Son Raw is back in the U.S.S.R. Not many club nights manage to attract attention outside of their home cities, particularly small, producer oriented ones. For all the hype around FWD and Low End Theory, theses were not (and are not) bacchanalian parties full of drug consumption and excess, they’re community run events by and […]

Son Raw is looking for a new room. Is genre even remotely useful anymore? From its earliest days as a tool for segregating “race” and “hillbilly” music in shops to its current status as a driver of ultra-specificity in dance music (minimal-psy-breaks anyone?), subcategorizing music into neatly defined boundaries has created as many problems as […]

Son Raw kind of just missed the Pokemon era as a kid Until I checked out the original version of Uncertainty for this post, I’d assumed Jagwar Ma was fronted by a waifish girl from Scotland rather than an Aussie dude with a thing for Madchester era vocal production. A rockist I am not. But […]

Son Raw refuses to cover anything with a “future” genre tag. A few years ago, there were barely enough instrumental Grime tunes seeing official release to make up a scene, let alone enough good ones to incite weekly purchases. Today however, the tide has shifted – consider Boomkat’s renaming their Dubstep/Grime/Funky section to Grime/FWD if […]

JT The Goon is a legend and U.O.E.N.O it. From his days storming East London Pirate Radio as a teenager to his production for Grime’ legendary Slew Dem Crew, JT didn’t just have a front row seat for the foundation of UK street culture, he played an active, if oft unappreciated role. Now, after a […]

Son Raw hit you with TSSS TSSS! Zha, whose mixtape I recently shared, is starting a new Youtube series highlighting up and coming emcees. Now I usually wouldn’t post a freestyle video, lord knows there’s enough sites dedicated those if you want to trawl through gigs worth of aspiring rappers, but once he roped in […]

Son Raw sometimes listens to Zomby, never rocks Abercrombie London MC CasisDead spends a lot of time claiming he’s the real thing and not a gimmick, which is counter-intuitive for a guy who wears a skull mask and raps about everything from rape to guns with a healthy side of drug abuse and sales. While […]

Son Raw no tek no bludclart backchat. Apparently if you’re English, a small fraction of your tax dollars goes towards late night BBC programming that involves Kahn & Neek’s ferocious blend of angry video game sounds, Jamaican chat and stomach-churning b-lines, which upsets me as a Canadian because all I get out of National public […]

Son Raw’s making loot like Marvel comic books, for his survival Montreal’s a hard partying city, a fact that keeps many a producer too exhausted from gigging to truly hunker down and create tracks of real value. There’s a reason you’re not likely to find Lunice or Jacques Greene out on the town too often […]

Son Raw is the rap Bill Murray. No, this isn’t groundhog’s day – I wrote about this combination a few months back but like The Low End Theory and Autonomic Podcasts, when these crews hit Rinse it’s always worth a mention.  Dusk & Blackdown returned to radio after another extended absence, but while the irregularity […]