Interview: Rising Grime Duo K9 and Dark0

Grime renaissance? Rising London producer Dark0 is not buying into the hype. “What they mean by that is – grime is now considered cool. They don’t mean it has come back, because grime was always there,” he tells me in a Shoreditch cafe, while we’re waiting for his mate K9 to arrive. “Grime started at a time where there was no online blogging, no magazines and almost no infrastructure. I loved grime, but back in the day I never went to clashes, because I didn’t want to get stabbed up at 14, y’know. It was a mad scene.”

The young West London producer, who has established a name for himself with icy, hyper-melodic instrumental mutants on Gobstopper and Lost Codes, has had a rough night. Apparently, he sneaked into the after party of fellow London musician Kindness by taking on the main event’s identity. “Someone brought me a triple A pass that said ‘Kindness’ – I didn’t even know what man looks like. I just googled him today, it turns out he has long hair,” laughs Dark0.

Although he cites grime as one of his main influences, he refuses to be pigeonholed with the current instrumental grime scene that has evolved around the influential Boxed club night. Yet whether or not he pictures himself in that realm, Dark0 was partly responsible for the best grime album of 2014 by applying a forward-thinking aesthetic to K9’s classic road rap. Mad in the Cut, the mixtape they recorded in under a week, combined the playfulness of free-of-charge releases with the emotional depth a concept album about loss and grief demands. (A major theme is the death of K9’s closest friend, SLK-affiliated grime MC Vager.)

Eventually, K9 arrives at the café, and the conversation begins. Clearly, they are friends beyond just their musical alliance: Moving from their earliest days together to the bright future ahead of them, the duo consistently finishes each other’s sentences.

Do you still live in West London, K9?

K9

Yeah, Harrow Road.

How did you get to meet Dark0?

K9

Basically my friend Elias, a Russian dude, introduced us.

Dark0

Ruski Mafia. [laughs]

K9

One day he was like, “I got this mate, Dark0, you would love what he does. He does grime, but he’s not like everyone else, it’s different. You have to link up, and I just went, ‘All right, say no more.’”

Dark0

You gotta understand, this was when grime was mad quiet.

K9

I think we met at Koko’s in Camden, that’s where I met Dark0 and all of his boys.

Dark0

I was doing a set and there was a microphone plugged in, so I was like: “K9, spit,” passed him the mic, and from there it turned into a grime rave. All of us were spraying bars all of a sudden, was wavey.

K9

There is a little clip of that on someone’s mobile phone. Even Dark0 had a little verse…

How big is your repertoire of bars at this moment, Dark0?

Dark0

What, mine? None! [laughs]

K9

But between the mandem, he was getting reloads. [laughs] See when we’re drunk enough we’ll go back to back. One time we were waiting for a mate over at NTS radio...

Dark0

… and they told us that the guy who was meant to play the next show was late, he wasn’t gonna show up for an hour. We were like, “Say no more, do you need someone to step in?” The full thing didn’t get recorded, only ten minutes of it.

K9

But that was the best 10 minutes of the set. I’ve had some good times with this bro right here.

Dark0, have you been a fan of K9 before?

Dark0

I knew of K9 before I met him. He had an SBTV video and again I knew him through Elias. I just never met the dude until that night at Koko’s.

K9

The sickest thing about our relationship is: I met a lot of people in the music industry, there’s literally just Dark0 and my boy Natty, who’s another grime MC, who I would call my West London bredrins. See, the rest of the people, I just know them through music but I don’t kick it with them. Music is what I’ve been doing for a long time, bruv.

How long actually?

K9

If you want to put a number on it… I joined Musical Mob in 2004. We were called the Younger Musical Mob and within it was only me and Dirty Dapz who were allowed to go on radio with the olders.

The first footage I found of yours was of you and your old crew Straight Grindin’.

