". i don't know why i thought it was a Yiddish word. may be because there are so many great yiddish words.

--------------------
i'll update the links bit of this blog soon as there are so many fantastic blogs that i read now that aren't on there. mean time, i'll say: you must read kid shirt's review of the 'ultra' 7 inch. it'll make you realise that, although previously unknown to you, you NEED this record, otherwise yr life is pathetic and incomplete (i've been trying to hunt down a copy today). it's a great bit of writing.

2005-07-02T17:39:00.000Z

"yr hoping it'll be a light at the end,
but why would it?
so you could come try it again?"

-Brazen.

loveitloveitloveit.

2005-06-30T15:35:00.000Z

FOR THOSE WHO ARE INTERESTED,
THERE’S SOME WORDS ABOUT THE ROLL DEEP ALBUM AT THE BOTTOM
OF THIS POST. AN APPRAISAL AND CRITIQUE, WHATEVER.

But first we’re not talking about music, we’re going to talk about other things instead. But we’ll get to the music eventually, slowly, tortuously. Come, waste time with me…

My friend Louie, who is one of the best people in the world, if you don’t know her yr missing out big time, says she reads this for the non-music stuff not the music stuff, so here you go Louie…

London is overrun with police today. They are everywhere. I get off the tube at Euston and there’s about a dozen policemen stood at the exit. I guess the tube must be crawling, swarming, with criminals. I didn’t notice, such is the ingenuity of the modern criminal mind when it comes to disguises. A woman with strangely grey eyes (as in, they were all grey, ‘whites’ and all), sat right next to me on the tube, as far as possible from the black woman to my left. Some people have problems.
Then I go to the ‘institute of autonomy’, a squat on gower street, to get some food. A police van is parked outside, looking scared, useless and stupid as only police vans can. A harassed looking man opens the door and tells us that the police have been staking out the place for 2 days now. Something to do with the G8 protests, may be. He informs us we’ll now be on police records, on film. This makes me happy for some reason. May be I should feel a small wave of anger against the big brother state and all that, but I just love it, to feel like an outlaw when all I want is a cheap risotto ...

-----------------------------
I don’t know, I’m speculating here, but I think that there must be, or it is at least highly probable that there is, a mental disorder in which the sufferers fall in love incessantly, perhaps constantly.

--------------
In a similar vein, or perhaps a deeply dissimilar one, if you can think of an activity, no matter how perverted or even fundamentally non-sexual, someone, somewhere, will have a sexual fetish relating to it, and there will likely be a couple of web pages devoted to said fetish. Such is our world.

----------------------

To go back to cheap food in the Bloomsbury area. I would recommend:
-diwana, on drummond street, behind euston station. An indian restaurant with an all-you-can-eat for £6 lunch menu. This is the real deal. And it’s all vegetarian.

- rive guache, on warren street. A french run café specialising in ridiculously generous and ornate sandwiches for not much money at all

- The Place, on Duke’s street, just south of euston. This is a dance school and theatre as well as a café, so you get to watch graceful people wearing leg warmers flit in and out while you eat. It’s really cheap and the portugese-style custard cakes are lovely.

- Quaker meeting house café, on Euston road. Today I had a goat’s cheese, spinach and asparagus sandwich here for £1.50! altho the place did make me feel like I was back at school, somehow.

----------------------------

Often in London, people ask me directions. Lots of people get lost in london. I’m often out and about, without that typically busy-londoner-face, so perhaps I’m a little more inviting than many as a prospective guide through the city. However, when I give directions to these lost and worried people, perhaps repeating them a few times with minor stylistic changes in order to ensure that they remember them, whenever I look behind me to check on their progress, they are invariably going in a totally different direction to the one I proposed, or asking another person for directions. Their looks when I give them directions say a lot: a slight but definite undercurrent of disbelief on their open faces, like they’re only listening to these directions to humour me. Why is this? At first, I thought it might be because I don’t appear certain and sure enough when giving directions, but this can’t be it. I only give directions if I’m absolutely certain that they will be correct, and this must come across somehow, you’d hope. Rather, I think their disbelief comes from the fact that my directions don’t accord very well, if at all, with their impression of what their route should be, given their map reading. However, they’re only asking me for directions because their ability to read a map has proven to be inadequate, so the whole thing seems very perverse. What should I do, collude in their false beliefs and impressions, just to win their confidence? Perhaps make little amendments to what they think their route should be, so that they are at least not quite so lost? But then, how to find out what they think their route should be?
An alternative, of course, is to approach them after I see them walking off in a different direction than the one I instructed them to take, and ask them what the fuck they are doing.

Although perhaps without the ‘fuck’. I’ll play that one by ear.

------------------------------

Micheal mayer and ada at fabric this Saturday.

-----------------------------------

Why does everyone on trains seem to read the Daily Mail?
------------------------------------

We were at glastonbury. I’m not going to do a review, I can’t be bothered. I’ll just say that I love glastonbury, and the reason I love it is probably the opposite of why most people say they love glastonbury. I love glastonbury because it’s not really counter-cultural at all, with the exception of the Green Fields. It’s a pop and populist event, that allows me to feel truly part of the mainstream of my generation, doing the same things, seeing the same bands, laughing at the same absurd rains. Glastonbury IS the establishment now, and that’s what so great about it- it supplies that rush of excitement that no longer feeling isolated from your peers and contemporaries gives you. Everyone is lovely to each other at glastonbury, and people smile and chat together, but really, there’s no special ‘glastonbury experience’, nor a unique ‘glastonbury spirit’. It’s just like going out on a Friday night in any city, but accepting and being accepted by everyone you come across. Glastonbury makes everyone feel like you imagine the most popular kid in school must have felt. There’s nothing new there, just an egalitarian extension of access to the old, established ways of doing things. But that can be a very important, and perhaps beautiful, thing.

On Sunday we saw rufus wainwright perform ‘hallelujah’ and he stopped singing half way through because he said it was too beautiful. With the sunset- what is more every-day lovely than a sunset? - and the crowd, it was quite overwhelming.

---------------------------------------

I’m in an odd mood today.
----------------------------------------

The next time someone does some ‘performance art’ next to me, I vow to get involved and really test them. These bastards thrive off the scared and silent backing-away of their victims. Now I want to see them work for their living. Like, we went to this thing called ‘tropicana’ a few months ago- lots of people dancing round you in the dark of a disused tube station. Quite creepy. If I go to something like that again I’m going to wrestle one of the dancers to the floor and then claim that I’ve been touched up. Or there was this bit in ‘tropicana’ where you went in to what looked like a tube driver’s tea room and were ushered out by someone who was clearly a RADA trained actor pretending to be a driver on his break. I should have INSISTED that I stay for a cup of tea, then really out stay my welcome, and make him finally break down and make him admit that, yes, the ‘tea room’ idea was a bit of pretence that's gone horribly wrong. If audiences truly got involved with art that claims to be about ‘dissolving the barrier between performer and spectator’, 90% of it would finish over night. Would that be a good thing or a bad thing? Who knows, let’s try it and see. I want a proper performance, give me a performance...

---------------------
what's the word, a yiddish one i think, that means 'standing on the stairs, leaving the party, and just realizing the devastating reposte you should have made to some jibe at the party'?

---------------------

Well, I guess I should talk about ROLL DEEP- IN AT THE DEEP END, then.

Is it grime, is it something else? Well, I find that whole line of thought slightly repellent, as for as long as I’ve been listening to this music called grime, there’s been no definitive grime sound at all- the borders have been wide open. I hope that always continues. But if you want to get picky, you could say that the fractured female vocal samples and R n B beats made boomier have been a mainstay of the grime canon from the very start. Take roll deep’s ‘you were always’, for example. So, yes, this album is melodic and it is pop, but grime was always like that, or corners of it were.

But In At The Deep End isn’t just a grime album, even if it is a grime album: rather, it’s more than that, it’s a london pirate radio album. Partly, this comes from how it sounds- the heavy, wide-eyed bass-lines cut through with glistening R n B melodicism is just like listening to Rinse FM with Kiss FM bleeding in. But it also comes from how it feels, though- the hazy closeness of the sound, the love and the camaraderie between the MCs, the playfulness of it all. The dicking around, putting on obscure 80s hits just for a laugh, remind me of hot evenings listening to Delight FM. Pirate radio always sounds best in summer, a soundtrack to barbeques and drinks in public parks and commons, with MC’s holed up in impossibly hot, tiny studios, voices soaked with the lazy joy of a hot day in the city, broadcasting through the smog. And roll deep have created an album which sounds exactly like summer. We listened to it on the coach to glastonbury, as west london gradually melted into fields, and it was perfect.

The first time I heard this album, it just breezed through me, delightful but weightless. Yr just transfixed by the gloss. But more and more listens in, and things start to tug and pull at yr soul. Things start to stick. Like the first track, ‘flying away’ sounds just a little awkward and strained. But then the final vocal refrain comes in and things fall into place; ‘I’ve been working so hard, I’ve been working so hard’. The restless knottiness of the grimette tunes, ‘show you’, and ‘be careful’, full of dizzying interjections by splinters of female vocals, is utterly hardcore but so light and quick that shimmers of prettiness are kicked up from the thorns. And the lyrics! ‘Remember the day’ gently sculpts a lump in a throat, as wiley builds and builds to the line, ‘I just want to live where no one will find me’. Breeze has got pains in his left tit, he’s on heart ache avenue, should have left it. Wiley informs a policeman on a stop and search that he uses the baseball bat in his car to play baseball...or rounders. Sad but funny, roll deep come across like the greatest friends together, and some of the greatest friends you could ever have.

It’s the confidence that permeates all the seconds of this record that pulls me in the most, though. This is roll deep’s victory record, a celebration of being top boys in the game. But it’s not an arrogant record. Rather, their confidence comes across in sheeny-shiny twists and turns of the productions, fuelled by and trusting in raw intuition, throwing away all the rules, even the ones about never sampling Buddha Lounge CDs (as the almighty ‘shake a leg’ does). And of course the confidence comes through from the MCs, from their relaxed and open-hearted delight. It’s the little things- the way at the start of ‘people don’t know’, someone absent-mindedly sings the melody, ‘oh-uh-uh-oh’, and wiley jumps in to clarify: ‘eski-boy, confident with the flow’. The way Scratchy steals a little bit of Flow-dan’s flow in ‘when I’m ere’, doing that whisper/gasp-effect that the Big Mic Man does: ‘keep on guard when I’m ere’. The way they refer to themselves and each other by their first names, rather than aliases. The in jokes and made-up words. This is a party at the end of a long journey to the top, and the start of a whole new one.

But mainly it’s the sheer urgency of the MCs which enthrals. Everyone sounds unbeatable, like they NEED this. Everyone’s a hero on this record, but breeze, brazen and jet le in particular light things up to day-glo whenever they’re on the mic, attacking their lines with this crisp finesse and delicacy, never phased by either the occasional self-consciously MOR stylings beneath them, nor the wild twirls of gutter accordian that frequently break through. Jet le’s the patient tutor, bearing his soul in infinite articulate ways. Brazen is the voice of sad and vengeful minds, screaming into his pillow, but sounding so hopeful and vital with it. And there’s a case for Breeze being the greatest of all grime MCs, bar the incomparable Riko. I find myself almost having to catch my breath sometimes, he sounds so captivating, so deadly and focussed, like he’s going at twice the speed of all the other MCs, even though he’s actually at their tempo: it just feels like a torrent.

It’s not perfect, this album. The skit is as bad as skits always are, and ‘good girl’ is too heavy on the kanye-isms, but the peaks are as giddily high as anything out there- shake a leg, when I’m ere, let it out, remember the days, and the final gang-call of the poltergeist relay. And what I love about this album is that, in the context of all this breezy pop, the heavier ‘grime’ tunes start to sound like pop songs too: when I’m ere sounds like a future No. 1 hit when heard in its place amongst the other tracks, with its catchiness and conciseness suddenly foregrounded. So, that should give us hope, I guess.

For all that this record has been dismissed, or even praised, as a harmless, light-weight, bit of summer fun, I think there’s much more to it that that. It’s a record by some of the few musical geniuses we have in pop working either at, or very near, the top of what they are capable of. It’s a gorgeous kaleidoscope of a record, which breaks your heart and then suggests that we put on our classics and have a little dance. It’s a wonderful record to live with.

2005-06-21T19:58:00.000Z

ok, off to glastonbury tomorrow, so no time for posts. lots when i get back, though. dying to write about the roll deep lp...

2005-06-14T15:40:00.000Z

some words on superpitcher: Today.

i decided to do a kind of review, just for fun.

it's been difficult to write this, cuz i love superpitcher's music so much that i struggle to put it into words. that said, Superpitcher's music is good in a way which means that it teeters on the edge of being not very good at all. it's a risky game to play, but when it all goes right, he's sublime. Irre, Mushroom, Fieber and Heroin, as well as his remixes of MFA and Dntel, are some of the greatest dance tracks i've ever heard- fragile and huge at the same time. 'Epic and intimate', as Gabba Pod once described him: macro-soul from micro-house. Then there's the mythology that surrounds him: the sharp-dressed, impossibly romantic, sensitive soul, searching for his missing half, crafting Smiths-ian techno as love letters. how can you not have a little bit of a crush on him? 'sad boys for life' is the motto, kind of. now, you could be harsh here and lament the fact that we've come from UR's 'revolution for change' to celebrations of melancholy that stray worryingly close to the bedsit, in just over a decade. But really, that'd be unfair. When they're at their best- and superpitcher is frequently their best- Kompakt are doing something so wonderful, so necessary, and so obvious it's a wonder that it all seems so revolutionary: making super-personal, open-hearted techno, aching and glowing with emotion: often love. and a lot of longing too.

But there's a problem with superpitcher's dreamy shoe/star-gazing music in that sometimes dreamy misty-cism is all he gives. amniotic washes and fogs of sound float about, beats click away, lonely and warm, and it's very pretty but very empty, and very unsatisfying. it's like going straight to the post-coital cigarette, skipping the sex: there's a nothingness at the centre of it, and so the whole experience dissolves, loses meaning. His album, and big tracks like 'happiness' suffered from this, which may be- sadly- the cost of making techno as delicate and intimate as he does.

