Sach O thinks you should have a seat.
Joni Mitchell never lies: you don’t know what you got till it’s gone. Too often, special moments in musical history are swallowed by the tide of progress as producers constantly reinvent themselves searching for the next sound. On one hand it’s healthy, on the other hand fans are constantly pining for specific eras: early 70s roots, golden era Hip-Hop, mid 90s Jungle, and now the beginnings of Grime.
Futuristic and minimal to a fault, the first Grime beats by producers like Wiley, Dizzee, Terror Danjah and JME quickly bulked up and straightened out, as emcees and producers sought to crossover. But part of the movement’s magic lay in its alien-textures and displacement from established music-industry tropes. Birmingham producer Preditah understands this, keeping his beats leaner than an anorexic greyhound and twice as mean. His new Eightsome EP stands not only as a great example of what made classic grime so fascinating, but also as an equally strong collection of ideas demonstrating how that energy can be updated for the future.
Take opening number “Big Mikee”: a looping pulse, a heavily distressed 808 cowbell, a string loop and…that’s it. Whereas Grime contemporaries Royal-T, Swindle and S-X embellish their tracks with Garage, Funk and Trap-Hop to much success, it’s the sheer minimalism of Preditah’s work that separates him from the pack — harking back to genre touchstones such as Pulse X without coming off as self-consciously retro.
Another example: on paper, there’s nothing strange about “Gargoyle” – strings, drums, horns. Except in this case, the sounds are completely synthesized and swung as to bear no practical resemblance to the instruments they’re supposedly imitating. Compressed into a one bar loop, the beat’s main refrain recalls a marching band from hell or a chase scene from a particularly schlocky horror movie. Throw on some emcees and it’s a suitable rap beat but alone? It’s just bizarre.
Hectic and Royal Mess for their part, sound like Lil Jon and Bobby Digital-era Rza off a particularly nasty fifth of gin – pushing the horns and strings to their respective extremes. Ironically, whereas this kind of Grime-as-fight-music posturing might once rankled sensitive types, the overall effect seems more menacing than brutish in light of Dubstep’s subsequent move towards overblown grandiosity and recycled ideas.
Yet even tracks built around well-worn elements like Goofy’s 8 bit Eski-vibes and Nosy Parker’s mid-range wobble succeed in transcending their origins, the latter’s funky lead-synth colliding with a spooky, Specials-inflected counterpoint. For a producer working within an extremely limited and minimal palette, Preditah manages to squeeze every bit of life out of these ideas without having to repeat himself.
But the EP’s best moments might be its chillest: “Protein Shake” and “The One” are funky, bizarre detours away from the realm of functionalism into grime’s most alien and alienated of tendencies. The former’s Street Fighter samples and sour synths call to mind Silkie at his his most experimental, but with an explosive propulsion rather than measured progression. If you were to take black music, turn it inside out, replace every instrument with a keyboard module and then suddenly decided that the result had to be danceable, you’d probably be half-way there.
As for “The One,” it’s jungle-as-nausea, replacing any steadiness of rhythm with a start-stop lurch underpinned by a growling low end and gurgling marijuana powered vibes. It’s the perfect ending for one of the best instrumental releases of the year and one that proves a point: if grime once sounded frighteningly futuristic, that terrifying future has now arrived.
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