Glasgow: No mean city

“I reckon,” yells Russell ‘Inkke’ Paterson over murky hip hop boom, “that this is the only club in the world playing nothin’ but old skool Memphis rap.” He looks round at the kids raving, bathed in the green glow of Glasgow’s Art School lights. “The venue’s rad, it’s always been rad. I can just hit ’em up and say, hey man I wanna put on a night playing 90s Memphis rap, and they’re like, yeah man, do it!”

The night in question is F.W.D.K. Inkke’s semi-regular homage to the syrup-slow textures and lo-fi rattle of 90s dirty South hip hop. The 23-year-old is both resident and promoter, and when he’s not laughing with his mates, he’s behind the decks, interspersing his own productions – skewed fusions of menacing rap beats and grime energy – with tracks ripped from crusty sounding cassettes. He’s dropping 20-year-old obscurities that have rarely made it beyond the blocks where they were first recorded; in most cities this would be an impossibly niche prospect. But this isn’t most cities: this is Glasgow, a city where a combination of multiple universities alongside the local’s long-standing love of nightlife has created a perfect storm of new ravers and old heads, all living and breathing underground culture. Now, rising up from this nurturing space for what seems like the umpteenth time, a new generation of Glaswegian producers and DJs are ready to rep once more.

Inkke’s debut album ‘Faded With Da Kittens’ (hence FWDK) was released on Glasgow/London label Astral Black back in 2014. A journey through stoned Memphis rap textures, the record was an unexpected side-step for a producer who was just starting to gain traction with his series of neck-snapping grime war dubs. While a more linear A&R man might decry this move as ‘confusing the brand’, Astral Black has been making a name for itself by refusing to let its artists be pigeonholed, drawing favourable comparisons to the early work of still formidable Glaswegian genre-smashers Numbers and LuckyMe.

Originally started in London by hip hop beat-maker Jon Phonics back in 2013, two months after starting the label, Phonics found himself in Glasgow “to visit some pals for a week. That turned into a month, and that turned into three years plus…” Enamoured with the city, Phonics has since released music from a slew of new artists that make up a loosely affiliated Glaswegian scene, putting out records by the likes of Inkke, DJ Milktray, Bushido and Dressin Red. The link between all of them is a curiosity in searching out new ways to blend UK rave culture with hip hop and grime aesthetics- and Phonics is reluctant to pin them down beyond this, citing a restless creativity as the foundation of the city’s music scene.

“Glasgow has a history as a techno city, there’s obviously some influential labels and club nights here that focus on that, but the people I’ve met who run those labels and nights are, on the whole, pretty open minded. The kids who grew up going to those nights are now the new artists coming through, and I think as a direct result of that encouraged open-mindedness, you end up with people making Memphis-inspired slow mo rap beats but who also own every Dance Mania record ever released. Or Bushido, for example, who is making dancehall-infused club music but also used to go happy hardcore nights.”

The day after Inkke’s F.W.D.K. party there’s a chance to hear this fusion in effect. Inkke’s met up with fellow young producers Milktray and Bleaker. Milktray often shares bills with Inkke, bringing his own brand of grime re-edits, doing everything from versioning 90s r’n’b classics into jittering 140bpm floor-fillers to turning DJ XTC's grime classic 'Functions on the Low' into a 4/4 dancefloor monster (far before Stormzy bought the beat into the charts). Bleaker, meanwhile, is a young Glaswegian who has found his Unknown To The Unknown-signed revamp of speed garage favourite ‘Hype The Funk’ –a kinetic assault of kick, clap and snare with all the rawness and energy of a Dance Mania killer, getting spun as much in garage sets on Rinse FM as it is being dropped by Black Madonna in Berlin. None of the three make records that sound the same, yet somehow all of their tunes could appear in a single set without any raised eyebrows.

Today they are hanging on the corner of an industrial estate. It would be a cold, relentlessly miserable scene if there wasn’t a vast graffiti mural splashed over one of the nearby warehouse walls; this is a local recording studio and – on the downlow – an after-hours club. Outside the studio the Just Jam truck has pulled up. It’s the reason the trio are on this windy corner: the London streaming website is on a tour of UK cities, filming local artists DJing from within their custom-built lorry. As Bleaker records the first set of the day, Milktray and Inkke affably explain the influences that make up their mix of techno, grime and hip hop.

“I grew up on LuckyMe, Numbers,” says Milktray “listening to a lot of radio sets, watching YouTube, Channel U – I didn’t have Sky so I’d have to go to a friend’s house to watch it.”

“I didn’t have the internet until I was 15 or 16 or something,” counters Inkke. “Someone gave me Wiley’s album, and I’d get tapes off people, grime radio sets. And I used to go to the Fortified night.”

Milktray explains: “Fortifed used to book grime people. That was at the Art School ages ago. They’d book Elijah & Skilliam, Ben UFO, Jackmaster playing a grime set. But Gordon, the guy who owns it, worked on the rigs so he was away a lot, and it ended up stopping.”