'Today' is already a legendary superpitcher release, slotting into the mythology nicely, even though this mix cd only contains one of his tracks ('Happiness', remixed by current techno top-boy Lawrence). But the feel of this record is so close to Superpticher's own productions, the tracks presented in accord with his instantly recognisable and personal vision, that it's not merely a collection of tracks either: this is superpitcher's mix. Alernating between opiate haze, and shuddery, pleasingly ruff around the edges, techno, the mix is rarely pretty, or at least, not in an obvious, regular way. Rather, it's a smoky, darkly-glam, slow red-wine seduction of a record: techno being sexy, but in a very old Europe way- noir, faded elegance, femme fatales. And so on. It's often deliciously acidic and nasty (as on the remix on micheal mayer's 'lovefood', remixed by closer musik's Matias Aguayo: 'give me love, so i can kill', the lady hisses, sounding both forlorn and deadly) . Some of the best moments, though, are where it kicks in to expansive, dancefloor techno (as on the oliver hacke, dj koze and wignomy brothers tracks), perhaps too physical and steely to be microhouse, but cut through with a tense, crystalline beauty.

i've been listening to quite a bit of early (88-89) house recently, and throughout 'Today' there's a similar feel, with synth lines loping out and then spooling away further into the background, always retaining a shimmery, gentle distance. This early house sound is surprisingly close to the minimal Kompakt aesthetic: 4/4 feminised and cut down to human scale, but still a wide-screen sound, a mirror-ball casting out long arcs of melody as it spins. But despite the delicate glimmers and glitters of 'Today', for the most part it's a hard record to love: it's a little too restrained, too introspective, too sadly lovesick to love. but that all changes in the final two tracks (Max Mohr's gleeful, cliche-embracing 'old song', and sebastian tellier's 'la ritournelle'), where Superpitcher lets go of the tension he's spent an hour building, and ends the mix in a flourish of loose joy that sounds gorgeous and baroque, given all that gone before it. With the sebastian tellier track in particular, i never want the elaborate dew of strings and piano to end: the sun's finally come up, there's the feeling that superpitcher's found what he's been looking for, and you have to, and it's all been worth it.

2005-06-13T08:41:00.000Z

Davina is a true professional - talentless, charmless and can barely even read the fucking autocue.

-Little Dog's Day journeys in to the heart of darkness.

-------------------------

somedisco loves both The Leopard AND Darkness At Noon. two of my all time favourites as well.

2005-06-07T12:32:00.000Z

it's hilarious, and scary, just how easily and nonchalently Prancehall (formerly MPC) can churn out piss-takes of hyper-theorised grime discourse:

"Ahh yes, the ritual slewing of the 'wasteman'. Perhaps the most vivid imagery portrayed in the video. It does indeed (symbolically) prefigure the "abandonment of Genius Kru's matey garage heritage" as you so rightly state. The offering, by the 'wasteman', of the Newkie Brown is a heterodoxical way of justifying the need to slew the waste man, maybe?

But is this slewing justified?

As Nietzsche said: "punishment hardens and renders people more insensible; it concentrates; it increases the feeling of estrangement; it strengthens the power of resistance. "

Could the slewing of the waste man indeed be as destructive as the reverse? Will the 'wastemen' eventually rise to conquer the "darker iconicity of aggieness, nash-banging and steel pipes." Are we to see a cyclical alternation of opposites, an attunement at variance with itself, an eternal recurrence of ascent and descent? Hold tight shizzle."

2005-06-07T09:06:00.000Z

Before i get started properly, i should say that Rinse is the only pirate station you need now. It's like Deja used to be, now that jammer, mac 10, d double, ruff sqwad, dj mackie, and essentials are on there. i still miss Deja tho, if only for the way MCs would bark out the station's frequency: 'NINE! TWO! T'REE, GO!'

-------------------------------
THESE ARE SOME OF MY FAVOURITE GRIME DJS:

ok, so grime is an MCs game and all that, with djs often being reduced to the role of putting the needle back on the vinyl after MCs have wheeled back their own tune, but a good DJ is an essential, and underrated, part of any great crew. and essential and underated = nice thing to write about. also, with me coming to grime from more a dance background than a hiphop one, i've always tended to focus on DJs and instrumental mixes to quite a large extent, hearing some of these mixes as street versions of wonky techno perhaps (sidenote: i LOVE the term 'wonky techno'. it was invented by jerome hill, who used to work at Access All Areas, the record shop and one-stop rave shop in Camden. even now, there's a whole record bin devoted to Wonky techno, with descriptions like 'Pure Wonk!' scrawled on to the record labels. But i digress).
so, without further ado, here are my heroes of the 1s and 2s:

Dj Mac 10.
Back when Nasty were still a going concern, as opposed to their current disarray after the exodus of kano, demon and ghetto, they had perhaps the most distinctive style of any crew when it came to their pirate shows. it was heads-down, non-stop, switching and shifting restless intensity. and a large part of this style, this sound, was Mac 10's djing. he hardly ever did rewinds, and he never stopped tracks so that MCs could give out phone numbers or read text messages from listeners. Nasty weren't about that: they were about a constant hailstorm of noise, with MCs passing the mic quickly, but not as quickly as Mac 10 was introducing new records to the mix. On a few sets i've heard from him, he rarely plays any record for more than 15 seconds, constructing a kalaidoscopic hour-long kind of grime megamix that plays on grime's innate and internal fractures and unpredictability. He's now solo on Rinse FM, but without MCs, he seems to have settled into a more relaxed style. Hopefully, MCs will begin to trickle into his show, and he'll start to pile it on once again.

Dj Bossman
Bossman is Essential's DJ, with a similar style to Mac 10's, although unlike Mac 10 he's most interesting and exciting when he's solo, rather than in a crew situation. He tends to take up at least 45 minutes of each of his shows on Rinse FM (wednesday nights, i think) with an instrumental mix. Like Mac 10, Bossman favours the wild, thin, mercury-sound, of grime records interlocking and dropping away incredibly quickly. However, whereas Mac 10 always seemed to favour a wall of noise as the context and guiding principle for his mixes, Bossman likes to introduce more peaks and troughs into his sets, which, when he's at his best, are the most dizzying and breathless on the radio. he also gets bonus points for coming across as such a lovely person on his Rinse sets. and for regularly playing his increasingly insane remixes of davinche's 'eyes on you' (try to hear the one where everything's reversed, so that it's all turned to glistening sound-gloop that ties knots in itself and pushes a grin onto your face).

DJ Slimzee

A man so hardcore when it comes to pirate radio, it's now illegal for him to be above the fourth floor of any building in Bow, Slimzee is also probably the most technically skilled of all grime DJs. indeed, his recent dissatisfaction with grime seems to be the lack of room it can leave for a DJ's creativity and talent. Whereas Mac 10 and Bossman are masters are the fast cut and chop, Slimzee prefers the long, patient mix, eeking out the similarities and complementary aspects of couples of tracks. More so than any other grime DJ, slimzee turns his raw materials into something else entirely, building them up into his own unique creations (slmizee's mixes are also unique in another way: he only plays one-off dubs that have been made especially for him). you can tell that slimzee used to be a drum n bass and jungle DJ: his sets always roll, driving forward into the middle distance of slimzee's imagination, sound-waves rising, crashing, retreating, rising...
Slimzee's still on Rinse, sundays 3-5 pm on a semi-regular basis (where Riko is a frequent choice of host), but the best place to hear him is probably the CD he put out on Ministry of Sound a few years with God's Gift: it's called 'street beats' and it's baffingly underrated.

New Brand Flex.

New Brand Flex were (are?) always an oddity in the grime scene: a collective of DJs and remixers with some links to More fire and east connection, but largely standing on their own as the only grime crew without MC members. New Brand Flex's Deja shows were the most consistently entertaining 2 hours every week. They specialised in gleefully out of control gabba-garage, heavy on the boing-boing, filled with messy smears and snatches of records considered and then pulled out of the mix. There was a wide-eyed, ravey intensity about new brand flex mixes: here, perhaps more than anywhere else in grime, you could see the hardcore continuum in effect, as they often sounded like a futuristic ardkore set, fuelled by nasty, speedy, pills and amyl nitrate. their remixes have to be heard to be believed: fuck knows what the original tracks were, but the cartoon, mangled arcade-gabba that emerges is the punkest, snottiest, grime out there. And i'll always love them for spending about 10 minutes of one set explaining to their listeners why Tim Westwood was a dick, and then running a phone poll to see if we agreed with them (we did, overwhelmingly...). If anyone knows where i can hear new brand flex nowadays, please e-mail me.

Dj Scholar
Scholar isn't particularly interesting as a DJ per se, but as a selector, he's a top boy. Ok, so, as Ruff Sqwad's DJ, he does have a pretty peerless selection to choose from, but he's also a master at fixing a certain atmosphere in his mixes, so that you hear familiar tracks in a whole different way. i remember once he slotted Alias's dark-techno 'gladiator' between the dreamy swirls of ruff sqwad productions, and suddenly it sounded gorgeous, light... even, sexy. And that's his genius: to make every track sound like a ruff sqwad track, to make you hear melancholy and romance where before you might have only heard concrete-block brutalism, or skeletal clapping and boinging. so i guess it's no surprise that he's one of my favourites, as that's kind of what silverdollarcircle tries to do as well.

Special mentions go to:

-DJ logan sama, for the best record box ever.
-DJ plasticman, for doing the darker than dark take on grime better than anyone.
-DJ Mackie, the stalwart of great instrumental grime mixes.

2005-06-02T09:22:00.000Z

before the deluge...

there'll be lots and lots of new stuff on here in the next few days, but i thought before all that comes, i'll tie up some loose ends and resolve some controversy/conflict. so yes, silverdollarcircle has been atypically negative as of late (particularly towards the music press and the bands they hype), and some people have thought that i should have said what should be done, instead of simply stating what should not be done. Part of me wants to answer this in the same way that Bernard Williams answered R M Hare, when Hare said to him, 'You argue against all these theories, but what do you propose we put in their place?' To which Williams' reply was: 'In their place, nothing!'

But another part of me isn't satisfied with that. So i guess i want to appeal to how much writing and music there is of an incredibly high standard out there, and just focus on this. Of course, not everyone can be as good as ruff sqwad or Ada, or blissblog, or beyond the implode, but i think everyone should at least try. And i'm not sure that bands like the Killers or the Bravery are trying (and the NME certainly aren't trying). Also, when people do fail to reach the peaks of their fellow writers or musicians, i think we should note and point out that they've failed in this way (which doesn't mean a totally negative judgment of course: there can be a lot of good in music and writing that isn't the best out there). But i think it'd be a good thing if critical standards were re-set, and raised.

One way to do that is to impose a zero-tolerance critical stance on the mediocre, which i was tempted to do a while back. now, i'm not so sure. i stand by the claim that the killers and razorlight make the worst music in the world, but that's not because they are mediocre per se, but also because of all the baggage that comes with them: that they are presented as being hugely exciting, instead of mediocre; that they openly take their cues from non-mediocre bands; that there seems to be no impetus from them to strive for better; that they threaten to perpetuate this mid-70s musical atmosphere that seems to have existed since my mid-teens (i.e some people doing amazing stuff, but the mainstream being so lacking in ideas, or even good tunes, that it's scarcely believable).

So, in summmary: things are bad, but silverdollarcircle will henceforth only be about the things that are good, because there's still enough of those.

----------------------------

p.s. Roll Deep are playing glastonbury!!!

2005-05-18T10:03:00.000Z

It is not enough to:

-sing in your own accents.
-have listened to Gang of Four.
-wear suits and thin ties.
-dance in a jerky and unconventional manner.
-live in shoreditch, or anywhere else in east london.
-have some form of relationship with pete doherty.
-have a pretty good record collection.
-have done some powerful drugs.
-point out that really grime, rather than your scene, is where the interesting stuff is happening.
-have some quite catchy songs.
-write songs about every day life.
-have authentically working class members of your band.
-play unpredictable, and sometimes shambolic, gigs.
-put out some limited edition seven inches on small labels.
-have been to art school.
-play gigs in new cross.
-have your album produced by a post punk musician from the early 80s.
-be on a fashionable independent label.
-wear pin badges on your lapels.
-give entertaining and articulate interviews.
-appear unimpressed by the possibility of being a 'star'.
-have tempo changes and odd tunings in your songs.
-have interesting hair.
-play gigs in unusual places, such as tube trains.
-look elegant, even when fucked.
-have attractive partners.
-remind us of music that john peel used to play a lot.
-remind us of other music that we like.
-have been admired by john peel.
-be a fun listen to once in a while.
-be a breath of fresh air compared to coldplay and travis.

It has been said before, but we must boycott mediocrity, now and forever. Safe, 'quite nice', music and art, the result of aiming just low enough, is the worst in the world.

Razorlight, Maximo Park, the Killers, the Futureheads and the rest of your terminally conservative NME family: you create the worst music that has ever existed. Worse than nu-metal, prog-rock, easy listening, muzak, white reggae, dee dee ramone's hip hop album.

------------------
tomorrow i will talk about ruff sqwad and roll deep again, may be.

dirty canvas 2

2005-05-11T03:14:00.000Z

href="http://silverdollarcircle.buzznet.com/?id=1178511">

dirty canvas 2

dirty canvas

2005-05-11T02:59:00.000Z

2005-04-28T21:37:00.000Z

cameras whirr, cameras take.

2 tracks with samples of camera-noise. the sound of glamma.

danny weed- salt beef

dominik eulberg- track 2 from 'flora and fauna'.

me and jak the dripper were just talking today about how amazing dominik eulberg is, so, heh, this one's for you jack...

2005-04-21T19:42:00.000Z

the 1950s high school prom band have had their instruments taken away, and have been handed acid and cheap samplers. they do the best they can. they get pretty sexy. a new music:

shizuo- untitled.

------------
silverdollarcircle v.2 soon come, believe.

2005-04-10T11:02:00.000Z

one time, for the ladies.
my girlfriend's mum is an exercise teacher. she plays music for the ladies she teaches to exercise to. this is the tracklisting of a CD i made yesterday for her exercise classes- this is what th middle aged women of south london will be shocking out to from now on:

-destra garcia: bonnie and clyde
-cecile: high-five
-buzzcocks: ever fallen in love
-kevin lyttle: turn me on
-adonis: no way back (club mix)
-the knife: heartbeats (rex the dog mix)
-new order: blue monday
-ronnettes: baby i love you
-skatalites: garden of love
-talking heads: nothing but flowers
-joy division: love will tear us apart
-marz: fovever, never
-david byrne: the great intoxication
-jose gonzalez: heartbeats.

2005-04-09T09:38:00.000Z

keep jumping, and celebrate, till morning.

the sun is shining so:

destra garcia- bonnie and clyde.

big soca hit from last year or may be 2003 that is the ultimate pop song.

2005-03-25T16:38:00.000Z

if anyone tries to tell you that wiley isn't a top boy grime MC, show them this track:

target- 'earth warrior remix' pirate radio rip.

2005-03-08T18:50:00.000Z

sabbatical

this blog won't be updated on anything like a regular basis until mid may, cuz i'm going to be too busy till then [thesis, exams, blah].

i might post the occasional mp3, and may be finally get around to posting mp3s of some pirate sets, but there'll be no words.

so, until then, listen to yr ruff squad, stay safe, and i'll see you in the summer!

