Scratcha DVA & Menzi - Beyond Gqom & Grime - New 12" EP Record 2023 Hakuna Kulala Uganada Vinyl - Electronic / Grime / Gqom / Club

Pairing the eminent ringleader of London grime/UKF/bass music with Durban’s wildest gqom producer, ‘Beyond Gqom & Grime’ is a next level back ’n forth/collaboration that highlights the prevailing influence of East, Central and South African electronic music on the British scene. It leads on from the Scratchclart b2b Menzi Boiler Room set in early ’23 with a seismic, intercontinental fist bump that regenerates new energy from classic-contemporary templates and lends a rude London accent to up-to-the-second “taxi techno”. 

Menzi, a member of Infamous Boiz, builds on admiration for 2020’s ‘Impazamo’ EP, and its freakish, uptempo skews on gqom, with panic-raising alarms and subtropical downpour sound design on his intense remix of Scratcha’s ‘DRM Walk’, and a new mix of DSVA’s ‘IC3’ galvanised with militant Zulu trample. Scratcha returns fire with a staggering ‘RnG’ remix of Menzi’s ’Shandis’ reset with cyber-monk chant and a club-scanning sort of deferred gratification. 

However it gets really special when they go in together, opening with what sounds like a Goodiepal vocal sample on their Devil-mix style remix of gqom, titled ‘Q’ and redressing DVA’s late UKF remix of Roska ‘Nasty Nasty Nasty’ with glom’s signature bass drum trills and and grimiest, scything Triton vamps on a nuclear-tipped club warhead.