In the time that Fortified was active it helped disseminate grime into the city’s DNA. Glasgow is a small place – when a new sound enters, it doesn’t just hit the radar of a contained scene, it gets noticed by all the heads in the city. This creates an interesting situation of individualism and hybridity – all the producers here are keen on pursuing their own unique style, but they also spend a lot of time checking each other’s nights out, drawing on the parts they enjoy. Hip hop heads go to techno nights, and grime fans listen to disco. With this particular set of young artists it’s led to a sound that is hard to define – except by what it’s not. It’s not, for example, the linear, big-room techno that Glaswegian stalwart Soma Records has been making famous for years. It seems the crucial switch in style has been the introduction of the bass and syncopation of hip hop and grime. But Bleaker, set now finished, insists that trying to come up with a single banner for the music this new generation is making is a mistake.

“I don’t think it makes sense to have a name for the scene. Glasgow’s such a small city, there’s us and our pals, everyone does a totally different sound, but everyone’s into what everyone else does. Everyone goes to the same nights, regardless of what’s going on, so it all goes into a melting pot, and people just take what they want from that. It’s less focused than some scenes where everyone is focusing towards this same goal, and developing the sound together. In Glasgow it’s not quite the same; we take influence from each other, but we’re all doing our own thing.”

As a case in point, Bleaker is about to go on an American tour with Gang Fatale, the country-wide collective made up of similarly like-minded early 20-somethings obsessed with rhythmically aberrant techno. There doesn’t seem to be any bitterness among his contemporaries about this potential step-up, though.

“If someone does well then it’ll do better for you anyway, because people will be looking at what’s happening here, and at your pals,” Inkke says. “I don’t think there’s any competition.” This magnanimous attitude is probably helped by the fact that he is himself a rising star: this July his ‘Secret Palaces’ EP was treated to a 12” release by LuckyMe, confirming his ascent to Glasgow’s A-list.

At this point, Nightwave (pictured below) shows up to record a set. Born in Slovenia, Maya Medvesek came to London in the early noughties before moving up to Glasgow from where she runs her Heka Trax label, seven releases deep in a catalogue that has pushed mutations of grime and club to the forefront. The Heka Trax output seems typical of this new Glaswegian sound in that it exists in the spaces between tunes, where grime meets techno, and hip hop meets bass. “No boring vanilla house,” Nightwave laughs, defining both her sound and the new sound of Glasgow. “Nothing where it’s just a thump for three hours.”

As an outsider who has lived in both London and Glasgow, Medvesek is perhaps best placed to sum up what is going on in the Scottish city. “Glasgow’s really small. It’s cheap to get around so we have a really healthy scene. The only down-side is that everything closes at 3am, but we end up just going to people’s houses for massive afterparties. They tried to make people drink less with the early closing but now they just get mad wi’ it more.”

She speaks with the self-possession of someone clearly able to hold her own in the ‘boys club’ world of dance music – both on the decks and off them. It turns out that this skill comes in handy a few weeks later, when she finds herself at the receiving end of a load of online abuse for daring to be a women playing on Boiler Room – the gist of which was that she was only booked to play because she was someone’s girlfriend. “Good to see all the experts in the Boiler Room chat!” she breezily tweeted in response to the haters. “Thanks! Come clean my flat sometime.” It was the kind of response you’d expect from a Glasgow-based producer; people here can give as good as they get, and it would take far more than an anonymous troll to derail someone with Nightwave’s self-belief. “It is quite macho up here,” she confesses, “so I try and get more women DJs involved – I don’t make it a big thing, but just try and balance it out.”

As she says this, she finishes off a can of beer and, along with everyone present, starts cracking into a bottle of whisky – partially to ward off the increasingly bitter wind.

“The weather’s usually pretty shit here,” she acknowledges. “There’s nothing to do but drink and go out and have a good time. You’re not allowed to drink on the streets any more, so you’ve got to go into a club. So that’s what we do.”

Paradoxically, the next day the city is hot with sunshine. As if to prove the communal nature of Glasgow, the Just Jam van is spotted by producer and DJ Double Nugget, who also designs the lights for Hudson Mohawke’s stage show. It turns out he’s an old hand at running raves in the mountains, and directs the van out into the beautiful rolling hills surrounding Loch Lomond, a vast lake an hour outside the city, to shoot the day’s sets.

American motorists, up in the Highlands searching for Braveheart moments to share with the folks back home, seem baffled as they pass the truck. It’s doubtful they came all this way to Caledonia expecting to see high-spirited local kids tearing around playing twinkling grime melodies, hectic footwork rhythms, and bursts of comically foul-mouthed ghetto tech – particularly halfway up a mountain where the main residents are sheep and thistles.

At one point a car cruises by and its wheels catch on a trailing camera lead. The lead goes taut, and for a horrible moment it looks as though the truck will be pulled apart by the motion of the car. As everyone shouts and waves, the driver eventually stops, and Double Nugget goes over. “Eh, it’s fucking Gordon!” he says to the others. It turns out that, miraculously, the driver is the guy who runs the Fortified parties that Milktray and Inkke were praising the day before. This, everyone agrees, is the nature of Glasgow, as Double Nugget laughs, “everyone knows everyone. The place is tiny, and we all make music.”

Eventually Gordon drives off with a wave, Double Nugget goes to the decks and cranks out some high-speed ghetto tech while the lads around him drink and laugh in the Scottish sunshine. They may not have a name for what they’re doing, but right now, they definitely have a vibe. It’s pretty clear which they think is more important.