2005-03-04T09:54:00.001Z

my favourite bit of raindance, which now seems so, so long ago, but it's only really been two weeks, was at 7 in the morning, in the hardcore room, which in the course of the night had gradually upped and moved from sweet and sticky happy hardcore to harder, darker, more 'epic', hardstyle with may be a little bit of newstyle thrown in for some gabba-you-can-dance-to bits, but i'm no expert on all these various permutations. anyway, my favourite moment was just as we were about to leave and brave london's current artic climate, but we thought we'd eke out one last dance, and i glance up through all the green fog and there's this girl in front of me, in those flourescent yellow jackets that all the slammin vinyl kids wear, and she's jumping up and down in total glee, hair-bunches batting the side of her head, arms flailing by her side. she loves this music. everyone else, by this time, we're all staggering around or rooted to the same spot, etching out the same patterns in the air, trying to keep the night going, but it's still feels like waking up on christmas morning to her, and she doesn't look like she even has to try. she was a vision of what it should be like, every time and all the time.

blizzard

2005-03-02T02:55:00.000Z

...

2005-03-02T02:53:00.000Z

igloo

ice pole

2005-03-02T02:49:00.000Z

Posted by: .

2005-02-26T18:53:00.000Z

there's a really good mix of mathew jonson tracks here.

i can't see his album- if there's going to be an album- being any better.

-------------------
i can't decide which i like better; alter ego's 'rocker' or that other wobbly squeal of joy, rex the dog's 'frequency'.

----------------
someone should write something about how quite a bit of techno that's coming out now sounds very hard-rocky, like t raumschmiere, and alter ego, and jake fairley. there's this movement of techno artists going on like robot Stooges or something. big riffs for drunken dancing. do the protagonists have tattoos and handlebar moustaches? do they have a packet of marlboro in their rolled up shirt sleeves? i hope so. i wonder what the belleville three, sleek and stylish hipsters that they were, would reckon to all this. scenes end up in funny (and fun) places, don't they. stuff happens.

but i can't be bothered to write much about it.

------------------

2005-02-26T14:57:00.000Z

i think that the mfa's 'the difference it makes [superpitcher remix]' should be the sound that clouds make when they brush against each other.

2005-02-24T14:32:00.000Z

TOO COLD!
don't go out. stay in, read a book, drink tea, and listen to Vashti Bunyan instead:

vashti bunyan- diamond day.

so lovely.

2005-02-18T10:22:00.000Z

well, it's been a weird week hasn't it. what did you do? this is what i did...

i thought about Nick a lot. his death hit me hard, as it did a lot of people.

i bought 2 todd edwards cds. ohmygosh! is this the raviest, blissiest music ever? the sound of pleasure centres sparkling and tingling... [do human bodies have pleasure centres? i hope so. they should do.]

i finally got a file sharing programme to work on my computer. good lord, what a revelation limewire is. ok, it's basically shit in a lot of ways and seeing 'need more sources' constantly is starting to drive me crazy, but i've now got a villalobos loveparade set and all the ice rink vocals and i am feeling triumphant and happy.

i thought about my thesis and wrote my thesis and went through that stage that everyone goes through when the earth seems to slip away beneath yr ideas and you start to wonder actually, may be this is just rubbish, built on a foundation of nothing. but i'm through that now. just got to persevere innit.

i listened to the latest trapez compilation lots. sheeny-shiny, often delicate, kinda-feminised techno. love it, obviously.

i ate lots of cheese.

i saw 'sideways'. a terrific film. probably the best film i've seen for the past 2 years or so, at least. it's perfect. it's understated, and funny, and unpretentious, and true, and exciting, and nicely detailed, and beautifully shot. it makes great film making look really easy.

i heard dj eastwood do a set on Raw UK. it was excellent for many reasons but the most 2 important are:
-this track done by loads of west MCs- like flirta d and i think purple and bashy and lots more. the chorus is this gang-chant of,
WHERE DO WE COME FROM?- NORTH WEEZY!!
HOW DO WE MAKE MONEY?- REAL EASY!!
HOW DO WE GET GIRLS?- THAT'S SLEAZY!!

and it's over this choppy forward riddim-style sturm und stab. it's kind of the crunkiest that grime has ever got- especially the testosterone soaked chorus. and some of that pantomime drunken swagger is fun occasionally. grizzly. also, more to the point, calling the north west 'north weezy' is genius.

-and the other reason was unorthodox fam's 'no help, no handouts'. unorthodox fam are the home of No-lay, who was on the Run the Road cd, tearing apart her sisters in grime with vicious glee. this track is even better though. come-what-may strings do the whole film soundtrack thing of facing possible doom with a steely gaze and a lonely, fixed mind, that thing that grime does often and so well, and then some MC, don't know his name goes:
"we don't need no help or handouts,
put away yr chequebooks we can manage".
it's the way he spits out 'we can manage', like he's throwing it back in yr face. bitterness and pride and anger that strengthens you while it's really cutting you apart. who can't relate to that.

i read arthur koestler's 'darkness at noon'. wonderful book about soviet show trials.

i saw 'extreme celebrity detox' on channel 4. ok, this is a cultural milestone. not necessarily a good one, but a milestone all the same. never before have 'celebrities' [the people on here are really, uh, 'pushing the concept'] sunk so low. basically, it's a programme where d-list failures take incredibly powerful hallucinogens and, naturally, have trips where they think that the spirit world has come to take their souls. all on camera. i bet their parents are proud. apparently this is all in order to 'detox' them, but they don't look very shinyhappydetoxed. they just look like they're fucked on drugs. oh and there's a bit where they have to do 'intensive masturbation' as well. it's a milestone in that it's the final, incontrovertible truth that people will do ANYTHING to be on tv. these people are without taboos or dignity, and really, it makes for some fun tv. they're happy, we're happy. so why the feeling of guilt and mild self-loathing? ah fuck it.

i noticed that lots of recent grime tracks feature the lyrics about 'shanks'. something that should please joe, and closely affiliated soft-rock combo the fandango boys.

i bought a ticket for Raindance this saturday. it's a huge old skool ardkore rave with some jungle and acid house as well. '75% MC free' apparently! i can't wait. i wonder if i'll end up buying a glow stick. i never have before but it'd be churlish not to at raindance, perhaps...

and i did not do anything else.

ok, so i'll love you and leave you [people who say that should have their voting rights removed] with this track

wolfgang and reinhard voigt- 'vision 04'

it's what i listened to after i heard that Nick had died. i dunno why. i guess i'd never be so into kompakt without Nick. and also, it's a sad track, but also an inspiring one, that looks to new adventures and possibilities. and it's been the soundtrack to this past, strange, difficult week.

x

2005-02-08T20:13:00.000Z

i am terribly sad to hear that Nick Kilroy has died. i only met Nick once, and he was one of the nicest people i've ever had the pleasure of being around: i spent a wonderful afternoon with him walking around east london, chatting about music, london and art, and being amazed and uplifted by his enthuasiasm, energy and interest in the world. you could just tell as soon as you met him: he was a special and good person.

2005-02-08T16:32:00.000Z

best bit of the forward riddim/Pow video:
d double dancing like a robot that's swatting away invisible flies.

worst bit:
when napper holds up that human skull. that's just silly.

--------------------

i live next to a primary school, and when my mind drifts from my thesis i stare out of the window. when i did this today, it was break time at the school. i noticed a kid running around trying to be part of each little gang in the playground. each group totally cold-shouldered him. it was like he wasn't even there. so this kid, smaller than the rest, skinnier, kind of gawky looking, rushed off to a new group. but each time, the same treatment- the same studious you-do-not-count, you-are-nothing-to-us response from his fellow pupils. i thought this was the saddest thing ever. then i noticed that he got talking to someone! his face lit up- finally he was being acknowledged. the search was over for some one to while away the grey time of a lonely school break with. i felt happy for him. then i saw him start to beat his new friend, hitting him over the head, over and over. laughing all the time. once again, he was left alone. i didn't know whether to feel happy or sad.

a true story.

2005-02-07T09:33:00.000Z

hello there,
sorry for there not being much [or, anything] here recently. all that end of year round up stuff tired me out for a little bit. thanks to everyone who said they liked it- things like that make it all worthwhile innit. so,so,so...hope you've had a good couple of weeks. i have. i saw roll deep, but we'll come to that later. also, i got dogzilla to say 'big up da Kid Serious' on his show on Rinse. that was HUGELY exciting. honestly, although it shouldn't be so much fun, it really is. i might text in a roll deep set and get wiley to say 'big up dissensus crew'. i dunno. it's quite an empty life, writing a thesis, you know.

i got the ruff sqwad mixtape, 'guns n roses' the other day from here. and you should all get it too- no excuses. it's...amazing in places, but not really one of the greatest records of all time as i predicted in my end-of-year thingy. they go a bit hip hop in the middle of it and that's not really a good move. i mean, i like hip hop and all, but stick to what yr good at, innit.

[actually, just as a sidenote i think that's the hardest thing in the world- being able to see yrself objectively and work out what yr good at then, uh, 'play to strengths'. it really is very difficult not to deceive oneself, isn't it. from ideas to hairstyles to careers to dance moves to cookery to christmas presents to jokes to knowing when to let an argument go to knowing when not to have A Little Bit More...working out how you'd assess yr situation from the position of a third party, an onlooker, with no bias or vested interest or prejudice, is crazily difficult.]

anyway, digression over, what were we talking about. ruff sqwad, yes. lovely ruff sqwad. them and roll deep are the only musical heroes i have left really, apart from david byrne, obviously. you know when yr young and just about everyone whose music you like is a hero of yours, and then, for whatever reason, their hero-status starts to fade away as you get older. and now i'm left with just a trinity of heroes- 2 grimey, the other someone i loved since i was 7 years old and, in his first 4 albums, said just about everything that needs to be said in pop songs. i don't quite know what i mean by 'hero' but i know that ruff sqwad definitely are heroes of mine. i guess it's all about seeing they're music as perfect, as a completely right version of what music should, and needs, to sound like. the child in me wants to find perfection in the stuff i hear, but the adult knows that, yes, 'nobody's perfect'*. that's why you lose yr heroes as you get older, i guess. but there's still that yearning to seek out something that can be classed as perfect and ideal.

anyway, i really am rambling here. so: ruff sqwad-they're on the radio tonight, 8-10pm 90.00fm, you should lock in.

*that's the name of a really good mix by andrea parker btw. it's only £4
--------------------

MP3::::::::::
and here's a track by ruff sqwad off guns n roses mixtape. it's called, magnificently,
'shake yr bum'.
i want my girlfriend's mum to stick it on in her aerobics class for the middle aged women of SW4, but i don't think that's going to happen, wonderful though it would be to know that, just once, in a church hall in clapham, distinguished members of the community were doing their star-jumps to Dirty Danger imploring them to 'shake yr bum-bum'. In this particular fantasy of mine, passing 'youths', hearing the music playing inside and recognising it as a track from their heroes, ruff sqwad, venture gingerly into the church hall to see what's going on. after a brief moment of brain-melting confusion when they see just how cool their mothers, teachers, local shop owners etc are in their sparetime, they get somehow caught up in the aerobics class and join in with the toning exercises. smiles all round, hugs, then fade to black.
that's the fantasy anyway. if anyone's listening, that should be the promo-video.

the real reason why i posted this track, though, is not to tell you about that little bit of imagination, fun though it was, but because a] it's excellent
and b] the guitar sample bit in it reminds me of something i might i have heard on some dj rupture mix, can't remember which one [ i might have made it up], and i think that dj rupture is excellent too.

-----------------
ANOTHER MP3:::::::
another person who is excellent is dave stelfox, who does a blog here and makes me want to go out and buy lots of dancehall stuff like tanya stephens.
and this track here
give it to me- Mad Mike
reminds me of him, for some reason. not sure why- i think it's the kind of thing he might like, but i really don't know. anyway, gorgeous, lushy detroit house before mad mike went all hard and techno and more boshy i guess. it's a good track to wake up to. i like the tinkly glockenspiel melody that comes shimmering in, and the way the big 808 Clap keeps things just hard enough to move along nicely. and that main synth line is a big start-of-friday-night smile set to music [or a seven-in-the-morning sun-coming-up smile, if yr more hardcore than me]. this record was released on Happy Records. i love that. it's on a dj rolando mix called 'sweat vol 1' which i picked up in rough trade for £2.
talking of which, i got a inperspective 12" from rough trade for a quid! you know, inperspective that neo-jungle label that simon reynolds likes. so i thought i'd check it out cuz it's pretty much bound to be good if he likes it, and indeed it is. highly recommended- it's by Equinox [urgh!] and called 'Filtration' [urgh! urgh!]. but urghs aside, it really is lovely. fluid and delicate and drippy like melting snowflakes.
so, rough trade covent garden is the place to be at the moment. i got a reinhard voigt 12 there for a a couple of quid the other day too.

ok, this post has gone for way too long. not really sure how cuz i haven't said anything much really. but now i've no time for the roll deep live post, so that's for another time. may be this evening, may be tomorrow. have a lovely day and remember to have a lovely lunch. lunch is so important.

