I was gonna do a post saying that that remix of Forward, with the martial snare drum rolls and synth strikes like a volley of flash-bulbs, was the most rave-y sounding grime track ever. But the track after it on Jason H's Rinse show was a tune called Speed Racer with a 303 in it. Nice one top one!

It seems Lethal B has added a ragga verse to No, unless I've just been ignoring it all this time. Probably reacting to the success of the Spragga Benz version of Fwd, and certainly Lethal B is happy to tinker with his tracks after they've been done- he's covered up swearing through liberal application of "pow"s, and you even get adverts on pirates for specially tailored Lethal B dub plates. Smart move- hip hop producers have for a long time messed about with their productions, adding shout outs and what not, to help keep it fresh on the street. The smart way to work with the scene is to satisfy this thirst of the street for freshness, and not to be too preciously auteurist about your productions and keeping them "sacred".

INteresting to see that this thread on the RWD forum, about the best metaphors and similies in the game, is almost entirely dedicated to JME. He's big! Particularly worth reading through this "backwards" lyric (actually it's more on a Yoda tip than a backwards thing)- jme dont take back chat / controller mic jme me dats / jme dont take no shit / blood longting a not is it / i am not a prick / battered get will takers mick / my names jme / me test cant mc's three / i will bust ur chin / quickly seconds split 8 in / you aint meridian crew / weak your man us test cant you / serious man like us / basis regular a on chins bus / u better understand / backwards chat can't me like man

"Big up the man who nicked my fridge! Big up all those people without a fridge!"- Shizzle and Napa on Aftershock UKG Mix Show

That new Roach song All Day Long with Rapid on production is absolutely massive. It takes the kind of Jericho-blowing-down horn tatoos that Essentials were rinsing last year and chops and stutters them until it's hitting you like a flurry of punches. Snare drum tatoos force the message home. There's also real melodic invention at the top end, with sweeping strings pushing it that little bit more hectic. Vocal is top notch too, Roach rules. [edit- just listened to All Day Long again, and the lyrics are astonishingly relentless. They go something like this- "You know there's no getting rid of me, no chance not by a long shot, everyone knows I'm in it all day long, I've been merking your whole crew all day long, I'm still lurking, pursue you all day long, I'm still loving it, do it for the fun of it, dancehall's running it running it all day long / You think I'm gonna slack no way, think I'm gonna put up with your crap no way, I bring the gat put eight caps in your face, don't care if you spray I'll square up the blade / set the pace just like when Trim merked ace, Roll Deep MCs are way too great, and you know Rapid merked the track in a way, he used to lay crews out dead in a state / and I see them roll up [....] / with the men that assassinate to get paid / we jump out looking for the man that I hate / bruise them I think today pay day / I see one breh with the eight gold chain / from here that bling is driving me insane / We get a quick six for that on the estate" Best bits there are the "dancehall's running it running it", just because the repetition is absolutely breathless with excitement, and the ultra-cinematic line "from here, that bling is driving me insane", where you can almost see the Roach killing time on the estate when a smooth-riding, custom built Beamer makes an extravagent entrance, and he thinks "why can't I have some of that. Amazingly vivid lyrics, although obviously how you feel about it depends on what you think about gun talk. But the mic skills on this track are incredible. OK, what am I doing still at work transcribing Roll Deep lyrics. Haven't I got a house to go to?]

I'm playing tunes tommorow (in between bands and then in the basement) at the White Heat club, in Infinity, Old Burlington Street, behind the Royal Academy of Arts. Bands include the magnificent stoner-Kraut of Hey Collosus, whose album I'm looking forward to hearing soon. Me and Stuart from Victory Garden will play boths sorts of music- rock and post-rock. So probably more "songs" than "tunes". But it will be great.

Riko and Jammer were on Richie Vibe Vee's show last night. The first thing Riko says in the interview is "yeah, been having a likkle drink", and sounds pretty charged (Richie tries desperately to keep the questions on the straight-and-narrow). On the mic though he's flawless, no stuttering just pure flow. This is what makes him so unique I think, the fact that- drink or no drink- his lyrics are so impulsive, thoughts turn into words effortlessly, and emotions are so close to the surface. Perhaps that's what makes Chosen One so powerful- he's trying to hold his feelings in check, "calm down, use composure blood", struggling to parse these thoughts and shape them. He stands outside the tide of emotions, which throws into sharp relief how passionate he is...

Browsing around for new hip hop flavas. If you've been starting at the screen long enough, "G-UNIT" starts to look like "C-UNT".

That Qwalli/arabic type track I was on about seems to be by Durty Doogz. Rough like desert sand.

