Six artists Annie Mac says to watch in 2016

Annie: “Sam’s 18 and from Stirling. I first came across him when I heard his track ‘Long Distance’ and played it incessantly on my show. It sounded like nothing I’d heard before. The quality of his productions is so high for someone so young. In a world of SoundCloud trap fodder, his music stands out for being tremendously creative and imaginative.”

Right from his first appearance on SoundCloud a couple of years back the music of Sam Gellaitry has been exhilaratingly futuristic, a startling melee of strings, Middle Eastern instrumentation, gigantic bass, asymmetrical hip hop beats and much more, sounding unlike anything else around. Even more extraordinary is the fact it’s made by a teenager from the quiet Scottish city of Stirling who’s been producing since he was 12.

“I started being interested when I was ten,” he says. “My older brother Michael used to make music, heavy happy hardcore, and he had software on the family computer. There was a sampler called Acid Pro that I used to muck around on. Then when I was twelve I discovered FruityLoops Studio, which is what I still use.”

At 13 he was into Daft Punk and part of an online community sharing old disco samples. If French house was an early influence, he soon moved on to Flying Lotus and other styles that fed into his impressively eclectic worldview.

“Certainly hip hop stuff, yes, Flying Lotus, Rustie , Hudson Mohawke,” he begins. “I was listening to a lot of abstract off-beat styles, really bright-coloured music. Then there’s game sounds: I used to play Rayman all the time so that got into me when I was really young. Jazz, of course. I first came to that through Jamiroquai but now I’m really into fusion jazz – Lenny White, Jeff Lorber, Roy Ayers. I like the way they don’t have any boundaries and just make whatever sounds good to them.”

Gellaitry’s music certainly avoids boundaries. His ‘Short Stories’ EP on smart alt-hip hop LA label Soulection at the start of last year boasted a wild range of styles. The label sent him on a DJ tour of Europe last summer, and having never even been to a club before he was able to see for the first time how crowds responded to his tunes.

“When people are dancing to four-to-the-floor music they don’t fully react,” he says. “When it’s really repetitive they’re lost in it, but when its trap and bassier stuff they just lose it, jumping around, which is really good fun, more energy.”

Gellaitry is the son of a teacher mum and a father who makes bagpipes. At 16 he went to a local music college but left to pursue music full time in July 2014, when his SoundCloud account had a million hits in a month. At the end of last year he launched his ‘Escapism’ EP on XL Records, and it’s just as experimental as his previous stuff. But when Mixmag asks whether he sees his career taking the Aphex Twin route of being an underground enigma who pops up every few years, or the higher-profile Daft Punk route, with giant live shows and a pop rep, he’s unsure.

“Hopefully a mix of the two,” he says. “I’d like to be discreet but known for the music. I never want to pop up in Heat magazine.”

For now Sam is a well-kept secret, but with a talent this big, his potential is limitless.

Annie: "This girl is something special. I put her AK Paul collab ‘So Good’ on my AMP 2014 compilation and have been watching her ever since. She’s found a real sound – groove-laden, slinky pop music – but it’s her voice that shines through. Flawless r’n’b/soul. She’s gonna have an incredible year"

NAO – pronounced ‘nay-oh’ – puts her musicality down to her family background. Raised in Hackney by a social worker mother who encouraged her to take singing and piano lessons, she’s the youngest of five siblings.

“Music’s massive in my family,” she giggles in her sweetly high-pitched voice. “We listen to it more than we watch TV or play PlayStation. I have four brothers and sisters and there was music coming out of every room every day, morning to night. They’d all be going out, bringing it home, the pirate radio stations of their generation – Rinse FM, Kool FM. You don’t realise how much it has an impact, except with hindsight.”

NAO used to gig around her local area, then went to Guildhall School of Music and Drama where she studied jazz, but when she left she says “I came full circle to where I started.” She initially cut some songs with a student friend, the producer John Calvert. The result was ‘Back Porch’ which ended up on her debut ‘So Good’ EP (whose title cut was produced by AK Paul, brother of Jai). It immediately won props for its chewy amalgam of Jill Scott-style nu-soul lyricism with the electronic heft of Aluna George or SBTRKT. Disclosure were among those listening and asked NAO to sing on ‘Superego’ from their second album, ’Caracal’.

“I was just a bedroom artist, a no-one,” NAO laughs self-deprecatingly, “and one of the biggest bands tweeted that I’d been on their radar. When they were writing their album they called me up. I never thought I could be a singer and get paid. I was bumbling along, making a living. When I started my own music I never thought anyone would listen. The first time I realised things were going to change was when I did my first headline show at Electrowerkz 18 months ago. It sold out.”