2005-01-21T17:37:00.000Z

for those who missed it first time around, i've re-uploaded:

d double and foots track

[these you send it files expire after 25 downloads- i sort out a proper way to post mp3s, that won't expire, soon]

2005-01-21T13:29:00.000Z

this blog's end-of-year roundup thing has gone on for far too long, but we're nearing the end, don't worry:
the final chapter- best things that were not grime in 2004

[no particular order except for the first two, which were the best things i heard in 2004];

kanye west- college dropout.
destra garcia- bonnie and clyde [gorgeous soca hit]
usher-yeah
bjork-medulla
junior boys- last exit
michael mayer- touch
michael mayer- speaker
v/a- kompakt total 5 [esp. the t raumschmiere and justus kohncke tracks]
alter ego- rocker
alter ego- rocker [plasticman remix]
alter ego- transphormer
animal collective- sung tongs
sunburned hand of the man- s/t
superpitcher- happiness remixes
mfa- the difference it makes [superpitcher remix]
dave stelfox- real dancehall rock bassnationmix [esp. the alicia keys one]
streets- blinded by the light
skinnyman- fuck the hook
dripdropdrap and mpc dj set at university college london
diplo and mia- piracy funds terrorism
mia- galang
the knife- heart beats [rex the dog mix]
diplo- florida
diplo- diplo rhythm
ada- blondie
ada- bum bum
dj/rupture post election resonance fm mix
dj/rupture- special gunpowder
filastine- judas goat
tokyo adventures- hunters' hand book
that fucking tank- s/t
fennesz- venice
andrea parker- nobody's perfect [touchin bass] mix
natasha bedingfield- these words [i know, i know...sorry but i just love it]
eric prydz- call on me
v/a- ammunition [planet mu comp]
ivan smagghe- suck my deck
spektrum- kinda new [tiefschwarz mix]
booka shade- memento
party mix courtesy simon reynolds
favela funk mix courtesy simon reynolds
todd burns- die neue riddim schaffel mix
todd burns- microhouse mix
philip sherburne- schaffel is stronger than pride mix
philip sherburne- the thaw mix
philip sherburne- creepshow mix
v/a soca gold 2004
v/a soca bible
timmy- bumper catcha fire
dawg e slaughter- trample
sigur ros- ba ba ti ki di do
three of a kind- babycakes
arve henriksen- Chiaroscuro
destiny's child- lose my breathe
anticon- 1999-2004 sampler [esp. pedestrian track]
j2k- heat in the srreets 2
lucien n luciano- blind behaviour
matthew dear- dog days
matthew dear- dog days [pantytec remix]
matthew dear primer mix cd courtesy jak drip drop drap
matthew dear- leave luck to heaven
perlon- superlongevity 3 [esp. 'ping pong voodoo' by narcotic syntax, and 'mr big star' by markus nikolai and nina
nina sky- move ya body
v/a kill bill 2 soundtrack
lamb chop- aw c'mon/ no you c'mon
akufen- fabric mix
jimmy edgar- bounce make model
ratatat- germany to germany
laura veirs- the carbon glacier
wasteland- vulture culture mix
nivea and lil jon- ok
rachel stevens- some girls
franz ferdinand- take me out
franz ferdinand- s/t
david byrne- grown backwards

2005-01-21T10:03:00.000Z

another grime mp3:

wiley/skepta; pulse eskimo aka gunshot riddim

'gunshot riddim' is often wrongly thought to be a wiley original, but gradually stories have started to leak out about it not being wiley's own work- often these rumours said it was actually a jammer track, that wiley had stolen and released under his own name.

however, logan sama cleared up the confusion at rwdmag the other week- apparently, it's a skepta remix of 'eskimo' that got mistakenly labelled as a wiley original.
anyway, it's fantastic, and it's radically different to eskimo. a corrupted take on gabba-garage, it's all pitch shifted kick drums tripping over themselves, and a shard of digital-noise storm over the top. it's radical in the way it sounds so ungainly, with a jerky, splenetic rhythm, like skepta rejected even typical hardcore techno-blare as being too smooth and safe. 'gunshot riddim' sounds as messy and panicky as track with that name should. the track's stammering, stuttering beat also means that, despite being built from uniformly ultra-brutalist sounds and textures, it never lapses into the repellent macho rigidity of much extreme electronic music. this is a more organic take on extremism, on a human, even personal, scale. the sound of people losing and terrifying themselves, rather than machines terrorising people.

and yet, despite its convolutions and severity, it's still got a groove- you still want to dance to it. in fact, i'd say that it's one of the most obviously danceable grime tracks that have been released. but it calls for, it demands, that you bring some new moves to the floor...

--------------------------
a sad farewell to one of my favoutite blogs which no longer exists anymore: hackneyed central.

and a welcome return to a blog that took a break: ukiyo-e.

2005-01-20T17:06:00.000Z

silverdollarcircle begins its journey into mp3 posting in ultra lo fi stylee:

d double and footsie rare track

not sure what it's called. i've heard it referred to as 'drawing gash' on messageboards but that's a horrible name innit.

anyway- traded lyrics + naive-pop melody...lovely.
would write more but i'm exhausted after that bloody grime round up thing...

anyhow,
enjoy.

and e-mail me if it doesn't work. i'm guessing it won't, cuz i'm rubbish at computers.

2005-01-19T18:46:00.000Z

some more grime

2005-01-17T21:27:00.000Z

GRIME: BEST OF THE REST 2004.

ok, here's the rest of the end of year round up of grime stuff. hope you like it. it's, um,. very...long. i quite doing these small little snippets of reviews you know. makes me feel a bit like that Wire writer, byron coley. not that i'm nearly as good as him of course. he's my favourite journalist.
anyway, enough chitchat...

-------------
DIRTY DANGER-'It's dirty'.

don't know if this was released in 2004 or not. probably not, actually. but i have to mention it quickly just cuz it's super amazing. dirty danger is the ruff squad MC who sounds like dizzee, and here he drops his best ever lyric: 'and it's dir-TY, don't be stupid there's no cupid, yeah i'm dir-TY/that girl knows my fame and she's chatting my name cuz she knows i'm dir-TY'. all over this soupy and gloopy cartoon synth line. the days i have spent with this tune in my head...

RUFF SQUAD- MOVE.
Really may be this should have made the 'best of 2004' list, but it's too late now innit. anyway, this was where tinchy got all relaxed and friendly, coaxing us to 'make a racket, don't be scared to let it out'. with the collapsing building blocks of strings and guitar in the background, it makes having a good time sound heroic and a deadly serious affair. that's beautiful.

RUFF SQUAD-'GET UP'

madly, inexplicably, i'd totally forgotten about this track until about a week ago when i heard it on an old ruff sqwad tape. they don't seem to play it much in their sets anymore, which is crazy cuz it's right up there. it's possibly the most dedicated moment of blissed out melodicism that grime has ever produced, and has the ruff sqwad MCs almost whispering the chorus. a very gentle, translucent sound.

RUFF SQUAD- ALRIGHT.
Another moment of perfection from ruff sqwad. this was kind of the ruff sqwad sound growing up a little bit, getting a little deeper, putting on some more layers. but this being ruff sqwad, growing up doesn't mean getting boring and leaden: it means getting all stately and grand. ths track will break yr heart every single time, especially when tinchy goes: "you said you were alright, but i knew you weren't ok, behind the sarcasm and the front may be you'll slip away". he sounds like he's choking back tears and i feel the same when i hear it.

INFRARED SOUND- DELIGHT FM TAPE
who are they? where are they from? infrared sound remain a mystery to me, which makes them even more exciting. i've only heard one set from them- this tape- which remains one of the greatest pieces of sustained grime MCing i've ever heard; a torrent of ideas and shattered phrases spat out quickly and with total commitment. the way they lock with the riddims, like when they MC in tune to 'misty cold', still sends shivers...

SIDEWINDER TAPE W/ DEMON, GHETTO, CRAZY TITCH, DOOGZ, LETHAL B ETC.

this is the tape that raw blaze used to play when there were no djs or crews in the studio. everyone shouts and screams! the music cuts out for a reload like every 10 seconds! the air-horn blare from the audience is constant and both fantastically irritating and exhilirating! an all-time noise classic.

EASTWOOD AND ODDZ- 'THE COALITION'.
good gosh this is intense. it's like a grossly, abdusrdly inflated version of that hollow, squarewave grime sound, exploding in a shower of blurts, boings and whistles. i never want this tune to end when it's on, even though it makes me kind of dizzy.

ALIAS-"WARRIOR'.
alias is one of the few producers doing that breakier, darkcore take on grimey garage that i really like. this is punishing and brilliant in its stripped down simplicity: killer bass line fucking up yr insides over a rigid, martial beat. like a lot of alias stuff, it's a cold, almost techno sound that's so straight to the point it's always fascinating. kind of a modern day 'energy flash' may be.

ALIAS- 'GLADIATOR 2'
really this pretty difficult to tell apart from the first gladiator, but, you know, that first one was wonderful and so is this. the bass line sounds like it's glowing, wrapped in sickly, feverish neon. an underrated track from a hugely underrated producer- no one does the meaner, shadowy side of grime better than alias. Like the song says: "DON'T STOP!"

ALIAS- GUTTER REMIX.
a remix of the mighty j sweet's gabba-grime masterpiece. this is actually probably slightly less good than the original, just cuz messing with perfection is always going to be a bit of risky business, but it's still joyously hardcore.

ALIAS FEAT. KEISHA AND CRAZY TITCH- 'GULLY'.
i mean, really, how? what chain of events led to crazy titch and alias teaming up with the sugababes for an underground white label hit?! love the idea of it, of course, but may be the reality is a little disappointing. still, an amazing idea.

CRAZY TITCH-"JUST AN ARSEHOLE"
yeah it's crazy t over dizzee's 'jus a rascal', saying lots of rudeness about dizzee rascal. like poplife blog, i find crazy just too shouty and unsubtle most of the time. there's no finesse there. which is bad as regards listening to a whole set of him, but for furiously playgroundish taunts it's quite fun, with titch keeping it menacing and silly at the same time, which always goes down well with me.

ESSENTIALS FEAT. KATIE-'MR DJ'.
I love the mesh of the beat and the bass on this track, the way it gets amped up and up until it's this huge robotic groove stomping over everything. but the soaring vocals from katie cut through it and then it gets intense in a whole different way. this is totally pop and yet still a defiant, mentalist sound. it's machine-funk that makes me want to dance in a new way like i've never seen or done before.

ESSENTIALS- JENNY.
this is probably essentials' biggest tune to date, and although it is good, i'm not sure whether it's even close to the best essentials can produce. the davinche beat sounds oddly stodgy and lumpy here, but the quick, conversational exchanges between the essentials MCs make it quite special still. for the first time since early Roll Deep, here's a grime crew that sounds like a BAND, coming together to share hooks and fire ideas off each other. that gives essentials a poised, spontaneous energy that sets them apart.

ESSENTIALS- CAN'T BRING TO ESSENTIALS.
...but the tight,collective force of essentials is probably best on this track, which was inescapable for much of the year. if there's one grime lyric that'll define 2004 for me, it'll be the chorus to this track: "can't bring to essentials, you can't bring to essentials NO!'. wicked. and davinche went crazy mad here, piling on the clipped string and brass stabs to a gleaming, sharp gale of sound, like broken glass flying out of yr speakers.

ESSENTIALS FEAT. JUST ABOUT EVERY MC IN THE WORLD- 'HEAD QUARTERS'.

there's so many MCs on this track that i have trouble remembering any of them, cuz i'm stupid like that. but i think shizzle's on there. and kano definitely is. anyway, i'm sure i wouldn't like this track half as much if it didn't have the person with the drill sergeant voice demanding 'are you gonna hold it down?' of each MC. the idea of a ardkore military is brilliant and funny. i don't think anyone else really shines that much here, but whenever yr attention starts to wander there's always that cool fuck the drill sergeant to make you smile every 30 seconds or so.

ESSENTIALS-'SHUT DOWN SHOP'

davinche got quite fragile with this one. it's almost like a prototype of his more full on, smashing and grabbing barrages of strings. but like i always say, i like brittle, slightly uncertain sounding music, and so i love this.

BOSSMAN-'BONGO EYES'.
like the name suggest, this is essentials' dj bossman mixing davinche's 'eyes on u' with youngsta's seminal 'bongo'. a good, sensible idea, you might think, and so it is, but the results are even greater than the sum of the parts. i don't know how, but some magic has happened somewhere along the way, and the insertion of a few boings to eyes on u gives it this irresistable, confident swagger that sounds so RIGHT that it's like it's always existed and it's only just now been discovered. a lot of grime is like this- the simple elements are constructed in a very elegant way, that's beautiful in its balance and harmoniousness.

DAVINCHE FEAT. KANO- 'Ps AND Qs'
first time i heard this i was like, yeah it's alright. then a few more times and: 'actually, it's pretty boring'. then a few more times and i saw the light. now i just can't get it out of my head after hearing it. the vocals and riddim fit so tightly it's a wonder to behold. again, it's all in the elegant proportions and structure. and kano sounds so sharp and cut throat, he makes yr jaw drop. the cheeky asides are put aside for once, and kano lays it out simply: no one sounds as smooth and casual in such a deadly serious way as he does.sure he can be a little too smooth sometimes, but when he's on it, i still find myself thinking that he must be one of the coolest people who ever lived.

DAVINCHE + SHYSTIE-'MAKE IT EASY REMIX'.
really, the production of shystie's album wasn't very good was it. ruined the album really. so it's good that she's seen sense, or the record label's finally let her to what she wants to do, whatever, and released remixes with proper grime masters on the buttons. davinche gives this track just the jacking, prickly, unstable groove that this song needed to wake up and rush towards you with it's head full of ideas. shystie's frequently a brilliant MC- intelligent and conscious while being funny and never preachy, and she has an urgency and natural aggression that makes you listen. she's real. and when she's with the right producer, her tracks shine fierce and bright.

SHYSTIE-'ONE WISH [TERROR DANJAH REMIX].
and here's another shystie remix that transforms the original into a grime masterpiece. terror danjah goes all soft-core ravey blissy on this one, sounding a bit like aphex did when he was still interested in beautiful and hazy ways to make people dance. and what a wicked parting shot Bruza has towards the end: 'more money, more problems: but forget the problems, GIMME THE MONEY!'. ah i love that cocky cockney from the east.

TERROR DANJAH + SHOLA AMA- 'LOVE IS HERE TO STAY'.best grimella/grimette moment of 2004 was between this and 'so contagious' and after much umming and ahhing so contagious got it, but its little sister, 'love is here to stay', is still pop genius. terror danjah's beat is all punchlines and kicklines of space age sounds zapping and crunching, cutting out suddenly in little heart stopiping moments. shola ama matches the whistle and arc of the synths and she sounds so free, soaring up and up. sweet as nut.

TERROR DANJAH-PINA COLADA
Here terror danjah left his usual dark and metallic sonic crawls behind and kicked back a little with some ruffed up and grimey tropical whimsy. it sounds like someone whistling to themselves on the way to the beach one sunny morning. it's a fun and funny delight. it might end up as a minor footnote in the career of terror danjah, but it always nice to be surprised by some lightness come sparkling through the merk.

SHYSTIE- WOMEN'S WORLD [P-JAM REMIX]
The greatest of all the shystie remixes of 2004, p-jam's version is gratuitously hyperactive, throwing ideas at you so fast that you have no idea what's going on. after listening to it countless times, i'm still not sure i really know what happens in this song. just that a lot happens. and quickly. and it excites me.

P-JAM + D DOUBLE- ANGER MANAGEMENT.

i don't get why people are saying that d double's glory days might be over when he's just done a track as good as this. here he boils down his flow to thick, smudgy verbal jabs, letting the p-jam bass fill in the gaps, which curls and trips over itself, as those tendrils of sublow leak out and dart back. like villalobos, p-jam can make his bass sound totally organic and totally mechanical at the same time.

D DOUBLE- SIGNAL.
a little trim/bruza style cheeky self-awareness came in with this, d double's latest track. he congratulates himself for his ooo ooo and mui mui, complementing the top boy he sees in the mirror; 'that's very original, never heard that from another individual'. when you hear music this characterful and personalised, it warms you a little bit.

THE STREETS- GET OUT OF MY HOUSE REMIX.
christ, did mike skinner make this beat then? it's super-grimey! he can turn his hand to anything, can't he, that lad. anyway, that surprisingly great beat aside, the best thing about this track is d double who sounds so funny and bratty he's adorable, perfectly mimicing the selfish pleas of a teenage boy who wants sex before he mum comes back and bollocks him. he sounds dainty and light here, showing again that's he not just about thugged out lisps and retches, fun as they are.