K9

Yeah, that’s from when I came out of prison. That’s from 6Foot’s birthday set. But there’s a video of me from 2004, I turned 15 two days after that. That was in the youth club. It was a good spot to do something like that. These guys around me were my idols, going back to back with them were some of the best moments in my life. Around that time I was going to all these places by myself, maybe with one or two mates. More time we weren’t even invited, we just rolled. There was a time in early 2005 when I went to the Channel U Christmas party. Ace & Fizz were hosting it, Jay Sean, before he was famous, was there. He was beatboxing while I was spitting. I wish I could find that footage. That was a number one highlight of the early days.

Shortly after that I used to go on Manic FM, an Internet radio station started by Musical Mob. Everyone rolled up at the station, Wiley, Skepta, Jammer, everyone. I used to be there so much, DJ Garna went, “Yo K9, give me your number, I’ll phone you when there’s a set.” I was thinking, “He’s not gonna phone me.” Then I got a text, bam, “Show tonight, coming?” I was like, “Yeah?” You know, I was a young man, 16 years old. I just thought, “Hell yes.” Jumped on a bus, then jumped on a train, navigated my way to the station… it was me, Chronik, Lady Fury, Dollar The Dustman...

Dark0

Dollar The Dustman…

Is he still around?

K9

Barely. [laughs]

You do reference that text message by DJ Garna on Mad in the Cut’s “iSPit,” don’t you?

K9

Yeah, I talk about it. But I didn’t put any excerpt of the show on the record, although I have it. I should upload it one day. When I go on Rinse FM and see Jammer he likes to go on like he doesn’t know me and that. A lot of people act like they haven’t heard of me. But I’m humble, and there’s truly humble people like Grandmixxer who shout people out, or Dark0. But us, we are not only rolling musically.

Dark0

We’re boys first, innit. Music is second.

Did that help the production process?

Dark0

Absolutely man, we recorded the whole thing within like a week. We picked the beats in a day, made a booth using my sweatshirts and it was a wrap. [laughs]

I was wondering why you decided to release Mad in the Cut as a free mixtape.

K9

As far as proper productions, man, I haven’t really put anything out. I used to have old school dubs from when I was younger. I had this discussion recently, and Mad in the Cut is really and truly the first time I put out something solid.

Dark0

It wasn’t about money. Money is not our mission. That was about showing people, “Look, this is what you’re getting for free.” Imagine what the next thing is gonna be… Just showing people the levels, man. There is a lot of bullshit around getting the limelight, when really there’s better people out there. This is just an example of that, like a statement, “Here take this mixtape, this is how it’s done. These are bars. These are beats.” Also, grime is now part of this digital internet age, so Mad in the Cut ultimately transitioned the old paradigm to the current.

K9

All sorts of people are connecting with it. People are fuckin’ with me Stateside as well. Shout Suicideyear, Son Raw and Geng Grizzly.

Mad in the Cut was very well received. Did that come as a surprise?

Dark0

I kinda knew that it was gonna pop the way it did. I knew that people who were long time fans of grime and road rap music would love it. Also, people who were into those kinds of instrumentals would resonate with the whole thing. It covered many bases. We didn’t put no money in it, nothing, we just made it and put it out. We premiered it through Fact Mag. Next thing I know I woke up in the morning and like ten magazines had featured us.

The peculiar thing about it was, Dark0 has been a well-established name in 2014, but there was not a lot of info on K9 and this very project. It was just the music that people liked.

K9

Fact Mag hit me up for some info which all the other plugs started remixing and making crazy mistakes with. [laughs] Apparently I just came out of prison, Vagez’ name was Vader, all of that...

Dark0

Star Wars.

Loud Invasion features Young Vagez, that’s his…

K9

That’s his young brother, exactly. Shouts to Young Vagez. He’s someone I would wanna see break through eventually. He just turned 16. He doesn’t care too much about this kind of shit yet though, but he’ll be about in the future, musically.

Tell me a bit more about how Mad in the Cut came together.

Dark0

We recorded it all in my own room. I mixed it, recorded it, and packaged it all myself. It’s the first curation project I’ve ever done.