NAO had put the time in as a backing singer with Kwabs, Jarvis Cocker and others, and by supporting Imagine Dragons on tour, but with the releases that followed during 2015, the ‘February 15’ EP and ‘Bad Blood’ single, her profile grew (the latter aided by a striking, somewhat disturbing video featuring nudity and plants growing out of people’s eyes).

After a successful UK tour at the end of last year she’s now working on her debut album with producers including Kaytranada, and will embark on a bigger European tour in April. She’s clearly thrilled that her music has found an audience, but when Mixmag asks if she’d ever want to be as big as Beyoncé she’s not so sure.

“I don’t think I’d like that,” she says. “Beyoncé is amazing, but I see my life being a bit more than music. I want to be in control, not part of massive machine.”

But it must be good to earn a living as a singer-songwriter?

“Yes,” she agrees, “I used to do a little bit of teaching, singing and piano, but now I’m full-time NAO.”

By the end of 2016, full-time NAO may well be the state of many people’s playlists.

Annie: "As grime gets more and more ubiquitous, there are more MCs breaking through from outside London. CoCo killed it at the end of 2015 with ‘Big Bou Yah’, a dancehall-sampling, spacey banger. His bars are sharp and funny and memorable and I’m super-excited to see him break through in 2016."

Grime is still undergoing a serious and continuing renaissance, and one of its prime new talents is CoCo. Known to his family as Leon Riley, CoCo moved from his native Sheffield to London in February 2015. To keep body and soul together he landed a job as a business broker in Aldgate, but his true passion will always be music.

“I want to reach out,” the 24-year-old MC enthuses. “Money would be good if it came, but that’s not the reason I do music. I just want as many people to know about CoCo as possible.”

You can’t fault his ambition and, fortunately, he has the talent to back it up. Over the last year his hyper-speed flow has drawn much attention on bass-basted tunes such as ‘Big Bou Yah’ and ‘Target Practice’ recorded with Toddla T for the latter’s Girls Music label.

“Everyone thinks me and Toddla T go way back because of the Sheffield connection,” he laughs, “but I’d never seen him there, only in London. We have a mutual friend, the bass producer DS1, and he played Toddla a tune I’d made. I went to night at XOYO and met him. A week after that, on our second session in the studio, we made ‘Target Practice’.”

CoCo has also cropped up to notable effect guesting on BBC Radio 1Xtra and made a huge impression with his appearances last summer at Ibiza Rocks and the Notting Hill Carnival. The younger of two children to a single mother who works as a nurse, he fell in love with the local grime scene while at secondary school.

“It was very good in Sheffield when I was younger,” he recalls. “The best it ever was. I aspired to be like people around me. I don’t know how I found this passion for music or MCing but somehow it just stuck. It fitted with me.”

He formed a collective with older local MCs such as Shinobi, MDK and Smiley – who initially had to smuggle him, under age, into venues. By the time he was 17 he was appearing regularly at venues such as West Street Live and Plug, and his YouTube videos, including the catchy ‘Hey Mambo’, were drawing tens of thousands of hits. He puts his crisp, distinctive mic style down to number of factors: “My mum’s well–spoken and I’ve always been quite a perfectionist. I used to draw very carefully and I have neat handwriting. I take pride in what I do.”

So we can conclude that his mother was also a big influence, then?

“She was a supermum,” he says, “Although when I was young she was always telling me to turn my music down and focus on school, on the real world. Now that I live in London she doesn’t stop ringing me – ‘I heard you on the radio again!’ – she just can’t get enough of it.”

CoCo’s mum may be his No 1 fan but, with big plans for 2016, she’ll soon have a whole lot of company.

Annie: "A terrifyingly talented young man from Guernsey. He’s nineteen years old and already a brilliant songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and music producer. He has that ability to make amazing pop songs with a real sonic edge – pop that feels familiar and foreign all at the same time."

Mura Masa, AKA 19-year-old Alex Crossan, is best known for his remixes – notably his sleek, submerged version of Ed Sheeran’s ‘Thinking Out Loud’, but also RL Grime’s ‘Kingpin’, Aquilo’s ‘Losing You’ and The Avener’s ‘Fadeout Lines’. He used to create abstract hip hop in the style of one of his musical heroes, Flying Lotus (as can be heard on his 2014 debut album, ‘Soundtrack To A Death’, on German label Jakarta) but has since developed his own unique style, bridging the worlds of classy home listening and late-night dancefloor. For further evidence, check the pulsing, dreamy ‘Firefly’, featuring another of Annie’s Future Talent picks for 2016, NAO. It all seems a long way from death metal (it was a metal track that gave him the Mura Masa moniker), yet Crossan doesn’t think so.