KANO- MIC CHECK.
just when i was starting to think that may be kano wasn't all that anymore, i heard this and realised why i loved his voice in the first place. yeah like poplife says, his flow might be just a little too sheeny-shiny refined here to really jolt yr ears into attention, but that doesn't matter so much when he sounds as genuinely angry as he does at some points here, as his deadpan calm cracks and he spits out words of disdain for all the shit MCs.

KANO + SADIE: 'SO SURE'.
it's a pleasant breeze of a song, bathed in a sweet lazy morning aferglow feel, but it doesn't put a flutter in my heart like, say, 'so contagious' or 'love is here to stay' do. the target remix of this track does, however, but that's a 2005 thing, just.

KANO AND KATIE + DAVINCHE- LEAVE ME ALONE.
...like 'so sure', this is a bit take it or leave it for me. some magic is missing. but any and every decent feminised take on grime is sorely needed at the moment.

DIZZEE RASCAL- 'SHOWTIME'.
i can't be bothered to repeat everything else i've said about it elsewhere here in this post, so i'll just say: it's good, and when you're listening to it, you KNOW that the ingredients are all there to make it a superb, classic record. it's got everything you'd want. and yet...and yet it ISN'T a superb record, and i just don't know why. i know that i SHOULD be amazed and awed by the brilliance on display, and yet i'm not. i'm even, and i never thought i'd say this about dizzee's take on grime, a little indifferent.

DIZZEE RASCAL-TRAPPED.
this, on the other hand, is quite special. it's the b-side to dream, and is a knotty, salty track, twisting jungle snares and ardkore blares into a rickety, alien shape that's punk as fuck.

LOW DEEP-'STR8 FLUSH'.
this came out right at the end of 2004, and was soon huge- nasty crew play it loads, as do most other crews. it's lovely, tinkling and stuttering through chopped smooth and sexy r n b samples. ok, grime producers have been doing this sort of thing for ages now, but these understated, delicate sound-poems will always have a place in my heart.

DJ MONDIE- 'STRAIGHT 2'
No relation to 'str8 flush' [ i think], this is a return to the early-youngsta sound of disorted boings and claps. and once in a while, there's nothing wrong with that.

JAMMER-'BACKWARDS RIDDIM'.
a remix of forward riddim which makes the string stab fairground run in reverse. i've heard a few MCs on this riddim, but eskobar stands out as particularly good. somehow, jammer's simple trick of reversing the melody makes it sound a little darkcore rave-droney. kinda a mentasm noise, may be. anyway, obviously that's a good thing.

JAMMER- FEEDBACK.
Jammer merks sunn-o and all those people, with a meditation on bass feedback and thrum. sludgy, but in a really pure, almost blissy way, it's right out there with wonder's 'what', and may be even beyond, at that end of the grime spectrum that takes delight in making no sense and confusing everyone. in theory that's great, and in practice it's lots of fun too.

JAMMER AND DAVINCHE AND KIDMAN- 'K-DOT'.
for me, this was where the dulled and drugged brass stab sound, introduced by jammer's 'destruction' and taken up so enthusiastically by davinche, finally reached the end of the line and ran out of interesting things to do or say. still, a wicked performance by essentials' MC kidman. i like it when grime MCs get all emphatic about their names, drilling it into yr head.

JAMMER-BLAZIN
This sounds VERY similar to wiley's 'fire hydrant' and indeed jammer's accused wiley of biting his sound. whatever, it's probably actually better than fire hydrant-more epic, more lush, more complete.

SLEW DEM- UNKNOWN TRACK
dunno the name of it, but i'm talking about that one where the chorus goes, 'merkin', merkin', that's what we're into/ merk in threes we merk in twos'.
that's great!

AGENT X- GRIME CLAPS.
this never seemed to get quite as big as it deserved to. i love it. it's got a nice, thick rolling feel to the bass like some of wiley's stuff has, that playstation-dub feel. the world needs more of that.

SPYDER B + SHIZZLE AND FLIRTA D AND LOADS MORE- 'REALLION'.
there's a bit of a fashion for grime MCs to end things in 'illion' at the moment. it's the new 'izzle'. here, each line from each MC does it, so you get this crazed, forward momentum that almost out-does the forward riddim.

BIG E.D + BRUZA + DEMON- 'THE RUSH'.
Big e-d has always been kind of the heavy metal counterpart to grime's more typically punkish energy. he's the sludgy, doomy one while others are all crackling snares and high pitched squeals, stabs and bleeps. on 'the rush' he takes it one step further than before, and nicks a sample from the deftones. demon screams in that quivery way he does, like a modern day jello biafra, and bruza's in his element, doing his high-camp cockney wideboy thing to perfection.

DEMON + KANO- 'BRING ARMS'.
i wouldn't put this track, from aim high vol 1, in this best of list, if it weren't for the 10 seconds or so where demon reaches higher and higher into insane intensity, climaxing with:
'i'm the MC that loves the sex,
bare back with ya sis-tah
just love the sex,
BARE BACK WI YA SIS-TAH'

you can tell that he's loving MCing so much then: it's probably one of my favourite bits of music ever.

FLO-DAN: 'THAT'S ME'.
another aim high cut, this has flo-dan doing his ace hypnotic gangsta-mantra thing, 'that's me, sell drugs, sex gal, smoke weed, that's me...'. he's the grime dmx, growling his lines softly into the mic, making you lean forward and listen.

ROLL DEEP + GOD'S GIFT; E3 RIDDIM
scene politics aside, cuz i find all that stuff boring and it's probably all hype anyway, this is a great record. god's gift sounds like a total mentalist- if MCs are going to do that kill-yr-mother scream and rave thing, then this is how it should be done. the riddim, by dexplicit, is probably actually a little better than the forward riddim to which it's closely related- that brutal skeleton of a melody sounds even more like a electroshock to yr soul.

LETHAL B- WILEY DISS.
it's yelping flurries of one line flows over kylie's 'can't get you out of my head'! what more can you want!

LETHAL B- 45.
over the beat and bassline to the Streets' 'don't mug yrself', lethal b goes all motown on us, to hilariously, joyfully discordant and out-of-tune effect. 'i got a 45...under my seat, so i suggest that you think twice cuz i might shoot yooooouuu' he croons, singjaying like big youth on a rough day. and it sounds amazing. out of tune singing is so underrated.

PLASTICMAN-CHA.

I'm not a huge plasticman fan, but i do love 'cha'. like all the best riddims, it lights up a grime set as soon as it's dropped. this was probably the first time i've really felt that i 'got' the typical plasticman bass-ooze thing. and having all those shouts of 'cha' at the end of each bar, sounding like some terrifying tribal war-chant, was a wicked idea. also means that MCs can interact with voices on the vinyl, which i guess is quite interesting.

FLIRTA D [?]- BOSIE.
not sure if this is flirta d or not, but i think it is. anyway, i love it cuz it's got the MC going 'cuz i'm BOSIE' in the chorus, in a really high-pitched, camp, 'i'm FREEEEE!' way.

LADY SOVEREIGN- CH-CHING.
how can you not fall for lady sovereign's voice after hearing this?! she's cheeky and she sounds JUST like london.

N DOUBLE A- L.MAN AND NARSTIE CLASH TRACK [DON'T KNOW ITS PROPER NAME]
...The one i was talking about a while back that has narstie considering doing an armed robbery, and l.man persuading him out of it and taking the piss out of him. there should be more clashes within crews i think- grime feeds off conflict and fractures- and clashes within the loyalty-bonds of a crew has a fantastic dynamic of love and hate. also, l-man is one of the best grime MCs around. actually, i'm not even sure if it's right to call him an MC. maybe 'spoken word artist' is better. whatever, he's come with something unheard...

D DOUBLE- FREESTYLE OVER 'SLOW JAMZ'.
as a woozy and gauzy sliver of gentle anti-pastoral melodicism, 'slow jamz' is perfect for grime, and loads of MCs have freestyled over it. the best though is d double, of course, who muses about all the different colours he sees throughout his day, imploring us to wake up and recognise everyday beauty: 'look around you, recognise, there's bare different colours...'. heronbone style.

BRUZA- AVE SOME OF THAT.
a better beat than 'bruzin' and the ultimate cheerful/threatening cockney geezer chorus. i'm sold! bruza's got a crazy east end music-hall thing going on with his take on grime. next i want him to do a version of, 'doin the lambeth walk, oi!'

J2K-NO NO NO
much of j2k's 'heat in the street' mixtape was uk hip hop, of a very high quality. but here he goes a little grimier and sounds...fearsome. he's hugely underatted- for cool-as-fuck dead-pan calm witticims, he's frequently the match of kano.

ALL-IN-ONE- ONE AWAY GIRL.
you can hear this on the 'practice hours' dvd, where all-in-one performs it in his car, jabbing his finger straight at the lens. i've never heard it anywhere else, and i hope it gets a proper release cuz it's one of the best displays of grime MCing i've ever heard. that bit where he ends this long, dramatic run of words, and then spits out, 'cuz we're not stupid, and none of us believe in cupid. do we?' blows me away. and then he starts talking about how he can't bear to sleep alone. yr emotionally exhausted by the end of it.

LIBERTY- MAKE LOVE.
a sticky, icky melody of r n b synth-slime gradually morphs into a half-speed rave piano-vamp, and Liberty ends lines with a shaky 'urrgh' like he's cumming, passing out, recoiling in disgust, and spooking the kids, all at the same time. it's so ridiculously sleazy, makes me feel dirty listening to it. but , you know, great. obviously.

MERLIN- UNKNOWN TRACK.

merlin seems have to have come through in just the past three months or so, as a producer affiliated to ruff sqwad, and with a similarly gorgeous take on ultra-dense mini-symphonies. on the best track i've heard from him, which i don't know the name of, he lives up to his name and does this delightful medieval stylee, with harps and everything. it's...epic!

ALL STAR PRODUCERS-
i only heard this a few times, on dj mackie's show, which is a shame cuz it was a wicked idea. basically: the most famous tropes and idioms from his top boy producer are bolted together, in a kind of megamix, with each having 8 bars each in the limelight. like a clash of producers, rather than MCs, right? and you could miss-call the station when yr favourite was on and the winner who got the most calls was announced at the end. so, a wicked idea, but it didn't seem to take on, sadly...

GEMMA FOX- GIRLFRIEND STORY.
i don't quite get when people talk about grimette/grimella, gemma fox's name is so rarely mentioned. i love this track- especially the way she goes 'woo-oo-oo' in the chorus. i like 'woo's in music.

NEW BRAND FLEX- 'RED ROSE'[?]
i'm not at all sure if that's the correct title, but the one i'm talking about is the absurdly over the top slice of gabba-grime where nu brand flex obviously take a gleeful excitement in creating anti-social, desctructive blare and pound. and that kind of happiness is infectious and addictively silly. punk-rave is here, may be? finally?

SLIMTING- DESERT STORM.
another piece of rave-{filtered through crunk)-grime [how's that for a genre name!], with slimting taking the sound of dying ardkore synth gloop and some scraps of 808 clapclapclap to create perhaps the most relentless monotone and minimal grime track ever. not really fun, but i'm kind of pleased that stuff like this exists.

EAST CONNECTION AND MANY MORE- THE LINK UP.
a little too americanised hiphop for my liking, but this track is still important cuz it features the long overdue return of the mighty sharkie major to vinyl. he's just as perfect as i remembered. Everyone who's heard sharkie loves him.

WILEY- FIRE HYDRANT.
fire hydrant is 'ground zero's little brother- a gentle, almost ambient, dream-like tundra that mangages to sound kind and heartless at the same time. as mentioned above, jammer's 'blazin' is probably a better take on the same theme and sounds, but fire hydrant is still right up there among the classics of wiley's career. it's also the preferred merkage track for roll deep now- it's what trim, scratchy and wiley all use when they want to be nasty about other people. trim in particular suits this riddim, as he's all watery and drifting like the track itself.

WILEY-ICE POLE REMIX
sometimes called, 'new era', this is similar to the almost bleep and bass style wiley's adopted recently [cf back 2 back and ice cream man]. ice pole remix is the most melodic of the lot, carried forward on exhilirating, darting and diving lines of square-wave melodies. sometimes tunefulness, when it is this restless and disorientatingly alien, can be as relentlessly hardcore as noise.

KELE LE ROC AND BIG E.D- FRONTLINE [DAVINCHE REMIX]
like i've said before, this is one of the saddest songs ever written. everything about it is so mournful- it's all muffled and lonely, with every sound seeming like it's struggling to continue. and through it all, kele le roc rises out her emotional tragedy and she sounds so bruised but so heroic.

2005-01-17T12:16:00.000Z

some grime.

2005-01-13T16:22:00.000Z

just to check that my picture posting thing works on my blog- here's me 5 years ago doing a noise set at munkyfest

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dj/rupture has an 8 minute or so piece of jah mek the world [jammer's production outfit] for you to download, off a tape i sent him. go go go!
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'best of the rest' grime round up soon come, believe.
'best of stuff that wasn't grime in 2004' soon come, believe.
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i'm gonna see that new ramones documentary tonight, huzzah!

2005-01-10T13:18:00.000Z

i used to write this blog on a desk next to a window and when my eyes drifted from the screen they settled on a view over south london.

now i write this blog on another desk and when my eyes drift from the screen they light on a framed copy of superpitcher's 'happiness' 12" on my wall*

soon i will move my computer and write this blog on yet another desk, and when my eyes drift from the screen they will land on a shelf with over 100 pirate radio tapes and a dozen or so grime 12"s on.

however, i do not think that these facts have influenced, or will influence, the content of this blog at all.

*my favourite record sleeve ever.

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in other news: joe has bought the greatest record of all time. dancehall for robots.
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the terrible realisation slowly dawns: i may never be able to grow a full beard.

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if you haven't done this already, i recommend that you stick on yr copy of Practice Hours dvd and let it run through the credits at the end: there's a little short film tucked away there which is really moving. a kind of visual love letter to east london and the MCs there, all set to that one that goes 'loving you is easy because yr beautiful'. beautiful...beautiful...beautiful.
and then the sun comes up.
anyway, yes, it's lovely. don't want to ruin the surprise further.

---------------------

if i was to re-name this blog, or do another blog, i would call it 'SPITTING ATOMS' or may be 'SPIT THE ATOM'. but i think spitting atoms is better may be. i think this name would be particularly good for a blog about grime MCing/spitting.
you can nick it from me if you like.