K9

It needed to be raw.

Dark0

It took us about a week to record. We did like five tracks in one day, and I did the mixing and skits in my own time.

K9

I just remembered, the radio rip interlude is actually from when we went on NTS radio that time, right?

Dark0

Yeah it is! That’s actually quite a mad skit, what happened was I put on one of my joints and K9 was killin’ it. I was gonna reload it and start it again, but for some reason set it to “Reverse” and K9 went “nah nah nah, let me ride it,” and he just started going ham. So I went on their site and found the set that we covered, I couldn’t even remember whose set it was, I just knew the day that we did it. I found it and turned it into a skit.

So you didn’t actually go to the studio with the other producers on the record?

Dark0

Everyone we approached knew about K9 and wanted to work with him, or I would have hit them up like, “Yo, K9 wants to vocal this beat for the mixtape” and they’d say “straight.”

What’s the deal with the Shmurda edit?

Dark0

The crazy thing about that was, half of that was just an actual freestyle...

Do you even write, K9, or just map it out in your head?

K9

I do write. I stopped freestyling for the most part, but I still do remember all my lyrics and have them ready.

Do you produce as well?

K9

Yes, a little bit. It’s not my main thing I do but I can produce a beat. I started off on my PlayStation...

Dark0

Jheez! Same bro, on a demo of Music 2000. [laughs] Me and my bro made tapes an’ shit!

K9

You also could sample on this thing, you just gotta use an audio CD… to sample stuff like Eskimo. [laughs] I think the next time I actually produced was in school. I just made a quick beat in music class. And then the next time I produced was in prison. That’s when I actually started to take it serious. Because in prison you get good chances, good opportunities… when you start education there, you have to take English, Maths and whatever and two vocational courses. One of the choices was music. So what they would do is they give you two lessons of music to see if you’re good at it. You go into the music room, and they got Apple Macs and MIDI keyboards and microphones and tell you how to use it. So they could see if you’re creative or not, basically.

I sat down, opened GarageBand and remembered the tune I made on Music 2000, recreated it on GarageBand and just spat on it for the whole rest of the lesson. Everyone was like, “Yo, that is sick!” There were two teachers, both called Marc, “Marc & Marc,” two white dudes, and they were like, “That’s sick. We love what you’re doing but the music programme is full. But listen, if someone is really serious in that matter, we’re ticking the box.” When I got my timetable and it said double music, I was like, “Yes!” I made a mixtape in jail, that’s circulating in there right now.

Do you have the files?

K9

I left it in Onley in Coventry. It could still be in Coventry, or it probably left the prison with someone else. I kinda wish I still had the files… I don’t know. Everything I made in prison, I just left behind, y’know, making a fresh start. A lot of people keep going to prison. I came out of prison and I never went back.

How long were you sent away for?

K9

I was in for just under a year. I came out and haven’t look back ever since. That was in 2007 and I came back out in 2008. And I’m glad I went to prison then. I met some people in prison, like Delusion, do you remember the grime MC Delusion?

Sure, people on Grime Forum wondered what happened to him.

K9

He’s my friend, I met him in prison. After jail I linked him up with people in the West. You know he’s from East London. We’re cool, I actually met a couple of people in there. It’s crazy, the people you meet in a place like that.

I think what people found so compelling about Mad in the Cut is your willingness to speak about these topics so bluntly.

K9

In a way that was me leaving behind certain things, too. It’s me trying to come to terms with loss.

Dark0

Yeah, I suppose that was the running theme of the whole mixtape. Trying to put all of that behind you and coming out stronger than that?

K9

When I write bars I really put myself in a certain time and place. So when I speak about Vager I put myself into the times when he was alive. What we used to be up to. And when I talk about the pain inside, that is obviously today’s perspective on it. When a person dies it’s just too hard to deal with – for me, I can’t look at his pictures. It’s hard to think about him, but then I just spit about it. Cause that’s what I do, I spit about it, I have to talk about it. I’ll be sitting with Dark0, talking about all the depressing times, and then the mood’s low – after a while I just start channeling it into a positive energy and I can spit about it. I don’t like keeping it inside. When I keep it inside, I get angry, I snap on people for no reason.

