This month, Martin discusses JME's debut album as well as dubstep producer LD and Transition Mastering Studios. Here is an excerpt; you can find the full article text HERE

Words by Martin Clarke for Pitchfork.

"Earlier this month, JME's debut album Famous? quietly appeared in shops. No promotion, no lead single for mainstream radio airplay, no PR or magazine interviews: It was just out, and not simply in grime specialists like UKrecordshop.com or Avalanchemusichut.com, but high street stores and iTunes-- the very places grime has been historically absent from. JME is pretty confident his MySpace is the key to his success, a way, without marketing spending, for him to generate a sizeable fanbase.

What helps JME immensely is the strength and depth of his debut album. Grime, in essence, is raw street music, aggressive east London MCs documenting lives spent in conflict with their peers. The problem is that the further grime went away from UK garage-- emphasizing lyrical "war" and stripped-back halfstep beats that had more in common with hip-hop than 2step-- the more it now seems it alienated certain parts of its grass roots, clubgoing community. The scene also alienated commercial radio, either by not working effectively with industry pluggers or by being too aggressive for conservative playlist-makers.

This year has seen several interesting responses to these two problems, i.e. lack of dancefloor momentum and hyper aggression levels, which challenge how grime can evolve and yet retain its identity and audience. First there was funky, the house hybrid that's developing in east London clubs and in turn igniting the blogosphere (here, here and here), that despite starting warm, is quickly developing an MC-hosted, younger, grimier side, just as UK garage did."

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"With the blogosphere alight with talk about London's funky, a genre given life because of grime's lack of danceability, dubstep is beginning to re-balance how it too, post the halfstep bass drop and wobble metal mosh, can groove again. If there's one track that captures the percussion zeitgeist in dubstep summer 2008, it's LD v Kode9's "Bad". At first, from experience, it can seem a little underwhelming. But through repeated exposure, most notably via Kode's sets, its compressed congas and sour disco samples begin to get under your skin. When they get under your feet too, suddenly you're dancing.

The influence of dark house persists in dubstep, from Mala to Quest & Silkie. But what links "Bad" with several of the most interesting experiments in percussive dubstep right now is one man in particular: LD. A lot of very influential DJs in dubstep rely heavily on LD, and not just for his productions. By day he's the dubplate cutting engineer at south London's Transition studios, producing one-off 10" or 12" acetates for DJs to arm their sets with. It's old technology but still deadly effective in the dance.

LD began producing at school, where pupils were taught how to use Cubase. After college he began experimenting, making most jungle/drum'n'bass. But it was when he got himself a job as a runner at Transition studios that he both began training as a mastering engineer and also got introduced to dubstep.

If you own a dubstep record, chances are you'll have appreciated Transition's work. Most of the influential labels master their 12" vinyl there, from DMZ to Hyperdub. In fact it's often said Transition were highly influential in guiding the early productions of many of the scene's heavy hitters, providing sonic insight and positive recommendations to improve many a beat-maker's sound. So it's perhaps little surprise that their cutting engineer is coming good."