2005-01-08T20:52:00.000Z

grime in 2004: track by track

ok, let us begin. i'll try to do the very best tracks now and do the rest in a few days. there's no top 10's or anything like that cuz that would be impossibly arbitary. best just to write them down in whatever order i think of them. so here it comes:

WILEY- DYLAN'S ON A HYPE TING
my favourite grime track of this year, easily. musically, it's just a steal of dizzee's 'hype talk' riddim, which isn't even near the best dizzee production, but wiley's vocals lift the track into something else entirely. i've never heard an MC sound like his MCing is this important to him. wiley sounds like he's on the verge of tears, and that's as hardcore as music ever gets.

IMP BATCH-GYPE RIDDIM.
who knows where this came from. pushing the light-fingered orchestral side of grime to it's conclusion, this is kind of easy-listening, kaempfert-esque grime, and just as great and no where near as horrible as that may sound. the grime 'surfin safari'! when you think that this is for ultra-violent MCs to spit their lyrics over, you get confused and the world makes no sense. and it's such a fun track, see-sawing and stop-starting, exhaling little gaspy breaths of joy, it's delightful.

DAVINCHE-EYES ON U.
davinche did loads of great stuff this year, probably more than anyone, but i particularly loved eyes on u. it has a possessed and focussed energy about it that means it lights up any grime radio set. all punishing stabs and hints of melodic flurries, it's kind of the quintessential davinche.

XTC- MISTY COLD REMIX
i think xtc are affiliated with ruff sqwad somehow, i dunno. ruff sqwad play XTC lots, and this is a remix of a ruff sqwad track. so yeah. i reckon they're connected somehow. ANYWAY, this remix transforms the melodic dynamism of misty cold into a tear stained haze that'll break yr heart. when that piano motif comes repeating in, yr an emotional wreck. why can't all music be this powerful. it's as softcore and sickly blissy as a grime production outfit called xtc should be.

XTC- FUNKTION ON DA LOW
little glitchy stutter samples, and a plaintive flute melody and not much else: it's probably the best ever example of grime's occasional forays into naive dreampop genius. this song is perfect, and it sounds of heaven.

RUFF SQWAD- UR LOVE FEELS.
as i say all the time, every ruff sqwad track is something you must hear if you haven't already, but ur love feels is probably their greatest 5 minutes yet. ardkore/kanye-esque chipmunk vocals slime and bleed all over the place, while a gloriously epic synth line, that manages to be solid + assured and creakily vulnerable at the same time, holds together one of those grimey artic soundscapes that makes me melt.

RUFF SQWAD- ANNA.
mmmmmmm, rousing. those repeating, echoey brass parts calling yr soul to arms...this has a kind of windswept drama to it, a bit like aphex's 'didgeridoo'. if ruff sqwad aren't able to live in disused bank vaults and drive tanks in a couple of years, then the whole world is twisted and wrong.

RUFF SQWAD-'I CAN FEEL IT COMING'.
this is a bit like 'ur love feels' actually. but you know, if it's good, if it's THIS good, then make more of it.

WILEY-ICE CREAM MAN
There's a few wiley tracks released around the same time that all sound quite similar:-ice pole remix and back 2 back and ice cream man. wiley often gets a little bit obsessed with certain sounds, and really rinses those for a while and then goes on to a new sound. anyway, the sound here is a 16bar switch between casio calculator plink plonk soars of high end melody, then a a crunchier electro-squiggle that wiley introduced in his old track, 'problems'. ice pole remix is sometimes the best of the lot for me, because of the way the melodies seem to attack yr speakers + nothing's held back. but mostly i prefer ice cream man. i like the way the switch between the wistful synth whistle and the more hardcore, grindy + hammering riff is so pronounced and always a bit shocking. and i like the way it's got that electric bleep in it that causes me to reach for my phone and check my inbox for next texts. it's an evil track, but in a surreal + kind of sugary way, so the title's apt innit.

WILEY-COLDER
another apt title: this is as cold as eskiboy's ever. minimal percussive booms and bangs and an icicle of string stabs and that's fucking it. scary stuff + i love it.

LETHAL BIZZLE AND MANS-FORWARD RIDDIM.
i've probably said all i could ever say about this track already. so i won't repeat all that here, except to say that grime has NEVER sounded so exciting. this is the essence of the sound + the scene, three years and countless records and bars distilled down to this 3 minute rush.on a side note: i think the press release says that this track is an anti-gun song, cuz i've heard a few people in the media repeat that back at us the public. for fuck's sake! could a song be any less anti-guns?! 'SHOOT IT SHOOT IT SHOOT IT' etc. they're, er, 'havinalarf' i think is what i'm meant to say.

STICKY AND SLK- 'HYPE HYPE'.
if any track next year is going to be as big as forward riddim was this year, i think it'll probably be 'hype hype'. this is party-grime that everyone loves. sticky comes back from wherever he's been all this time and lays down a typically colourful and frantic riot of sounds + beats, and the SLK MCs go crazy on it, with all these grunts and yelps and lil jon impressions -'Oh YEAH!'-. it'll make you lose yr breath it's so much fun. oh and apparently SLK are THE grime crew for 2005.

ROLL DEEP-SHAKE A LEG.
more party-grime. oh how i love this music so. this is the most addictively enjoyable track of 2004 for me. it's so unself-consciously silly and joyful. it bumps and bounces all over the place and the roll deep MCs sound drunk in that cool-as-fuck way that you only see in Bacardi adverts and never in real life when they come together for the gang chorus sing-along, 'come on, shake a leg with me, whoaaa'.
i feel sad for people that don't like this song. it always makes me smile and laugh.

ROLL DEEP- LET IT OUT.
from roll deep's party-grime to the other end of the spectrum now. 'let it out' is all hazy clouds of gentle melody like fennesz in his quieter moods. piano chords shimmer through the fog. MCs sound a little lost, a little frail may be. yes i love this track.

ROLL DEEP- POLTERGEIST RELAY.
terror danjah's 'poltergeist' is a typically hard, scary, crisp and sheeny banger + this vocal version of it, by roll deep, has some of the best MCing ever from the crew. dunno what else to say, really. amazing.

WILEY-TAKE CHANCES
...likewise this one. it's wiley's version of terror danjah's 'creep crawler', which is slimy and sleazy and oozes out of yr speakers. filthy and disgusting but in a good way obviously. wiley sounds very on-point and agile here, providing a necessary counter to the sludge and merk of the riddim. it might be comically misheard on my part, but i really like the bit where he seems to say, 'i'm CND, but yr gun away boy'. see wiley's a leftie pacifist just like all of us.

TRIM, WILEY, D DOUBLE, RIKO,- BOOGEY MAN.
this is trim's first appearance on vinyl, and it's the first time i felt like i really 'got' him. he takes the hook and he is awesome. his vocals float and rasp around the track, sounding almost like after-thoughts. that's very different to most grime, and it's newness is compelling. and he just sucks you in- you can't help but pay attention to these slurred, disjointed half-phrases. it's like he's rolling the words round in his mouth just cuz he likes the sound of them. whimsical grime is where it's at. the other MCs on this are all nangle. riko goes a bit mental just so you know that he's not scared AT ALL of the boogey man, and d double manages to fit in a lovely little expression of love to his baby daughter. oh, and terror danjah also merks it on the buttons. it's this crazy cartoon nightmare sound, all wheezy and music boxey, with little ice-cold bleeps. but the best bit is the Psycho-esque strings that come stabbing in for the chorus. horror-grime done so right that it's delicious.

TRIM + JAMMER- TIME'S TICKING AWAY.
trim gets all conscious here, warning us that we're not long for this earth and so we should Just Do It. his voice has never sounded more beautiful or lovable: he's as natural and gently bracing as autumn breeze full of golden leaves. and jammer comes correct with a oriental flute spiral that sounds so plaintive it almost hurts.

TRIM + BIGGAMAN- HUG AND A KISS.
a typically grimey guarded expression of affection for a girl from trim, and bigga-man creates this revolutionary sino-grime track that you keep thinking is going to explode into some gory, epic technicolour at any moment, but all you get is scrapes of strings, and constant suggestions + feints. so pared down and so beautiful- this kind of track is exactly why i love grime.

JAMMER + UNKNOWN MC-'OK THEN' [?]
this could be the most important grime track of 2005. not just because it's brilliant [although it is], but because it's an MC-led track with an addictive poppy melody, and really that hasn't happened for a long time, since kano's boys luv girls may be. the chorus will stay in yr head for ever: 'oh, ok then, draw the gat and then we'll spray them'. perhaps it's difficult to imagine those words being sung with skippy innocent joy but really that's what happens. i also love the gloopy plastic-bounce that jammer builds for the riddim.

DAVINCHE + KANO + WILEY- BABY.
davinche is very clever here, making like fennesz and fucking around with a sample of a woman saying 'baby' so that it's transformed into a white hot electric baby-talk goo of gurgles and clicks. it'll take yr breath away. wiley sounds ever so sad and honest, and kano does his weirdly detached, arch, verbal smirks and sounds brilliant on this one.

WONDER + KANO- WHAT HAVE YOU DONE LATELY?
i guess really this is the big one. this is the one everyone's been talking about. and it is a monumentally, epically great track. this is grime revelling in, celebrating, it's discordance and wrongness, making machines and music do what they're not meant to do. but it still has a groove, however twisted it gets. it is pop music for 100 years in the future. i love the wail of 'what have you done? for meeeeeeeeee, late...ly'. that's crazy wicked. and kano merks the track, sounding much colder + more desperate and serious than usual, repeating, 'i'm not lying to you'. hearts and souls have been poured into this song.

D DOUBLE + SHOLA AMA + TERROR DANJAH- 'SO CONTAGIOUS'.
grimette, pop grime, grime n B, and did someone at dissensus say 'grimella'? i like that one. anyway, whatever it's called, terror danjah is the master of it. this all sexy and glows and shimmers in a deep + exhausted way. post-coital grime if you like. why not. shola ama is magical here, and puts the dead-eyed attempts at sexuality from the likes of beyonce to shame. and d double does does what you might have thought once was impossible and comes across as a friskily romantic fellow. of all the female vocal led grime released in 2004 this is the best; this is milestone.

P JAM + CHARDONNAY + FRISCO-CAN'T HOLD IT IN.
more grimella, but this leans a little more to the Wonder-skool of total fuckedness and wrongness. p jam turns his infamous speaker wrecking bass even further up in intensity, so that these almightly slabs of sub-low sounds drill through the track with absurd force. this is p-jam being all poppy and it's still one of the most hardcore tunes i've heard in the past year. chardonnay is very ache-y and heart breaking in her torrents of love for her man, and she has the kind of assured magic that the best aretha franklin stuff has. these people are stars + i feel honoured to live in the same city as them.

2005-01-06T01:33:00.000Z

you know how lots of people say it's a terrible thing that not many people buy the NME anymore and that melody maker had to go out of business and etc etc?

well, really, fuck off. it's a GOOD thing that people don't want to buy shit anymore. for all my life, the NME was a piece of shit + to think that that the world owes you a living for writing shit is fucking low.

and yes, i know silverdollarcircle is often rubbish, but i do try [lame i know...] and i don't expect anyone to think that it's good. i'm learning here.

----
so, heh, i'm feeling quite 'punk rock' at the moment. talking of which, simon reynolds reckons that blogs have hit their 1970s phase. that's correct i think, and beyond the implode and kid shirt are the punk revolution come to shake us up: they make this seem so conservative and boring...

sorry, this has been a weird post hasn't it. but the freedom to do 'weird posts' is what so cool about the blogosphere isn't it. sorry i'm being weird again. i've had a headache all day and i don't feel normal.

i'll do a grime track by track round up tomorrow and everything will be ok.

love you, night night
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

2004-12-29T15:46:00.000Z

end of year round up [the start of it anyway]

sorry for the delay. another broken promise. this time is wasn’t my fault [honest, sir…] cuz I’m back at my parents house in the wilds of the north west, where internet access is unreliable at best, and non-existent most of the time…

anyway, lets do some rounding up of 2004. I guess I should talk about grime first. 2004 will always be the year of grime for me, I think. firstly, it was the year that silverdollarcircle really became, somehow, a ‘grime blog’ rather than any other sort. just sort of happened that way. and it was nice that it did cuz as grime got bigger and bigger more people outside my immediate friends started to read silverdollarcircle. so to get some uh ‘recognition’ for stuff that I’d written was lovely, thanks [and surprisingly easy too- just mentioning ruff sqwad a few times really brings the referrals in, ha…].

but there are other, better, non-narcissistic reasons why 2004 was the year of grime. importantly, this was the first year of grime. that is, this was the first year when this sound + this scene really had a name. remember back to early this year- people were still arguing whether it was eski, sublow, 8-bar, east beats, just garage, just uk hip hop, grimey garage. now, nah, it’s just grime. which is kinda sad cuz eski was a better name. ah well. but the formation of a consensus on just what everyone was involved in was important because it helped the scene become much bigger. journalists and other listeners need something to latch on to, and the ‘grime’ tag gave them that- suddenly, it was tripping off broadsheet writers keyboards loads, and grime artists were getting signed. go into any independent record shop now and ask for some grime and although they’ll probably still tell you to fuck off, they’ll at least know what yr on about. that wouldn’t have been the case 12 months ago.

yeah grime got bigger this year. I wouldn’t say it’s poised to take over anytime soon- it’s still too mad, too out of control, and too hardcore for that. but there’s little chinks of grime entering, or about to enter the mainstream consciousness. dizzee’s a proper pop star now- he’s a band aider for goodness sake! wiley tried and failed, but come the release of the roll deep album on relentless next year, he could make a go of it next time around. ‘shake a leg’ in particular is a number one hit if there’s a god. kano also got signed this year, and could be v big if he profits as he should do from his increasingly close association with mike skinner. lethal bizzle’s forward riddim got in at number 11 which is worse than I hoped but fantastic for such an uncommercial track, although unfortunantely the radio edit is a brutally crippled hack job that’s lost the special things that the original had. and lady sovereign could be the larger than life, instantly recognisable, sweetly nasty star that grime needs if it’s gonna burn it’s way into the thoughts, clubs, cars and bedrooms of the nation’s youth.

on the underground, things got settled after a worryingly long stretch where there seemed to be no grime at all on the radio. the pirates are once again one step ahead of the dti, and things look just rosy. raw uk is peerless, better even perhaps that its granddad Déjà vu. rinse has, thankfully, brought more MCs back in- the resolution of rinse management’s long standing conflict with roll deep meant that trim, wiley and scratchie became a literally inescapable presence on the radio from autumn onwards. you started to suspect that they lived in the rinse studios full time. other greatness in radio in 2004: the formation of On Top, the grime-dedicated south london pirate, run by n double a. also, the rise of internet radio attracted some big names to some stations, notably blaze-live fm. everyone knows, deep down, I think that they’re the future. keep an eye on them. they’re going to get bigger and bigger. who’s gonna bother abseiling down towerblocks to put up ariels when most of yr target audience are on broadband? [I know that a lot of people, and even more so in the east london ghettoes that grime is mainly a broadcast system to and for, don’t have broadband, but that’ll probably change in the next 5-7 years.]

