FOOD

This week has been all about food for me. I have the appetite of a crazed horse. I don't feel I can stop. Mainly Mexican this week, though last night I got so much chicken and spent about an hour in Chicken Cottage at 4am eating it and talking about why England haven't won a world cup recently.

Reaching Matter for Rinse/FWD>> tonight. Gonna be big. So to combine both food and Grime, here's a Grime tune about food:

The Best of Ms. Dynamite

"Question: boy can you add up? The equation of you plus me equals nada"



Most know her for winning a Mercury and a couple of BRITs for that song with the infuriatingly catchy chorus ('Ms Dynamite-ee-ee...') and disappearing. This really isn't fair: in my opinion she is the best Female Garage MC of all time, actually scrap that, the best garage MC of all time and she deserves more recognition for this. She's back with a new single, Sticky produced Bad Gyal, which echoes back to her mindblowing debut, BOOO!, also produced by Sticky.

So here are my personal favourite Dynamite penned tunes:



Despite the cheesy intro to the video ("Why they Booin'?!" "Cos this choons heavy bredwin!"), the bass drop is undeniably one of the biggest in UKG. Hear this on a big system and the subs risk your dental health.



If this was played to kids as a replacement for Government-issued 'Say No to HIV' posters, it's likely that Jeremy 'PUT SOMETHING ON THE END OF IT' Kyle would be out of a job. Here, Dynamite deals with the ins and outs of sexual health without sounding the slightest bit preachy. The beat from Menta is also silly huge.



On more of a Grime flex here, the b-side to It Takes More displays more of Dynamite's impeccable flow.



New single Bad Gyal is a return to form for Ms Dynamite: she's back with Sticky here and also back to roots with her flow. It's no suprise that Bashment/Funky DJs The Heatwave have been all over this. Catchy, but still coming ridiculously hard. A torrent of 'She still got it!'/'I never wrote her off, I promise!' talk to follow...

Sigha - Rawww EP [Hotflush]

A review I recently did for Inverted Audio

After two 12"s on the consistently brilliant Hotflush label earlier in 2009, Sigha returns with perhaps his most impressive release yet. Sigha's earlier releases established him, alongside producers such as Pangaea, T++ and Scuba, as a key purveyor of the techy side of the genre previously known as Dubstep. Although this release continues in the same vein as 'On The Strip' and 'Bruised', it becomes clear that Sigha has well and truly immersed himself in what his earlier productions pointed towards: mesmeric dub techno, but with an injection of garage's funk and swing.

Opener 'Rawww' ripples with infectious, sporadic energy stapled thinly together with a filtered, percussive synth, which runs throughout. The real joy here is the track's unpredictability: in ten minutes the groove changes almost at will, though always so subtle that it is impossible to tell what is coming next. The drums shift and click, layering over each other, dropping out and dipping back in, shifting from minimal and spacey to a bliss of funk with just a few extra drum hits in Omar S fashion.

The first track on the flip, entitled 'Hold My Heart Up To The Light', has a more skippy feel to it, which for the first two and a half minutes leads to a sense of claustrophobia, before being broken by some synth builds, then again being engulfed by the shivers of drum clicks. The occasional synth blocks stop just short of breaking the delicacy of the percussion here, and the result is a track which sounds at breaking point for its entirety, without its minimality ever becoming overwhelmed.

The final track is the closest this 12" gets to linearity, and is the most obvious on the record to be heard on a dancefloor. This, however, does little to damage the feeling of dread Sigha does so well to establish on the previous two tracks. The drop comes halfway through, doubling the energy without losing any pre-drop subtlety and from here the track continues to a natural, unforced end.

A touch more techy than his previous output, 'Rawww' is minimal, groove-laden, ominous and highly recommended.

Sigha Myspace

R.I.P My MPC 1000 2003-2009

I sold my MPC. I am really very upset about this. I had some great times with that little machine, so here be its history:

I bought my MPC 1000 in 2003/4 (est.) from a very dubious seller on ebay, whom I met to exchange funds for goods beneath some offices in Piccadilly Circus. I remember going in with my dad and finding two guys smoking a joint in front of loads of video editing equipment. It was a little bit awkward with my Dad, though he was quite cool about the whole thing considering. I played around with some of the samples on the pads and at that young age, 13, I was completely immersed in the experience of cutting up audio and rearranging it to create new sound. After confirming that, despite the constant cannabis fumes, the MPC still worked 100% fine, we bought it, and I could not wait to get it home to have a play.

One of the most striking things about any MPC, I mean mine was a 1000, not the seminal 2000XL, but still, the image of any MPC and the feeling of having a play on it is one of the most unique experiences in this world: Dilla created the majority of his beats on this thing; if you listen to the roots of hip hop from the 80s you will hear an MPC all over it; later DJ Shadow redefined the boundaries of hip hop by using the MPC to manipulate sound until he created such beauty as demonstrated in Midnight In A Perfect World, or actually the whole of Endtroducing... as a matter of fact.

The MPC enables the user to put together an on-the-fly re-edit of anything, and has played such an important part in the development of Hip Hop that it would be difficult to imagine what Hip Hop would look like now without it.

Thankfully I am able to keep my beloved MPC within my family: I have managed to sell it to my immensely talented brother and one day, when I can afford it (if I can afford it), I will buy him a top of the range new MPC in exchange for my old MPC 1000 because this particular sampler has played such a huge part in why I love Hip Hop, and as a result of this Dubstep, House, Funky, D'n'B etc. and henceforth why I love the music that I love today. I was never particularly good as a producer with my MPC, but by paying that much attention to sound by spending that much time with it, I have learnt some very valuable lessons about sound, and managed to immerse myself in each individual sound so very deeply that I have reaped the endless benefits of this in my current life.

MY AKAI MPC 1000, I SALUTE YOU. MY YOU HAVE MANY HAPPY YEARS WITH MY BROTHER BEN.


SAM'S BLUE MPC 1000: 2003-2009. R.I.P.

I have recorded a mix which will be up as soon as I can get the link here; I have had some problems with zshare today. The mix is mostly UK funky with some big twists on it, like some Untold, James Blake and Darkstar. If I don't get a chance to upload this mix soon however, I will upload the phenomenal mix by Pariah that he recently completed for Sonic Router. Trust me, this is so big, I heard it today - mind blowing.