Dark0

You snapped on me a couple of times, too.

K9

I did, a couple of times, yeah. But then I would talk to you about it a minute later, like, “Bro, it’s this, it’s that.” [laughs] And then we’re cool again.

Dark0

Yeah, that’s how we’re wired though, you get me. I’ve got a short temper, too. I might say something that 9 or whoever doesn’t agree with, and we’ll just get into it. [laughs]

You already addressed the coming to terms with loss bit as a recurring theme on Mad in the Cut. It took me a minute to realize that “Homie” and “Stress” are basically two different angles on the same story.

K9

All those lyrics about Vager, I wrote them when I was with his Mum at her house. His mum, his sister, I’d be sitting down in their living room, smoking, drinking, writing and writing. His brothers, peeps from round the area dropped by... He never hurt no one and no one ever wanted to hurt him. He had no enemies and nothing. He was my best friend.

So what happened to him?

K9

It had nothing to do with him – he was on the phone with his girlfriend, when someone fired a gun. The bullet bounced off the floor and went in the back of his head. It happened in 2011. I came to terms with it, I can talk about it, but it’s still just fucked up, you know what I mean...

When you say you still can’t look at his pictures, shooting the video for “Stress” must have been quite intense, I guess?

K9

Yeah.

The footage of you and Vager on holidays was that taken from the “holiday in Gambia” you reference on “Homie”?

K9

That’s the footage from Gambia, exactly.

Dark0

Shout outs to Jim Alexander, he directed the video. He hit us up – I had sent him a really early demo of “Stress” which only I produced. The beat felt a bit too optimistic, so I shouted Visionist and was like, “Let’s make something a bit darker for this.” I was like, “Jim, here’s the beat,” he came back a week later like, “Here’s the storyboard, this is what I wanna do, I want it to be organic, like a journey.” Jim didn’t want it to be fake, he said, “I wanna be in Vagez’ living room, I wanna see the pictures.”

K9

Before he even filmed the thing, we went to Vager’s house, hung out with his mum, watched the Gambia tape, us chilling on the beach. We got ready to make this video. Next time I linked up with him, he came with me to the cemetery, sitting down there in the sun. He’s a G. He even helped me tidy up my grandmother’s grave.

Dark0

He’s like a method director. He gets into it first, and then films. He’s a very switched-on dude.

K9, Dark0’s tunes are known to be very melodic, and “Stress” is a good example for that. Is it hard to write on a tune that is so busy already?

K9

As in, is it almost distracting, you mean? Too much at once? See, the way I spat on this tune – initially I sent him an a cappella, so I spat that over a beat I made for Vagez’s sister for a tribute CD. When Dark0 heard the a cappella he was like, this verse needs to be its own tune... They built the new beat around the old a cappella, but the a cappella was mad grainy so I re-recorded it and it went back on the new beat. Everything in there is a question, after that I tell you how I feel. The thing is with these lyrics – they didn’t get written to that beat or even the beat I made initially. I can’t even remember what made me write them. All I remember is recording them at Dark0’s and I didn’t spit them the same, it was different. More emotional…

Dark0

Do you remember at the end of “Homie”... That whole thing was one take. We were recording, you were coming to the last few words and the song faded out and we didn’t talk for like ten minutes. [laughs] That’s what we mean by raw – we did it and you can hear it exactly how it was when we recorded it. One take.

Also you get the immediate reaction of your listeners, instead of waiting a long time for a label to put it out.

K9

Definitely, I went on holiday straight after releasing it, so I didn’t even know what the reaction was right away.

Dark0

When he came back to London, I sent him a list and screenshots of all that plugs that jumped on it. It was crazy. And, yeah, you get that immediate reaction, which is difficult to do with labels. We didn’t wanna sit on the mixtape. Soon as I got the artwork back, it was good to go.

