Grime DVDs
Beef? You want beef! I'll give all the trimmings! Armshouse? You want armshouse! I'll give you armshouse at your sixth form media college in the video editing suite! Nokia face-off! I'll knock YOUR face off! (Slumps) If like me you're trying to peel yourself off the floor of 2005, struggling to look the looming edifice of the forthcoming year in the eye you'd do as well to point your browser at rhythmdivision.co.uk or independance-records.co.uk and pick up a copy of the "Aim High Volume Two DVD" (Aim High). Watch Riko fresh from the clinker cluck like a chicken and toy with a man-size joint as he swivels in an armchair behind Targets billion-track console, easily the best TV you'll watch this year. Witness the Newham General as he lisps and his eyeballs pop in Jammers lab. Listen with your eyes as Targets signature afghani-flavoured accordian spools out into the poorly-lit vacated office building (with its beige deep ply carpet) that doubles as the Aim High HQ, and think everything you see.
The DVD is the new lingua franca of Grime. Only DJs and Middle-class tossbags like me buy the twelve inches for goodness sakes! In the hood man dem just tape Logan Sama's show and huddle round the Playstation. In the past few months we've seen more DVDs than Iceland offers combo deals on the full array of frozen goods. "Risky Roads", "Practice Hours" and before them "Lord of The Decks" and "Box Bloody Fresh", and the pace of their release is definitely quickening. Well it's a bargain innit, you get a charisma-packed DVD glittering with all your favourite icons strutting their stuff AND a CD. Sorted. It's hard to imagine how the pressure can be maintained, yet another East End expose would surely strain the patience, but with a glut of other sets in the pipeline the format is here to stay. The DVD looks set to become to Grime what the extended mix twelve inch was to Disco, the flexi-disc was to Indie, the 8-cassette pack was Hardcore and the mix CD is to Hip-Hop. The ramifications for the scene's structure of grassroots outlets (the pirate radio show, the underground record store etc) is yet to be felt, though the growth of Channel U, the cable show which screens the escalating number of shoestring Grime Pop Promos may be indicative of the change in climate towards a more visually-oriented culture.
It's the time of year when one has patience for only two sorts of music: the violent and the melancholic. While Grime may service the former, for the latter you'd do as well to reach for "Gather in the Mushrooms" (Castle) a collection of British Acid Folk Rock forged between 1968 and 1974. This brilliant and timely compilation, guided by the invisible hand of St Etienne's Bob Stanley will give you the inside track on this glaciated hinterland. With electronica artists like Matmos and Kieran Hebden relishing in the cod-ethnicity of Comus, Pentangle and Vashti Bunyan (an ethnicity which seems more compellingly authentic with the passing of time) and with prices for the original vinyl spirraling ever upward, here's a nifty short-cut to hipster nirvana.