"The only drama you know about is acting in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Imp Batch sounding crisp and nimble on the DJ Q mix show. Refreshes the parts that other recent mic sessions don't reach.

The new music in the background of the :: Rinse Fm dot Com :: website sounds like a breakbeat version of 2001 A Space Odyssey. Well perhaps not quite, but you can imagine it accompanying a monolith orbiting in space.

At this particular moment, for some reason, it's not the MCs who are pushing things forward but the producers (as Luka pointed out on dissensus, there have't been many new MCs who have caught the ear recently- JME was terrific on Roll Deep last night though). But Jammer and Ruff Squad are doing incredibly detailed, over-dense tracks that threaten to fall apart, but somehow still pack a fierce punch. The level of detail and ambition has gone up markedly- whereas last year it was just "tracks", music which spooled out in linear fashion from start to end, these days it's tracks which seem to redefine chorus/versus/middle 8s through persistent, recurrent hooks and indelible sound signartures woven into the tracks. Watch out for Jammer's Neckle, that's big, where he samples and pastes himself growling the title over his own rapping, so every bar seems part of a chorus; similarly D Double E's Signal samples his trademark "oiiiii!" / "it's me me me" and scatters them liberally amongst his impossibly dense, circular rhymes. Grime has always had little truck with choruses and versus, because of the breathless flows and an insatiable desire for "darkness" and "merkery" which precludes against form; at the moment, it's the producers adjusting to this by weaving dense, non-linear structures into 4 minutes tunes. The current pre-eminence of the producer is also suggested by the formation of the beat camp- the first crew consisting solely of producers and DJs, featuring the mighty P-Jam and Dexplicit (producer of the Forward rhythm).

You can check out Roll Deep's amazing When I'm Here, a mentioned a lot recently, on Cameo's current show (about 25 minutes in). An equally wicked cut to this riddim, by Wile Out Ones (aka Roll Deep youngsters) is on Aim High Volume 2, which you should rush out and buy if you ain't got it already. If you don't like this CD and DVD spectacular, I'll refund your money myself. Terms and conditions apply, like.

Heard two very decent recent releases from Important Records, and I've been meaning to write about them for ages. My ill girlfriend spending a couple of days wearing my Important t-shirt in bed has finally galvinised me to action. Two post rocky efforts that are enjoyable, paradoxically, through their sheer simplicity and even emptiness rather than over-elaboration. Take Larsen- their album Play is based around the melodies from several Autechre pieces, and improvises a dry, structural post-rock setting for them. The vibraphone melodies drift through crisp, stalking drum and bass constructions. The atmosphere builds slowly and effectively, and there's a couple of moments of real power. Strangely the magic here is arrived at through an arrid simplification oof the tunes- whereas Authechre's tracks are full of ludicrous interlocking detail, here there is nothing but space and a steadily slowing pace. Yet that is the beauty here, it's dronely and lonely and rather beautiful. Aside for one moment where they summon up a GSYBE type ascending bit (and that's not really my cup of tea these days), it's all falling melodies and sad grace. Beequeen's album The Bodyshop similarly starts with no urgency at all, and finishes almost without you noticing, but if you listen closely it's got an engaging mix of intimacy and elusiveness. Lo-fi patchwork pop, with tremelo guitars and murmuring voices that tantilisingly aren't quite touching, the slightness and hesitancy makes it feel like a couple of virgins learning to touch each other (turns away and pukes into bucket). Hesitancy starts to sound almost embarresed on their cover of Nick Drake's Black Eyed Dog (which doesn't do them or it justice) but that's the only bum note here. Actually not a million miles away from Animal Collective, ie dream pop where the dreams are jumbled, awkward, difficult to grasp.

Anyway, two releases that are in a sense somewhat plain- no flights of fantasy, no mad messing about, but fascinating self-contained universes. This plainess is definitely wholesome- with post-rock at the moment less is surely more- and these are two excellent albums.

So I was listening to Aftershock's UKG mix show the other day, and nearly fell off my chair when I heard one track, which seems to sample a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan CD we've been listening to in the office for about a year! No singing on the sample, just the basic music for Qwalli, which is droning harmonium and handclaps at a brisk, stepping tempo. Our CD has been almost worn out through overuse- it's over an hour long, there's three tracks, and they all more or less the same, so this Qwalli drone is more or less embedded in my mind. That's why, when they announced who the track was, I was still off my chair and missed it. Talking of golden ages, as Matt Woebot and Simon Blissblog have, when you hear a music able to sample anything and adapt it in this way it's a sure sign that the core music is indeed as strong and durable as some precious metal. Strange how musicality so often leads down a mushy dead end, where as sample-cality is the sign of a genre thriving. Just recently we've had Donaeo's Bark, based around dog barks, Dizzee's Off To Work, a symphony of footsteps and footfalls, that Biriani track based around a fat Bollywood sample, and now this. Sampledelic.