On Top was either the catalyst for or the result of, whichever you want to view it, grime finally becoming a real presence south of the river this year. a south london crew- essentials- were the biggest thing out there until roll deep’s triumphant return. n double a’s narstie and l.man were also names wildfiring their way round grime message boards and radio shows. what’s been especially interesting has been to see how south london has come with quite a distinct take on grime, particularly grime MCing. more verbose, dense and complex, and often more conscious, than the east-west style, crews like foreign format, infrared sound, south agents, essentials and l.man from n double started to push the boundaries of what the form could take. I guess one way to see it is that south MCs are coming from a more hiphop background than a jungle one, but I’m not at all sure. like always with grime, I’m just too ignorant and removed to know what’s really going on. but south london has got a distinctive, unique style, piling syllables and sentences on top of each other to stretch out rhyme schemes and create a more fluid, uh, flow than the shorter, thrillingly sharp and essential, bursts from east london MCs. not that I’m saying one is better than the other: there’s always room for more styles, especially in grime, where there’s room for just about anything.

essentials rise to top boy status this year shows another interesting aspect of grime: despite it often being seen as overwhelmingly about MCs and nothing else, it’s often still the producer who can make or break it for a crew. witness nasty’s almost painful to watch decline after jammer’s departure early this year. at the other end of the scale, davinche’s work with essentials was the major factor in them becoming on of the biggest crews out there; although essentials’ MCs, and particularly jendor, are the match of just about anyone, they wouldn’t be where they are now with davinche. likewise, ruff sqwad’s justly deserved, but still too slow, coming into fame and respect on the underground was largely down to their awe inspiring production’s swirls and sweeps, rather than the MCing [although, again, the MCs shouldn’t be ignored; slicks, dirty danger aka dangerous dirt (love that!), and of course tinchy are all wonderful). wiley also focussed on his production again towards the end of the year, releasing the mighty torrent of fire hydrant, icepole remix, ice cream man, colder, and back 2 back in the space of a few weeks. fire hydrant and ice cream particularly are now the mainstays of most grime sets, and have played a large part in making roll deep THE crew. producers still matter.

and there has been some incredible music put out over the last 12 months. after a slow start to the year, which led to me moaning on and on about how it was all over, the grime scene exploded from last summer onwards, to the point where it’s now almost impossible to keep up. truly, this is the golden age, right on the cusp between the twin poles of a tiny few making the strangest music with no rules, and of a large number of people making music that’s established its own entrenched rules of conduct. things’ll settle down soon, I guess: this can’t go on for ever. but right now there are still no rules to be broken. there’s no definitive grime sound, or grime rhythm, or grime structure that all or most tracks fall into. that said, perhaps there has been a little less sheer sonic invention this year than last. but last year was a formative year, with people establishing some of the many dissolute tropes that run through grime- stutter glitch rhythms, martial arts epic strings, ring tone melodies, computer game clinks and clunks etc. this year, tracks tended to reconfigure such sounds in different ways rather than come with new sounds, but grime remained the most fiercely inventive music out there. and there was some new paths being forged: the pop-ambient, melancholic miny symphonies of ruff sqwad, davinche’s occasional forays into fennesz-esque gurgles and drifts, agent x and big e.d’s love for speed-metal samples, ruff sqwad affiliates x-t-c and Merlin’s brittle, mournful melodies than sound somehow medieval [as befits a producer called Merlin I guess…], and the sheer discordance of wonder and p-jam’s raids on r n b, which take addictive delight in sounding non-more-wrong.

but mainly 2004 was a year when grime moved away from brutally bare 8-bars to a more song-based approach. come autumn and vocal tracks were everywhere. largely, the shift was initiated by terror danjah’s aftershock, but p-jam’s dice recordings, roll deep, essentials, ruff sqwad all put out classic ‘proper’ songs with choruses and hooks. the result is that many grime records don’t sound like grime pirate radio sets anymore- there’s almost two distinct strands within grime now. the exception to this trend, of course, is the forward riddim; the biggest grime track since eskimo and also the greatest ever attempt to capture in a 3 minuter track what a grime radio set sounds and feels like.

crucially, grime’s focus on vocal tracks and song-structures in 2004 brought a welcome return of the [ahem] gal dem to the scene. shola ama, sadie, and k-t all merked it this year, and my favourite female singer ever, kele le roc, was a brilliant, although frustratingly infrequent, presence. one worry I have, though, is that a truly, uniquely british style of r n b vocals has yet to emerge, so what you get with many vocal grime tracks is a very distinctively London sound with singers with american accents over the top, sounding like direct descendents of US r n b stars. there’s often something incongrous and half-formed about that, but mainly my worry is that one of the reasons why grime is so fantastic, why I love grime so much, is that it sounds so completely OF the place it was made. it’s not at any remove from the MCs or producers lives. so although, say, the producers are clearly descendents of crunk producers in some ways, as grime MCs are to dancehall deejays, those influences and roots get filtered through a very particular London prism. it’s hearing what London’s take on those musics that’s what makes grime often so special, and that’s what’s not there is many of the female vocal led tracks. that worry aside though, those vocal tracks are some of my favourite songs of the year and of all my life, and they’ve provided an essential counter-balance to grime’s ever-escalating testosterone spiral, which has ended up in what jess harvell has termed the ‘kill yr mother!!!!!’-style grime tracks. when a distinctively british r n b singing style develops, though, it’ll be even better. hopefully that’ll happen soon, although there might be good reasons to doubt it: the MCs role in grime is to keep it real, and so the use of english accents and slang was pretty natural. the female vocalists’ role is often to add a bit of glitz and glamour to proceedings, and so there isn’t so much pressure to lose the american stylings; indeed, there’s probably a reason arising from this role to keep the americanisms- america as glamourous, exotic, far-away and removed from the reality of the london streets grime rises up from.

some predictions for 2005, then, to finish this bit off: firstly, the big release of next year: the roll deep album. yes it’s not going to be all grime, and it’s going to frequently go into poppy hiphop from what I’ve heard, but the best tracks- let it out, and shake a leg- are INCREDIBLE. what’s more, they are, more so than any other grime tracks, hits in the making. this could be the album which finally sees wiley become a true pop star. and we all want that, don’t we? from what I’ve heard, it’s going to be the roll deep axis that are pushing things forward in 2005: in Trim, they’ve got one of the most original and talented MCs out there, and danny weed’s new productions [they’re on the new aim high mixtape] have to be heard to be believed. he’ll be the top boy producer in 2005, mark my words. ruff sqwad’s mixtape, Guns n Roses, is probably the release I’m most looking forward to. there is simply no way that this cannot be one of the greatest records of all time. it’s impossible. ruff sqwad possess true genius, and they’re just waiting for the world to catch up., Rapid and Dirty Danger are our generation’s Brian Wilsons. jammer’s jah mek the world productions, and his slew dem camp also have some epic, almighty tracks ready for release, that’ll redefine that woozy sino-grime sound that stirs yr heart and soul. And from his recent releases- particularly ‘baby’ and ‘mish mash’, it seems like davinche is only just hitting his stride. he’s taken it up another level in the past few months, and I can’t wait to hear what happens next.

generally, I think they’ll be a shift to more of the skewed + sketchy melodicism that grime does better than anyone. the ultra-raw, clattery, ‘forward riddim’ style bosh bosh bosh feels, perhaps sadly, like it’s hit a bit of a dead end. I’ll always love that sound, but I just don’t know what else those bare 808 and 909 skeletons have left to do.

MC wise, I’m really looking forward to hearing more of fumin (from boundary), who has energy and style to match even demon, and all-in-one (from mucky wolf pack), whose appearance on practice hours dvd, performing ‘one-away girl’ in his car should be legendary. he’s very, very special. also, Craze, who is in slew dem youngers, makes you pay attention whenever she touches the mic, as does ashman [ I’m not sure what crew he’s from]. bashy will also get big next year, although I’m not quite whether the hype is justified. Nasty’s ghetto needs to do some big vocal tracks, as does stormin:, when they are at their best, few other MCs even come close to them. both sound scarily, impossibly, intuitive, natural, dextrous and quick wittted. hopefully, god’s gift’s war with lethal b is just the start of a return to the forefront of grime. I want to hear him on the radio every night. 2005 should also be the year of the goldfather of Gift’s scary yardie/scary cockney style, Riko. he’s out of jail, and he’s in roll deep. nothing will stop him. he’s the best MC I’ve ever heard +, really, everyone should agree. jendor, from essentials, is also, to use that rubbish phrase, ‘one to watch’. he’s got a special energy and life to him. also, tinchy strider has upped his game massively, and when you hear him now you’ll understand why wiley made such a fuss about him all that time ago. his bastardized 2-step anthem, ‘underground’ will be a classic in 2005. maihem, a female MC who seems to affiliated with the E3 axis of aim high, tnt and j2k, is probably the most intelligent and funny MC out there. she’ll blow people away in 2005.

so in summary: 2004- the golden age of grime
2005- more of the same, as there’s still so much sitting around waiting for proper release, but with more vocal tracks, more tunes, more melodies. can’t wait.

coming soon: track by track run down of just about every grime track that i can remember from this year. hopefully, it'll be stupidly long.
happy new year if i don't write anything else before then...

2004-12-24T20:43:00.000Z

hola! and Feliz Navidad as well. sorry for the absence: i've not been dead or anything. i've been in Spain living the high life instead, wandering around seville and chestnut forests. it was sunny + friendly + yes it was wicked. but i don't feel christmassy at all:- it was a late summerish uh 'vibe' over there and i don't think southern europeans really 'do' christmas that much. but that's good. as much as i love christmassy stuff, an endless summer seems much more appealing.

first day i got in seville, switched the radio on and started randomly going through the stations cuz that's what i do innit, and i happened to stumble on a gabba station! at 3 in the afternoon! that's hardcore. instantly, i fell in love with the place. and i don't even really like gabba. [does anyone? isn't the point about people who are into gabba that they don't really 'like' anything? but i digress]

apparently, there's a form of extreme spanish techno called bakalao, and also spanish dried fish is called bacalao, so you have to be careful in fishmongers. and harecore techno record shops.

so, be told.

anyway, look, i'm off to the pub cuz it's xmas eve and all, but i will be back on boxing day i PROMISE [this isn't one of the rubbish promises that i always break...], with the start of my end of year round up. i think the whole thing is going to be so long that it might have to be in stages.

2005 is going to be all about wordage and hard work. like roll deep, silverdollarcircle had a little stumble and loss of focus, but i'm back now and i'm really enthusiastic about this and i want to make it as good as i can.

so see you boxing day. and happy christmas.

2004-12-08T16:30:00.000Z

o death where is thy sting?

i will do a proper post soon, i promise.

2004-12-03T16:59:00.000Z

i'm not always there when you call me but i'm always on time now baby baby be mine

----------
i want to write about favela funk soon

2004-12-03T10:52:00.003Z

Would it be right to say that most of us, us blog people that is, are now pretty tired and worn out and less enthusiastic than we once were about writing things on our computers?
i think that's true. certainly in my case. but i'm going to try to keep going, because, really, why not.
also, hopefully by the new year Thee Silver Dollar Of The Circle will be an mp3 blog. got to put my raw blaze and de ja vizzle tapes into mp3 form first, but after that they'll start to be posted here. and it will be, to use the BEST new slang term for those who know, nangle.

=======================
and, finally, here's what fabric the other day was like:
the best thing that happened all night, may be all year, was when me and jak were walking from holborn tube to pick up some of the raving massive raving crew for the night, and a car full of teenage lads drove by, with them leaning out of the window and screaming along to their stereo, 'BRING SOME BEEF YOU LOSE SOME TEETH!!'
i was so babblingly excited. a little contact with the real culture innit.
anyway anyway anyway>>>we get to fabric and good gosh it's ram already, akufen playing to people on the dancefloor trying get all spacious and floaty but compressed together so much that all you can do is a little bob and stutter. still, i thought akufen was wicked. much more fun than his farbic mix cd, which is still quite fun. very sexy, glittery and glistening.
miss kitten was lovely too. much more minimal and hardcore than i'd been led to expect. but there was a moment of utter softcore BLISS when she dropped the SUPERPITCHER REMIX OF MFA'S 'THE DIFFERENCE IT MAKES'. [it may still be available for download here, i dunno]. i LOVE this song. i adore it. when it's on, i never want it to end. hairs stand up and tears well up. it's overwhelming beautiful. impossibily graceful sighs of distortion are built up into this riff that breaks yr heart into a million pieces. its a bit like fennesz having a 6 am rave epiphany but not really. so, to hear this at fabric, with Miss Kitten adding her own ethereal whispers over the top, was the very, very special. she's my hero and we felt epic. for the only real time that night, the dancefloor seemed together.

oh and there was andrew weatherall as well. firstly the bad; 2 lone swordsman live was almost unbelievably awful. i hardly ever use this word but it was dire. a really weak and meandering take on 'dark' rock sounds. he killed the dance. BUT then he revived it with his DJ set which was just what i wanted. minimal but twisted with little slices of electro bombast: he smashed it.
so, another fun saturday.

but:::why don't people at fabric smile at each other and make eye contact with each other? come on! you're in a club! a significant proportion of you are on drugs! do yr bit!

it'd be much more fun if people did.
----------------------------------
DON'T FORGET::: jamek the world productions set on raw uk nine grand fm today 6-8pm. it's jammer and lewi white and bigga man's production outfit. you might get Ears MCing as well if yr lucky. i locked in last week and it was one of the best pirate shows i've heard- 2 hours of totally freah dubs that i'd never heard before, each an instant classic.

2004-11-26T10:44:00.000Z

as cologne is to techno, as east london is to grime, the west country is to great blogs.

---------------------------
there's been some worrying about words recently from some parts of this big internet world, with people arguing about what is grime and what is not. for what it's worth, here's my take:
-if MC's decide to spit their lyrics over a track, it becomes grime. often the tracks that they decide to go over are fairly similar stylistically, but there's a few tracks that are totally out on their own- what's the connection, say, between 'funktion on the low', or 'fire hydrant' and the more 'typical' grime sound of pulse x, straight riddim, wiley's harder stuff etc...?
that's the thing about grime, what makes it so exciting: anything goes. still, after 2 years, there's no real stylistic boundaries or idioms in place yet. it'll probably start to close up soon, or splinter into distinct scenes, but right now there seems to be room for any sound.

it's the context that's important in whether tracks are grime or not: it's how they are used.
so plasticman is a grime producer cuz MCs love 'cha' and 'shallow grave' etc.
----------------

i went to fabric the other day and met mpc and dripdropdrap there. it was fun. i might write about it soon.

