Hollow Earth

The archetypal Grime instrumental was Musical Mob’s “Pulse X” (2002), nothing more than a brittle drum track and an aggressive, pneumatic bass-line. If Youngstar, the track’s producer was a crow, or a sparrow, then within Grime Terror Danjah was a bejewelled Cockatoo. Unique among Grime Producers his baroque rhythm tracks craved more attention than, which as devices to frame the pyrotechnics of the MC, they were ever going to get. Other producers like Target, Danny Weed and Wiley brought original touches to their mixes – Danny Weed’s trademark accordion synth presets and Wiley’s drum-less “Devil” tracks spring to mind but didn’t create sonic interference for the MC. Terror Danjah was unique.

Jungle was a radically important music because it was the first truly indigenous British Dance Music. Grime, in which a generation of MCs who had cut their teeth chatting over Jungle, was an innovation of perhaps greater magnitude because it was the first indigenous form of UK Hip-Hop. Not a UK version of American Hip-Hop, but a Hip-Hop that sunk deeper into the musical DNA to arrive at a form that did as much justice to our Global location in the Diaspora as American Hip-Hop did to its relationship to Africa. It’s wrong to deny the basic importance of the rhythm track to Grime, because after all, UK MCs rapping over mid-tempo break-beats (Roots Manuva, Sway or Blackmarket Boy) as opposed to over hiccoughing UK Garage re-rubs, create precisely the fawning to US tropes which it was necessary to dispense with, but nevertheless Grime was all about the MC. Terror Danjah’s legacy, therefore, is a confused one.

2003, the date from which this collection commences, suddenly seems like an incredibly long time ago. A lot of us who picked up on Grime in 2002 found our interest tailed off drastically by the end of 2005. Critics complained that Grime had reached a glass ceiling; artist's ambitions seemed frustrated, in-fighting suddenly seeming less to outsiders like fascinatingly explosive braggadocio and more like the violent squabbling of the closely-cooped. This sensation of a scene gone wrong was cemented by MC Crazy Titch's incarceration for murder. Subsequently the number of physical releases dropped drastically and the vital energy of the scene, which had previously produced popular parties like Wiley's Eskimo Dance, ebbed away. Grime’s main audience drifted on down the ‘Nuum. Outsiders embraced Dubstep, some like myself, practically gave up on Urban Music altogether, having one's interest piqued by Bassline and Funky but never sated.

The entirely unpredictable punch line came in the form of celebrity MCs like Dizzy Rascal, Wiley and Tinchy Strider scoring chart hits. "Bonkers", "Wearing My Rolex" and "Number 1" have been all been very well, but they reveal little what made Grime so special in the first case; they’ve simply been “no brainer” music-business-savvy post-Shoreditch Chart Electro made hip by MCs with boatloads of charisma. There has been no “organic” breakthrough of artists in the way, for instance, that Run DMC exploded out of Old Skool Hip-Hop. Wiley, Dizzy and Tinchy still remain enormous talents, but divorced from their rightful production context, come across rather like decadent grandees squandering their artistic potential.

The last time I saw Terror Danjah was at an After Shock label showcase he had organised for Urban East 2005 in Stratford at the absolute peak of Grime’s eminence and promise. Crazy Titch was there performing “I Can C U, U Can C Me” (on TD’s Aftershock label), Sadie Ama performed “So Sure”, Shola Ama “So Contagious” and Bruza did “Bruzin’”. The producer’s stock could not have been higher. His vision was to create a kind of Soul-to-Soul style musical environment with singers and MCs all riding one producer’s beats. It didn’t work for the equally gifted Sticky and it didn’t work for Terror either. He would have been left on the shelf were it not for the recent support of Dubstep (forthcoming releases on Hyperdub) and IDM with this disc.

This compilation, on the bristling-with-life Planet Mu label, brainchild of Mike Paradinas’s (aka µ-Ziq ), makes many less mistakes than Rephlex the other great Post-IDM dance label did with their “Grime” compilations. Rephlex’s compilations came in refreshingly good time (usually bohemian circles need five years before which to embrace something as spiky as Grime, a process Poet and legendary blogger Luke Davies refers to witheringly as “half-life”). However that label committed the hugely embarrassing gaffe of the records not actually being Grime compilations at all, but documents of the nascent Dubstep scene. On the other hand, in the same way that Depth Charge’s J Saul Kane saw fit in the height of Mo Wax breaks culture to release a triple-disc set of Classic Electro, “Beat Classic” stripped of the vocals that were an essential part of the experience, Planet Mu have delivered us not with a Terror Danjah “Greatest Hits”, resplendent with “Cock Back”, “Boogieman” and “Not Convince”, but with a series of his instrumentals. Sometimes it pays to do the obvious thing and not the clever thing.

This isn’t quite the catastrophe it could be. TD was in the habit, like Wiley, of releasing instrumental discs. These would have been used primarily over the air or at the dance for people to MC over. But for the listener with a background in Techno to see the appeal of these vocally-unadorned riddims isn’t quite reading too far against the grain. These instrumentals were exceptionally special. If TD has any obvious forebear in the history of dance music, it would have to be the Lee Perry of Black Ark-era. Sonically the parallels are unmistakeable. At this time Perry had distinct sonic signatures: the mooing cow, the valley-deep/mountain-high phasing, the echoated dis-rhythmic percussion as texture and the amplified child’s bird water-pipe. A combination of all of them found their way into everything he did, in the same way onions and garlic feature prominently in Mediterranean cuisine. In an equivalent manner on every one of these tracks Terror Danjah has his bizarrely distorted “What will it be/Follow the beat” (Gremlin) voice, the horror strings, the strafing/glinting synth line, and the cackle. In cases the difference between tracks can be as simple as one element of his custom vocabulary brought to the fore and given a melodic twist. So for instance the strings carry “Haunted” (the instrumental of “Boogieman”) with the sublime “Crowbar 2” it’s the harp-like top line, on his remix of DJ Marsta’s “Fibre” it’s the bass-line. However, the more one is immersed in the Venusian Electro of “Gremlinz” the more these tics vanish from one’s ear-range, as though one becomes accustomed to the lush alien undergrowth and details like the quality of reverberations and the filigreed drum patterns come to the fore like busy insects or the glow of fireflies.