Simon on Essential's Headquarters. While we think about the wolf-meme, we shouldn't forget the wolf in our living room- why are dogs such a presence in lyrics? B-Live's Let The Dog's Bark, Donaeo's Bark (excellent pooch samples in that one)- and of course hip hop's got the big dawg style, hungry dawgs waiting to get on the mic etc. With grime, it's more like the dogs seem to be situated outide on road, guarding deserted, ring-fenced premises in the pouring rain, like the mute, menacing urban presence that wanders around the Zone of Tarkovsky's Stalker, rather than anthropomorphising dogs into dawgs as hip hop tends to do. Why would a genre want to do this anyway, compare it's characters to creatures who just shit and shag and want to go for walks. Wu Tang Killa Bees are cool, saying "I'm a dawg" is not.

I've never got into Crazy Titch as much more than a hype man- rough and ready rhymes that are pure adrenelin, but when listening back are more of a furious flurry than a flow you can get inside. His voice is thrilling on pirate radio, a gravelly flex that distorts the mic, seems to challenge the very music, but on record it doesn't seem to work with the beats, instead spilling everywhere, albeit in a fantastically boisterous manner. Negotiating in this fight between man and music is what makes a new track of his- I know no names yet- so terrific. It pitches his growl up and down on individual words on the chorus- this serves to pinning his exclamations to distinct moments of leverage in the song (what was once an all out attack becomes something more like the Kano's "Kick lines and punch lines"), while subverting his voice too, and turning it into something mechanical, futuristic. If you thought Rammallzee was odd, check this- it's like a robot and a ruffian trading line for line, combination style.

An idea which came to me while watching the MVE karoake, where Debbie (ex of Echobelly) was doing Message To You Rudi, complete with pork pie hat and middle-eight DJing ("I am the boss, the big bass boss!"). Now if Lethal B version the track as Message To You Roll Deep, we could be looking at the greatest one-away in the history of battle tools! A special of the Specials!

Stop your fooling around
Time is stritting right out
Better think of your future
Or else you'll wind up in jail
Roll Deep- POW! a message to you
Roll Deep- POW! a message to you
Roll Deep

C'mon, stick with me here!

No idea if I'm going to have time for a full end of year round up, what with college work and the empoyees of MVE making inconsiderate demands to have their money in the bank on time. It's not as if I haven't wanted to write, far far from it. Anyway, a slice of a round up was going to be grime tunes that have struck me as of special importance- recurrent tropes that have been particuarly influential this year, even if they haven't been the biggest hits (although some of them have). So here we go.

