Grime gets surreal and strange in the capable, fiercely innovative hands of Martin 'Blackdown' Clark and his production partner Dan 'Dusk' Frampton. MCs are sampled and looped talking about their lives, their voices submerged in crackle and sparse, minimal beats. Otherwise hardcore rapper Trim is chopped and looped into hypnotic shapes - 'This is not the world I was born in/ I fell from the sky and was kept' - while Roll Deep's Target is recorded and repeated while he delivers monologues about 'nippers doing waterfights' in east London's Limehouse.
The duo have created a debut that is grounded in grime, dubstep, electronica and the Asian 'desi' sounds of the city, but which converges those influences in eye-poppingly open-minded style. While Margins Music sits in the long line of albums influenced by Britain's soundsystem culture, it looks beyond our shared Jamaican heritage to other London side street sounds: drums, melodies and vocal snatches sourced from the Indian subcontinent.
Asian sounds are built into the DNA of the album, and the continent's influence is overtly present in the tunes that feature singer Farrah, who channels her voice into three numbers including the sweet and soothing 'Con/Fusion' and 'Kuri Pataka', which manages, much like the whole album, to be both as heavy and soporific as a valium oxygen tank and powerfully energetic.
Download 'Con/Fusion'; 'Kuri Pataka'