2004-11-22T14:33:00.000Z

time table for raw uk 90.00fm, from rwdmag forum

Monday

8-10 RUFF SQUAD
DJ Scholar, DJ Begg, Rapid, Mad Max, Slicks, Styder, Shifty & D.Danger

10-12 EAST CONNECTION
DJ Diesel, Double O, Rhyder, Demon, J Mundo, Napper, Fresh & Shizzle

Tuesday

6-8 N.A.S.T.Y
DJ Mac 10, DJ Snappy, Hyper, Armour, Big Seek, Stormin, Ghetto, Kano & NJ Fever

8-10 COMMANDA B

Wednesday

6-8 FIRE CAMP
DJ Twista, Lethal B, Ozzie B, 2Face, Clipper & Knowledge

8-10 TU TUFF
DJ Busby, Baby Sham, Spider B & Clumsy

10-12 NEWHAM GENERALS
DJ MS1, D Double, Footsie & Monkey

Thursday

6-8 TOTAL PACKAGE
DJ Marsta, Ivano & General LOK

10-12 AFTERSHOCK LABEL
DJ Shox, Bruza, Triple Threat & Terror Danjah

Friday

6-8 JAMEK-WORLD PRODUCTIONS

8-10 BOYS IN THE HOOD
DJ Flippy Smalls, Crazy Titch, Goodz & Dullision

10-12 EAST CONNECTION
DJ Nikki Slimting

Saturday

4-6 COMMANDA B

8-10 EAST CONNECTION
DJ Diesel, Double O, Rhyder, Demon, J Mundo, Napper, Fresh & Shizzle

10-12 FIRE CAMP
DJ Twista, Lethal B, Ozzie B, 2Face, Clipper & Knowledge

Sunday

4-6 DJ MACKIE

6-8 SLK
DJ Vectra, Flirta D, Ribz, Adam B & Swarvo

2004-11-18T21:58:00.000Z

so, RAW BLAZE 'nine grand' FM is back, properly this time. happy happy happy. i turned on my radio this morning, as full of anticipation and excitement as a 4 year old's christmas day, and there it was: broadcasting loud + nicely fuzzy, a recording of a sidewinder set blaring out of the speakers. i love Delight and Rinse and On Top and all, but to have the Big One back finally makes me realise just how much i've missed it this past 4 months or so...i've missed the big crew sets, the clashes, the birthday bash specials where they crowd as many top name MCs into the studio as they can, hearing ruff sqwad every week, hearing the MCs get better and better, coming up with new lyrics all the time. most of all, i guess, i've missed feeling that i understand what's going on in the world of grime, missed feeling connected. for someone like me, who loves grime deeply but whose main contact with grime is listening to the pirates, the absence of raw blaze was quite disorienting: suddenly, i felt even more out of touch than usual with this music that means a great deal with me, felt at another crucial remove from what is actually happening in the scene.

but yeah, raw blaze is back and so am i- should be back to posting with more regularity now that it's back on, just cuz there's going to be so much to write about, so many more adventures to follow.

the sidewinder show they played today was classic. incredibly over the top with demon, lethal b, nappa and crazy titch all trying to come across as more angry than the next man. it also features my favourite single moment in music i've heard this year [it only lasts 10 seconds or so], where demon and lethal b trade screamed lyrics, as the intensity steps up each time, ending in a furious and joyful flurry of yelps and howls from lethal b:
lethal B; POW POW POW
demon; YOU DON'T WANNA BRING ARMS HOUSE
lethal b; POW POW POW POW POW!!
demon; YOU DON'T WANNA BRING NO BEEF
lethal b; POW POW POW POW POW POW POW POW!!!

--------------------------------

big, big big cd out on monday [i think]::::
RUN THE ROADS [679 records], compiled by the fantastic grime journalist Martin Clark [hyperdub, Touch, Deuce]. you can read about it here.
all the tracks that i've heard that are on it are amazing, so i would very, very strongly recommend that you buy this if yr at all interested in hearing what the best grime in 2004 sounds like. a few tracks on there would each alone be worth the price of the cd- chosen one, let it out, move, destruction vip.
tinchy strider's 'move' [which used to be called 'headbanger', months ago] is one of the greatest ruff sqwad productions ever, along with one of the best grime vocal performances- tinchy strider encouraging us not to be scared to let it out, to move, to bang yr head, to make a racket.
so yes, you really should buy this cd.

--------------
i dunno if i've linked to this before or not, but if i haven't then i'm stupid:::
poplife is brilliant, one of my favourite blogs around, easily. derek writes about all that is interesting in modern music, which obviously [for me, anyway] includes a lot of grime, and he does it in a passionate, informed and natural way that's a really joy to read every day. so leave these awkward fumblings and go and read his stuff instead...

[but not yet cuz i've still got stuff to digress and meander about he he] particularly interesting for me recently on poplife was derek's comments on 'rhythmic danger' in grime [does anyone know where that phrase originates?] which is something i think about quite a lot. part of what makes grime so endlessly fascinating for me is the rhythmic invention, which crucially-and fairly uniquely- has come about as the result of a rejection of 'beat science'. the beat isn't important in grime tracks anymore- the MC holds the beats. he's the percussive instrument in the set up, the time keeper. [witness grime MCs carrying on going after the record has been cut out, waiting for the DJ to come back with a record that keeps time with them]. this reduced role for grime tracks has allowed producers to have an almost totally free hand in the sounds they make- for the first time in perhaps 50 years, there's a style of popular music, of music for dancing, clubs and cars, which has no 'standard' beat pattern at all. anything goes. the tracks are there as incidental music to the MCs- not incidental as in unimportant, but as in setting the scene, fixing the atmosphere, drawing the audience in, giving them something to hold on to.

so you get beatless mixes, or tracks with only the gentlest pitter-patter of beats, or tracks with beats as thrillingly ungainly counter-stabs to the MC's flow [i luv u, for example]. the spotlight moving to the MC from the DJ has opened up a whole new world of invention, and while there are downsides to that [such as the occasional slow-periods where no new big tracks seem to be picked up on that i've written about before], really what allows grime to be so exciting and- often- alien, is that the focus often isn't on it's most radical and alien aspects. with the MCs ruling the scene, the producers can let their imaginations explore fucked up pop-ambient snowscapes, gabba-electro carnage, computer game nightmare sounds, cut up and brutally condensed brass + horn filmic soundtracks.

and all the time, the MCs are coming up with new moves every time, of course, but i guess that's another post...

night night

2004-11-15T21:06:00.000Z

AKUFEN and MISS KITTIN at fabric this saturday. it's gonna be wicked, i'm going, and - come on, really- you should come along too...

something i was thinking about today: HOW good a title is 'misty cold' [ruff sqwad innit] ? it' so perfect, such a poetically accurate description of grimey melodic brutalism.

hazy, hazy, hazy days...

2004-11-10T18:55:00.000Z

"we should only allow women to run for government, own businesses, join the police force and generally run the world. We (the males of the species) have given it our best shot but let's face it, we don't have a fucking clue, and everybody knows it."

-duncan at the ugly vision, hitting that nail right on its head.

-------------------
DJ GODFATHER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I cannot stress enough how important it is for you to go over to dissensus and download the mp3 of the dj godfather mixtape.
after listening to it, i've spent pretty much the entire day singing to myself, "let me see yr dick work, let me see yr pussy work" over and over. it is only a matter of time before i am arrested.

2004-11-10T09:49:00.000Z

yesterday i saw the biggest piece of polystyrene i have ever seen in my life. quite possibly the biggest piece in the world. i reckon it was about a foot and a half deep, 8 feet long and 6 feet wide. i really wanted to touch it, for some reason, but it was behind railings. if you want to look at this unique object, it is on chenies street, which is off tottenham court road.

but, then, why would you?

------------
oh, i wrote that d double lyric down wrong by the way; it's not 'that's very individual, never heard that from another individual' its, 'that's very original, never heard that from another individual'.
so that's that sorted out then.
---------
other business:
this is going to seem like i'm only saying this cuz he said nice things about me recently, but it's not because of that at all: kid shirt's recent posts on illness, why he is currently a major global polluter, how he is the jewish messiah, and how he is the victim of alison goldfrapp's occult powers is the best blog post there has ever been.

------------
it made me happy to read evergreen daze mentioning that he enjoyed that christian marclay thing at the white cube a while back. i saw it too and i don't think i'll ever forget it. it was one of the most fun + exciting pieces of film + music i've seen + heard.

2004-11-08T22:20:00.000Z

getting back into the pirates after a little bit of a break has been such a pleasure. for a few weeks i haven't really been listening to pirate stations as religiously as before, just cuz it seemed a bit like huge effort to search out some MC stuff, with freeze + delight + on top down, and raw blaze still not back on despite those cruel, tantalising rwdmag forum posts that periodically appear. but now, delight + on top are back, so the floor in once again littered with the cellophane wrappers of C90 tapes...

ESSENTIALS were on tonight, [delight 103.0fm 8-10 mondays]and sounded very, very big. there's a self confidence to them now, a joyful swagger in what they do, that reflects their current position as perhaps the biggest crew aside from Roll Deep [who, by the way, never seem to be off the radio at the moment]. too many mind-boggling davinche dubs to take in all in one sitting, but i'll listen to the tape again and try and come up with some words about them. although i will say this now, about a [relatively] establised davinche track; his remix of big e d's 'frontline' with kele le roc on vocals is the saddest song i've heard all year. those mournful, muffled descending horn parts sound like they've just realised that it's all over, and the jabs of strings coming up from the typical frontline slime + murk lift the track only to be cut off unexpectedly, ending like dashed hope, quickly but not for long. and kele le roc is still my favourite female singer ever. when she sings 'well, excuse me...'here, singing about her right to cry at the emotional frontline, surrounded by those hazy horn parts plodding downwards, she sounds so strong, so heroic and so independent that you know she's a survivor of devastations and wrongs. the tragedy is all in that refusal to totally break down and wail, in her determination to keep it together and stay dignified. there's a kind of ache in her voice. and she makes you think that it'll never go away.

side note: a few weeks back, matt woebot's joked about how horrible it would be if f cd mixers had in-built glitch effects. well, it seems to have happened; bossman was using some cd decks tonight, and had a skipping cd sound come in whenever he was commanded [and those essentials boys do COMMAND] to reload a tune. it sounded wicked actually. but not as good as the screech of a record being pulled back though. that's the most exciting, exhilirating sound in the world.

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oh, and don't go out on sundays anymore. sundays are rubbish anyway. you should stay in doors cramming your body with roasted food stuffs while listening to D DOUBLE AND FOOTSIE on the braindead show [rinse 100.3fm sundays]. it was so great to hear d double back on the radio after all this time. felt like coming home, almost. 'ok, it's the newham gens' brought an instant big smile from me. d double is a star. he should be massive, and although he might not be cuz the world is fucked, he will always sound like a star. he's got a great new track out in which he bigs himself up for inventing his 'mui mui' and 'ooh ooh' echoes. 'that's very individual! never heard that from another individual!' he quips approvingly and i think the phrase is; pleased as punch. it is funny and it is delightful. d double is a star.

Tubby, the braindead dj, is quickly becoming one of my favourite grime DJs. i love the way he focusses on playing very dynamic, attacking grime that sounds like its making raids on yr speakers, rather than the currrently very popular dulled, low brass stabs that go 'dunh!...dunhh!' like some heroin version of dancehall [e.g; jammer's 'destruction' and quite a few daviche tracks]. Tubby prefers to keep it plasticy and restless, full of synthetic melodies throwing the tracks forward. as much as i like davinche and 'destruction', it's good to hear things begin to rise up from the dark and moody detonations that have taken over recently.

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oh and also; kompakt's 'speicher 2' mix cd. good lord, it's quite hard isn't it? joachim speith you are a crazy guy. what happened to that sitting on the beach missing yr girlfriend sound that michael mayer used to talk about? still lots of fun though.

2004-11-08T14:12:00.000Z

"we’re not speaking in anyone else’s language. We’re saying things that we experience and we believe in"
-davinche on grime, speaking to rwdmag

-i really, really love that new eminem song, 'just lose it'. the only song by him i've ever liked. it's like a hiphop cousin to roll deep's 'shake a leg'; that same loose, gleefully silly pop mess. more songs should be like this- we need more tracks that want to get people to lose their cool and act stupid on the dancefloor. cool is crippling.
"boy, shake that ass...wait, i mean girls, girls girls girls" that's genius! you love that! tell me you don't love that!

2004-11-06T01:57:00.000Z

"everybody's talking but nobody's listening
every day the same shit, week out and week in"

-dizzee rascal

2004-11-04T18:45:00.000Z

more people should read friend and comrade joe's little dogs day.

you can help rectify this sorry situation by going here.

and also, please, please buy Forward when it comes out. buy multiple copies- i'm sure you'll be able to find some use for them. this MUST go to number one.

2004-11-03T21:28:00.000Z

sincere concern and sympathy for all the good and right thinking people in america.

i feel quite scared now, thinking about the next 4 years...

listening to 'strings of life', feeling a little better. little comforts.

how could a place that produced that, also produce this?

2004-11-02T17:14:00.001Z

so i'm really disappointed + quite pissed off that i left the grime night at Fabric early. roll deep's set seems to have gone done in legend as one of the greatest live shows of all time. some people are saying better than wu tang. others are saying better than the sex pistols in 77. so, yes, quite regretting that early night i decided to have now. but still, the start of the night WAS a bit shit + very disheartening. but i guess in that kind of situation you've just got to stick it out and wait for roll deep to re-hearten you. a mistake, a historic, terrible mistake on my part...but i'm going to the next one and i'm going to stay there till the bitter/glorious end.

in other news: roll deep are now rich and signed

and you should all buy forward riddim on monday. i still think it'll go top 10.

this isn't very scientific but::: Kiss FM DJs are now responding to calls to play 'fwd' by playing it right at the end of their shows, keeping you listening with promises of 'fwd coming up real soon' and so on. they're using fwd as a tool to keep people locked in. this is exactly what happened with 'babycakes'. and that went to number one. admittedly, babycakes is hugely more commercial than fwd, but that fact only allowed it to STAY in the charts after its initial entry, because it could easily be slotted in to the rest of the daytime pop the legit stations pour out. before it got to number one, there was very little legit radio play of it. it's initial popularity was based on underground buzz alone. so that's my prediction for fwd; underground popularity pushes it way into the top ten, then it slides down the charts rapidly cuz everyone who was going to like it will have bought it in the first week. but still, it's going to be the best thing to happen to the british popular music scene since hardcore. it's going to be...an event.

2004-11-02T17:14:00.000Z

2004-10-27T10:06:00.000Z

good morning, the massive.

dj rupture + his band Nettle + Nass El Ghiwane, who have been described as 'the beatles of morocco', in terms of cultural importance and impact are playing the very swish Queen Elizabeth Hall tonight. get yr skins down there...