First off Warriors by Alias, dropped by Cameo for his mic-men passim. It transcends/redeems the snatch of gangster dialogue at the start (retro Wu Tang style) by the brutal bass drop. Two fearsome bass notes, as sticky and poisonous as the goo dripping from the Alien's jaw. The rest of the tune is just hustling percussion and an almost cheesy "Alias!" sample tag- probably made it 5 minutes, it never fails to get MC's going through it's sheer brutalism- imagine Energy Flash re-edited as a DJ tool for grime heads. Wiley's Ice Cream Man elicted nothing more than a "so what" from me for the first few times I heard it- some nice pingu-pop flavas interspersed with tough-ish junglist stabs, but no sonic genius there surely? But in the mix this track is a revelation, the ultra tuff section sucking the MCs in before dropping them without warning into the almost cutesy computer game themes. MC's who were huffing and puffing have to step it up with humour and poise, and usually they manage it. It may be just cog in the machine, but Ice Cream Man pushes things forward as much as any track this year, unlocking the latent humour and imaginative leaps that grime somehow encodes in it's hyper flows. In DJ tool terms, if Warriors is the hammer, this is the light switch (as you can see I know nothing about DIY). DaVinche's Frontline rhythm is great, and Kele Le Roc's vocal is even better (hopefully she's got an album coming out out through the Essentials camp, and if so it'll be a cracker if it's also got that sensuous Deeper Love Elisabeth Troy style track on it, Do That Dance, which is sheer aural foreplay), but the rhythm itself is what aroused me this year- a tantalising pop-futurist blueprint, dizzying G-funk squelches, or perhaps like a Patrick Adams disco production slowed down to 80bpm, and a masterful string quarter introduction that must have taken days to produce yet lasts just a dozen seconds or so- this is epic in scope, revolutionary in form. Just as dizzyingly epic is a synthy-strings track produced by (I think) Dexplicit, that sounds like Giorgio Moroder's Scarface theme over a hip hop beat- that could make it Mobb Deep's G.O.D. then, I guess, but this track has a bit more Motzartian flourish in it. And the flourishes keep on and on as it goes from key to key up the scale- so movie-theme and climax like is this rhythm that by the end of it the MC is starting to relate his whole life story in cinematic detail. A minature epic, an elegiac companion piece to the more fun Gype Riddem by Imp Batch- a tune done on playstation I think, and it's truly wonderful that with the simplest tools the UK is making the most wonderful sound sculptures. Roll Deep have done too many incredible tunes to mention (Fire Hydrant/Colder, that Lethal B diss, is classic war-talk fully of the stature of the BDP/Juice Crew diss series), production-wise I just want to mention one tune, When I'm Here. Like the Roll Deep porduced Doneao track, They Don't Know About Us, it's got an accordian in it- dunno how that idea came about (listening to Madvillan's Accordian?), but in both tracks it's wonderful. In the Doneao track, it's pure, utterly joyous jeep bounce, a bit like Shake A Leg. Talking of jeep-beats, Wiley says there's a baseball bat in his car, but he uses it to play baseball, which sums up the sunny-day with attitude feel of the Doneao track. Anyway, the real interest accordian-wise is in When I'm Here, which takes a moody introduction, like a Russian folk lament, and turns into a whirling dervish like minor-key polka figure, mixing subtle off-beat funkiness with some olde worlde pagan dance business. How did this come out of E3, who knows, but it sounds great with Wiley, Riko and the crew on top. What defines the brilliance of this for me is crystallization- whereas a lot of grime productions are defined by their utilitarian, use it and abuse it punchiness, When I'm Here adds real melodic depth- not just musicality but a subtle dissonance, strange harmonic interludes and unexpected moody tangents. A track that you really can't figure out no matter how much you try, these kind of submerged melodic additions/subtractions, jazzy/soul flavours buried at the bottom of the beats, I think will be what pushes grime production forward- the soulful substance beneath the fierce exterior. My tip for who's gonna achieve this sort of depth- P-Jam. Another track I want to mention more for the ideas it encapsulates than it's mere quality-ness is Headquarters by Essentials. There are some good rhymes on this one, although they didn't strike me as outstanding (especially given the quality and quantity of MCs on board- Kano, Bruza, Shizzle, Jendor, D Double E...), what's cool is the brilliantly realised vibe of MCs as soliders- their names are barked out by the Sergeant At Arms, they "state their location", before he demands "OK, gimme 16". This idea of street soldiers isn't new, but this track is tuff to the maximum, crawling mechanically along at 90 bpm with unnerving tribal sound-signals in the background making this 8-minute journey feel like it goes all the way up the Nung river to Cambodia. For sheer vibe, Headquarters couldn't be beat this year.

Crazy's got a new singalong. Wouldn't be great if this rumour, that Crazy has a side project as the Robert Johnson of Stratford, were true.

Dynasty apparently ripped up the set at Sidewinder, but I'm not feeling them just yet. The thing which bugs most of all is Hyper Fen's MC signature, where he breaks out of his gruff bark to squeak "it's murkage murkage" in a falsetto. Like a school boy game! What's strange is the way "murkage" here is just refered to as a quantity, as in "bringing lots of murkage", quantity rather than quality. To claim you're murking is like saying "we diss the most"- which ignores the fact that it's not how much you do it, but how you do it that's important. Besides, isn't it supposed to be your peers who decide who murks and who doesn't, not the MC himself?

Probably the only person who would try putting a sweet female vocal over the forward rhythm would be the person who did the beat in the first place. That's more or less what Dexplicit has done, with Carmen's "Got Me"- the beat isn't the original forward rhythm, by the handclaps and ravey stabs are in place- and boy oh boy it rocks. The forward rhythm's cavoriting/carousel feel, like a mosh pit falling over over the dance floor, is complemented by the neurotic/erotic twitchiness of 2-step styl female vocals. It's like the aggro boys in hoods meeting the fine girls and sharpening up their dance moves a little, indeed Dexplicit's remix of Forward rhythm here gives it more balanced and poise rather than just pure physical bounce. Check it on Cameo's showBBC - 1Xtra - Tracklistings - Pirate Sessions, about 10 minutes in. Big! Dexplicit is the producer I most want to interview at the moment, where is he?