Jammer - N.A.S.T.Y. Mix

(Click on the picture to download.)

Some more griminess, this time courtesy of ex-N.A.S.T.Y. Crew member Jammer. This mix was also a cover cd of Deuce Magazine in 2003 and it's basically a showcase of Jammer's then-recent production work. Now I can't really claim to be an expert on the genre, but this is still one of the best grime-cds I've ever listened to, be it mixtapes, dj mixes or regular albums. The quality of the tracks is conistently high, and though I guess most people will prefer the first half with the vocal versions of classics like Kano's Boys Love Girls and Davinche's Grimey, I especially love the all instrumental second half.

It's without an MC to guide you through the tracks and provide vocal hooks that you realize how odd a lot of this music really is: all sparse, hyper-syncopated, spastic rhythms, blaring and squelching synth noises and eruptous bass lines, quite abrasive, yet weirdly catchy. There's a strange dichotomy between the roughness and sparseness of the sounds and the often bombastic arrangements, resulting in a kind of minimalist maximalism. Best of all are the parts where those pseudo-oriental, plinkety-plonkety synth strings come in, of which Jammer was obviously quite fond at the time. Fantastic stuff, this.