“I used to be in couple of really heavy metal bands – deathcore,” he says, drily. “You know, I have this argument all the time about the difference between that and electronic music, but I think metal shares a lot with hip hop culture and dance music. There’s an impassioned energy coming through. With metal it tends to be anger, whereas dance music is euphoria. It’s all the same to me. I’ve never really drawn those lines. I’ve always been quite diverse. It wasn’t that big a leap – though when you listen to the metal stuff I did, you might think so.”

Raised on his American mother’s music, Joni Mitchell and the like, Alex was cut off from a broader range of musical styles by his isolation on the Channel Islands.

“Guernsey is a beautiful place,” he says, “but so far removed. You’d never get a culture like grime there. It lacks its own cultural identity, which is why I eventually latched onto lots of different things rather than one sound or one culture.”

When he was 15 Crossan heard Hudson Mohawke via YouTube and was intrigued. For the next five years the internet became his “back yard” as he “realised there was good music in the world”. From Mount Kimbie to Floating Points, Cashmere Cat to Warp Records he explored and explored – but one name became especially important: “With James Blake it was clear you could be an electronic artist and still be an amazing musician and songwriter.”

When his SoundCloud account reached 8,000 followers, he signed a management deal and is now working hard on his debut album. He’s currently based in Brighton where he went to university, though he’s now dropped out to focus on music. He recently completed a UK tour, featuring Bonzai on vocals who’s signed to his label Anchor Point, and there’s also a remix of Ibeyi forthcoming. In terms of where he’s headed in the longer term, Mura Masa admires Jamie xx, who he reckons “has crossed over but hasn’t conceded on his sound.” With the likes of Diplo and Skrillex paying attention to Mura Masa’s music, it seems likely he’ll have the opportunity to take a similar path…

Annie: "ANOTR are two friends from Amsterdam in their early twenties who used to make music under the name Piotr & Zhan. They changed their name and their sound to be more hard-hitting; now it’s really solid house music for the dancefloor. I’ve been supporting their DFTD release heavily in my sets and shows."

In Autumn of last year a tune popped up on Defected’s DFTD sub-label that single-handedly began wrecking a multitude of very different kinds of floors. DJs on the case ranged from Armand Van Helden to Josh Butler to Carl Craig. It was a 4/4 banger pitched somewhere between techno and house but with diva-ish vocal snippets that recalled the high days of rave. Titled ‘Strobe’, it became the tune that put Dutch duo ANOTR on the map.

“Dance music from the Netherlands is mostly seen as Dutch house and EDM,” says Jesse van der Heijden, the coil-haired half of the pair. “I grew up with that kind of dance music everywhere, and I wasn’t really interested. It was only after I discovered techno and old-skool house when I was 17… it started from there.”

“Seeing Alan Fitzpatrick at Awakenings, that’s where it all it began for me,” adds his longer-haired, bearded partner Oguzhan Guney. “I also started to look up to guys like Joseph Capriati and Adam Beyer. It’s not our music but we really enjoy the vibe of it, and when do a closing set we play a lot of techno – it keeps the crowd lively.”

The pair have followed ‘Strobe’ with ‘Want My Love’ on Snatch! Records, and their bi-monthly Base night is becoming a fixture in the Amsterdam calendar, but they reckon the key to their future success is the fact they’ve spent the past year stacking up reams of tracks, made especially for their own sets.

“We have over forty completed tracks,” smiles Jesse. “So many unreleased tunes waiting to drop! We can do a whole set just from our unreleased tunes.”

Both 21 and still students (Jesse’s at a music conservatory and Oguz studies law), the pair met four years ago through friends. Jesse has been making tunes since he was 11 but was becoming bored with it until he hooked up with Oguz who’d just started DJing and producing. The pair did their growing up in public, locally successful under the moniker Piotr & Zahn, through which they put out disco-flavoured, jackin’ fare. It was an interesting experiment, but halfway through 2015 they hit on the sound they’d always been looking for – and ANOTR was born.

“Armin van Buuren still has a big fanbase in the Netherlands but there’s a new generation coming through,” explains Jesse. “It’s generation house, generation deep house, and the artists we look up to are people like Armand Van Helden, Riva Starr, Jamie Jones, Green Velvet, Timmy Charles, Tommy Vercetti.”

The pair have a host of under-wraps releases primed for 2016, and are ready to head further afield. They DJed at an Armada Deep boat party in Ibiza last summer and are looking forward to their first UK trip.

“We can’t wait to cross that big river of sea,” says Oguz with a laugh. After an Annie Mac mini-mix in January, the great British clubbing public should be ready to give them a suitable welcome.