Is it any way uncomfortable that this sometimes pseudo-artsy online world is picking up on the mixtape so heavily?

Dark0

[laughs] We love and appreciate all the exposure that our work can get.

K9

I’m generally open to a lot of things.

Dark0

The only thing I don’t like is when journalists get stuff wrong. And because grime is so young, and it’s still young, they think they can dictate what it is or where it goes, through their inaccurate comments. But their word isn’t golden, our word is. What we say is true, we’re living it, and they’re not.

You tweeted recently, I’m paraphrasing here, “... all the journos [who] overanalyze grime like it’s GCSE edexcel anthology poems (…)” should “suck their mum’s highlighter pens.” [laughs]

Dark0

[laughs] Man, that was targeted at some people who were getting it all wrong, not all journalists. Just a couple who got a lot of shit wrong. It is what it is sometimes, it doesn’t need to be overanalysed, you know?

Are you planning to play live shows with the material at hand?

Dark0

Not just yet. We are gonna build some more stuff together and present a killer show once it’s all out. Not just yet. Why present something that is half-finished, I feel like that’s what a lot of artists are doing right now. They’re just doing things for the sake of doing them cause the money talks… No long-term thoughts.

K9

It’s all hype in the end, innit. I’m not naming no names, but when A does a tune with B and C and it’s A, A, A everywhere, people get tired of A. I guess I can be K in that analogy. [laughs] Before I released Mad in the Cut I had “Shottas Riddim” and that was it. People wanted to know, “When is your mixtape coming out?” And I always went, “Yeah, coming soon.” But the truth was, there’s no mixtape. None of this was planned. I liked the fact that nobody knew anything, and the only way to see me, was to actually see me. Now I have loads of people hittin’ me up sending me this and that, asking to work together and I’m thinking, “Why now?”

Dark0

It’s funny when other artists wanna collaborate and then get offended when you’re like, “I wanna do my own thing at the moment.” Like, I’m a busy guy. I got my own shit going on in my life. People think just because you do music, you have time for them... or that you’re automatically friends. I never came up like that.

K9

Yeah, and as soon as you hit them with the fee, they go silent. [laughs]

Was that “Fuck FGM” war dub actually the first song you ever made?

Dark0

That was it, yeah.

K9

You know how spontaneous that was?!

You sound really angry on that one.

K9

I tell you exactly how it was: Dark0 just came over, we were chilling…

Dark0

Remember, that was when the war dubs were kicking off in 2013… I made this one track. First time I made it, I thought, I gotta show this to K9.

K9

I was watching the whole war dub stuff, it was fun. We recorded it just as a joke. You showed me that FGM tune where they’re on the beach. These guys, man… We just slapped it on YouTube thinking, how long will this take to go on Grime Report or something? 15 minutes later, blam. [laughs]

You’re not really clashing anymore, are you?

K9

One time I was down for it, but now: what would it really do for me? It would make them big, or, shut them down. I was on Rinse FM the other day, talking about Lord of The Mics. I saw people clash each other and I was like, “Okay – now after this, then what?” You’ve clashed him, and you are now that guy from Lord of The Mics. That’s it. I’m on my own shit man, I haven’t got time for clashes.

I just remembered, you do mention Don’t Flop on the mixtape.

K9

When I watch Don’t Flop nowadays I think, I could do this. I could do that if I wanted to, I can spit off the top of my head for hours. But that’s dead. I don’t want to be this guy from Jump Off or that guy from Don’t Flop or the guy from Lord Of The Mics. I wanna be K9 like Wiley is Wiley and Styles P is Styles P. I don’t even want to be K9, the guy who made one sick mixtape. Which is why I’m gonna put stuff out. I got things in the pipeline that will make people say, “Yo, this is the guy – don’t know how we couldn’t see it back in the day.” Like I say on the tape, “For the last ten years where the hell was you, now I’m fucking with him, wanna send man tunes? Fuck them, I don’t care what them man do.”