NUKG Monthly: Nikki Nair, INVT, Gracie T and more
Nathan Evans' UK garage and club music column covers the latest songs, remixes, bootlegs, mixes and albums that captures his attention.
Cover image credit: SPRAYBOX
Mix of the Month: Nikki Nair - Rinse FM (UKG Special), 10th May 2023
Henry Ivy recently wrote that “it's hard to believe that Introspekt isn't actually from the UK”. A similar line of thinking pops into mind when listening to Nikki Nair mix. On the Atlanta DJ’s new 2-hour UKG Special on his Rinse FM residency, his track selections are indicative of a crate digger’s mentality.
A huge swath of it is the stuff you can’t get on regular streaming platforms but is only available because someone generously recorded it straight from vinyl and stuck it on Soundcloud or Bandcamp. You’re more than likely going to hear a tune from Wideboys or MJ Cole that you’ve never heard before and to match that era of their dominance, Nair throws the classic Korg organ on top of songs by Usher, OutKast, Alicia Keys and the Fugees.
Nair has been on a roll with toying with vintage aesthetics this year, given his time-twisting new collaboration with Hudson Mohawke, but this new Rinse mix has the gravitas of Dreem Teem’s Essential Mix.
Selector Björk Playing Hudson Mohawke and Nikki Nair
That Nikki Nair and Hudson Mohawke I just mentioned? The lead track from it, ‘Set the Roof’ was played by none other than Björk during a protest concert in Iceland. Björk has been a fan of HudMo for years and the Set the Roof EP being released on Warp Records likely got her attention. But it’s been a recurring joke online that every DJ plays Nair’s tracks, and it’s mind-boggling to think that he is now at a point of ubiquity now where one of modern music’s most adventurous artists is no different.
Also, it’s fun to wonder what other tracks she's liking at the minute. Is she a Two Shell head? If she likes producers playing with the form of garage house, Villager is definitely her bag. Maybe she likes some Minor Science? She’d love what’s coming out of the CloudCore label at the minute.
INVT & Logan_olm - MIAMI 2 LONDON: SOUND CLASH
Like the Petronas Towers, INVT and Logan_olm reaching out to each other took them both higher. Miami duo INVT has been featured on NUKG Monthly already this year, and Brent, London rapper Logan_olm was one of the many MCs to paint The Bug’s incredible noise-ragga album Fire from 2021. But together on the two-tracker MIAMI 2 LONDON: SOUND CLASH, they’re a pairing that raises each other’s game with more considered, patient production filled with tightly-wound flow patterns.
‘We Inside’ has INVT’s typically foggy, Silent Hill-coloured garage and a slightly robotic filter on Logan’s voice. He sounds undead as he enters his flow so casually, you believe that he’s barely registered the beat despite being locked in. The gunge-y bass doesn’t come in until a third of the way in, so confident is the production that it doesn’t need to bloat out with bells and whistles to hold your attention.
On the other half, Logan_olm demeans his “little boy” opponent ‘Ignite Dem’. His cold, tireless combo of attacks inside the second verse step over the humps of a beat switch-up from garage to dembow. Run the EP through and you’ll enjoy a thoughtfully sewn-up transition between tracks, too.
Joy Orbison - Pinky Ring (Kelbin Edit)
Italian producer Kelbin’s remix of Daphni’s ‘Cloudy’ is my song of the year so far. Meditating on the soul of the track in a way Daphni could not, he extends the underlying melancholia of the original piano cascade out like a reflection in a lake, while adding a small family of robotic synths that hold the reflective thoughts of something lost and searching.
As part of San Fran label Tabula Rasa’s new edit pack [REDACTED], Kelbin’s new garage updo of Joy Orbison’s ‘Pinky Ring’ reverses the premise - taking out the more drawn-out parts of Orbison’s UK bass roarer and turning the rest into scintillating 2step. He neuters the bass growl and turns the tempo up, keeping the core vocal chop while adding sour keys that fervently dance around. There are still the details that make Kelbin’s music what it is, such as the ever-so-flourished sub-bass that’s like a friendly signature underneath it all.
Update: Shortly after the piece published, this song was taken down. Link to the rest of the compilation is still up.
Kishan & Arfa - Feel Good
Like being a fan of boom-bap hip-hop, listening to garage will make you more accustomed to jazz’s tones, chords and harmonic hues. Writing about jazz in a UKG column makes me feel like the guy who harps on in a girl’s ear in the club, but Kishan and Arfa’s latest EP Feel Good is enough for me to get over that.
The first element you’ll notice across these tracks are the very physical drums that are recorded with the crispness of a live instrument. It’s very similar to how GD4YA is renovating UKG, broken beat and jazz into one house.
Kishan and Arfa work with quite melancholic parts, like the descending keys on ‘Kicks’, but the London-based producers make it fun through eager chops that have a myriad of details to catch; hits of atmosphere, arrow-shaped Korg organ flecks and crushed vocals. The title track uses frosted-glass keys that play a Glasper-like two-chord progression, and there’s a breakdown where the drums and bass are just dancing between each other.
Gracie T - Foundation FM (Specialists + Gracie T), 10th May 2023
Part of the Daytimers crew with Yung Singh and yourboykiran, Sheffield’s Gracie T delivers a two-hour marathon of bassline sprints for Foundation FM. It’s like a contortionist show with sound in which you’re constantly dazzled by the directions these basslines are warped in, always managing to find the next rung of the ladder. Gracie T was picked by none other than M.I.A. to open up her Boiler Room night in London, and here, she clocks in a session of the most acerbic styles of garage, grime, bassline and donk mixed with pop edits that would make Big Ang tear up. No matter where she goes in this mix, she always returns to those squirming, gritty basslines.
SPD & Griz-O - Relax
SPD and Griz-O hate the partygoers who take it too far, and the title track from their Relax EP with Bristol-based label Animated Audio confronts them. You know the types - the ones that can’t behave themselves on a night out, have no regard for spatial awareness, shake the barriers if the club has them and always come in hot and leave early. As the self-proclaimed “Southwest Sicko” Griz-O says, “chill with it”. He raps with a soft conviction like Donae’o, and the track itself has the same eye for observing people and nightlife as The Streets.
Speed Garage Bootleg of the Month: KE-YEN - ROUGH DUB
Rumor Control’s ‘Push The Renegade Gunman To Show Me Love’ was a candidate for this month’s crown for being the ‘easy mashup’ to end all easy mashups, almost sucking all bootlegs into a black hole and rendering them all null and void.
That shouldn’t diminish Ke-Yen’s bootleg of Home T, Cocoa Tea & Cutty Ranks’s ‘The Going is Rough’, quite the opposite of an easy mashup. The Aussie DJ catches the dancehall deep cut in an infectious loop that helixes around grilling bass to make a cut more incendiary than Skream’s Twitter.