- The London grime veteran and Durban gqom pioneer's joint EP for Hakuna Kulala is an inventive, electrifying tête-à-tête.
- Beyond Gqom & Grime presents a back-and-forth between London grime veteran Scratchclart (AKA Scratcha DVA) and Durban gqom pioneer Menzi Shabane. Across its five tracks, the producers rework songs by each other, remix collaboratively and co-author an original. While these experiments highlight the potential relationship between these genres, neither producer is a purist. Scratchclart encountered gqom in its infancy during a 2011 trip to Johannesburg (as discussed in a recent interview with PAM), and has already spent years fusing it with grime on his DRMTRK series. Menzi, meanwhile, helped to establish gqom with Infamous Boiz, but has since taken it into more industrial, alien realms, notably on 2020's Impazamo. Beyond Gqom & Grime offers not just a conversation between genres but between two genuine musical innovators.
The dynamic between these genres is clearest where Beyond Gqom & Grime references the early, pre-gqom chapters of Scratchclart's career. Collaboratively remixing his 2008 grime track "Nasty, Nasty, Nasty," Menzi and Scratchclart furnish the original beat with gqom-inspired percussion, chopped vocals and deeper synth sounds. It's a darker, more muscular track. This is inverted on Scratchclart's airy, melodic "RnG Remix" of Menzi's "Shandis," drawing from grime's softer RnG sub-genre. These decisions emphasise gqom's physicality, presenting its rise as having offered British grime producers (like Scratchclart himself) an entry-point to more crushingly heavy sounds.
Where Menzi remixes Scratchclart's later DRMTRK tracks—which already involve fusions of gqom and grime—he enhances the sense of space. "IC3"' is wetter and darker in Menzi's hands, but also more spatially complex, with waves of undulating distortion roaring in the distance. The comparatively airless beat of Scratchclart's 2018 "Drm Walk" returns in Menzi's remix as a slower, less opaque ghost of itself, amidst sirens and sheets of rain—but is this London or Durban rain? Both remixes pull Scratchclart's genre-fusing experiments out from the studio, and throw them into a vast, ambiguous space, pointing to the flow of these musical ideas between Durban, London and other points across the globe.
On the duo's collaborative track, "Q," the drums and vocal samples duel between sterile synths and lush orchestral swells. Sampling a YouTube video teaching Xhosa to English-speakers, "Q" evokes the Western music fans who have been electrified by gqom, and probably had to look up how to pronounce it. Beyond gqom and grime's conventions, Scratchclart & Menzi here point to the curiosity that has driven their experiments in these genres—once separately, and now together.
Tracklist01. Menzi - Shandis (Scratchclart's RnG Remix)
02. Scratchclart - Drm Walk (Menzi Remix)
03. Menzi & Scratchclart - Q
04. Scratchclart - IC3 (Menzi Remix)
05. Scratchclart Nasty Nasty Nasty (Menzi Remix)