Monday 30 December 2013

Essay (Trends of 2013): Neo-Eski, Alien Shapes and the New Wave of Grime

Artwork by Educastelo

This Dummy essay was also one of a number of end-of-year 'Trends of 2013' pieces for the mag, and looked at this years' new wave of grime, particularly its eski, sino and alien elements (click here to read). Pleased with this one - feat. Wiley, Logos, Visionist, Bloom, Inkke, Slackk, Murlo, SD Laika, war dubs, grime tonality (chromaticism vs pentatonicism), squarewave, auto design now and tomorrow, yo-yos and more.

Of all the areas of underground music that seemed to surge forward this year, grime was one of the most obvious and most intense.. 2013 might have been one of the most exciting years in emergent grime for quite some time - a year when the genre reached back to its roots to create its future...

Ultimately all these pressures on grime - what commercial success means, smoother dance directions and US approaches - really begged the question: what is grime? And for the answer to that, many producers have looked to its early days circa 2003, discovering there a freshness that stands out sharply against the productions of more recent years...

Visionist

If eski was a car designed in 2002, neo-eski feels like what the car would look like after a redesign in 2032, and not just the car itself but also the bizarre social, technological and climatological violence you'll be able to see out of its windows...

Visionist seems to be the avant-garde spearhead of grime's new wave, eschewing pastiche almost entirely in developing a range of distinctive sounds that are powerfully modern and that lose none of their effect to failed experimentalism...

The all-round biggest success might have been Bloom's 'Maze Temple EP,' an intense neo-eski raid that takes the futurism of Logos and makes you move to it. Bloom is one of the strongest of the new wavers, and his war dub send for Samename might have been my favourite of the lot, firing weapons that aren't supposed to be invented until the 23rd century...

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