{"id":118614,"date":"2023-02-02T18:06:48","date_gmt":"2023-02-02T16:06:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/?p=118614"},"modified":"2023-09-14T11:52:26","modified_gmt":"2023-09-14T09:52:26","slug":"scratchclart-gqom-vs-grime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/scratchclart-gqom-vs-grime\/","title":{"rendered":"Scratcha DVA and the mechanics of gqom vs grime"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The zebra \u201coiah\u201d is stuck in my head. The throaty howl punched throughout \u201cFlex\u201d. The opening call on \u201cBless the Earth\u201d. Somewhere far away on \u201cSiyobonga\u201d. It\u2019s Boiler Room Festival Day 1 on a cold Amsterdam night. The club is filling out with fishnets and dark eyeliner. A wide-open hanger with two stages eats the early mass of bodies seeking release, heavy beats and pushy cameos. \u201cwya?\u201d reads a text from Scratcha DVA aka Scratcha aka Scratchclart. Scratcha is here to do a b2b with gqom pioneer, Nyege Nyege signee and Durban native Menzi<\/a> Shabane. I\u2019ve been listening to the former\u2019s catalog for days. My mind is a jumble with Scratcha\u2019s chaotic productions; tracks with samples that feel like they\u2019re thrown together from different corners of a small room, artifacts from far away places crashing against a wall marked with a child\u2019s growing height. A security guard puts his hand on my chest as I try to enter backstage. Scratcha appears from behind the barrier with a neon wristband in one hand and a bottle of Patron in the other. He\u2019s wearing a big black jacket and dark cap. He leads me to the nearest table and folding chairs and pours us both a tall plastic cup of tequila. The party is already a\u2019rumble with bass and faraway woops and wolps. We mic up and jump into it. I\u2019m here to dissect the gqom, grime connection. Then to witness it in-person. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Gqom got the grime spirit<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Slap on Dominwoe\u2019s \u201cAfrica\u2019s Cry<\/a>\u201d, track 1 off the first Gqom Oh! The Sound of Durban <\/em>compilation from back in 2016, and you\u2019ll get the same dark, evil-tech feeling of Scratcha\u2019s \u201cReach the Sun<\/a>\u201d opener from his 2012 Pretty Ugly<\/em>. \u201cThat was my grime era,<\/em>\u201d Scratcha says with a smile, \u201cand I feel that how grime developed in the UK is how gqom developed. Like the same things happening in two different places. The gqom that the kids are making in Durban, it just reminds me of grime. And how they\u2019re making it.<\/em>\u201d Scratcha has had his hands in the grime machine for decades now. Pushing the boundaries, slicing up some rhythm & grime like on the landmark The Voice of Grime<\/em> compilation that put women\u2019s voices front and center or producing genre-bending cult classics like \u201cKurb Krawl<\/a>\u201d. Though despite being on major projects like Wiley\u2019s Playtime\u2019s Over<\/a>,<\/em> Scratcha\u2019s career is that of a maverick. Just outside the mainstream, with a taste too eclectic to fit neatly in the UK Funky, Grime or Tech House trends. \u201cI like all kinds of music and in the past it’s been to my detriment,<\/em>\u201d Scratcha admits of his gnarly, potpourri sound. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This sentiment, the outsider mentality that pushed him towards grime, is also what Scratcha saw in gqom. \u201cSomeone might disagree with me but my theory is that grime came from by people being shut out of trying to make UK garage,<\/em>\u201d Scratcha begins, connecting the dots. \u201cSo youngins are trying to make garage but didn’t have the supplies, didn’t have the equipment, didn’t have the facilities and it was this grimey sound. It was called grimey garage before it was called grime. In South Africa, the kids in Durban, they’re trying to make house; Afro-house, but at the end of the day, it’s house. But they don’t have the equipment, they’ve just got a laptop, a monitor on their wall or something and that’s it.\u201d <\/em>Scratcha looks up, \u201cIt’s just kids in bedrooms, you know?<\/em>\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDurban is all about gqom,\u201d <\/em>Menchess, a South African gqom producer, said to Dazed Mag<\/a> back in 2015. \u201cIt\u2019s like it’s the only thing they know. In the whole of South Africa, though, it has taken a while for gqom to catch on.<\/em>\u201d A music born and bred in Durban with roots in South Africa\u2019s groovy house variant Kwaito, gqom has been the outsider music for South Africans and internationals. Meaning \u201chit\u201d or \u201cdrum\u201d in isiZulu, the genre is often overshadowed by the jazzy and more sensual amapiano, or pushed aside as a raw and unpolished breed of club music. \u201cTo be honest, I never thought gqom would gain popularity beyond Durban,<\/em>\u201d DJ Lag once said, surprised by the genre’s growing popularity overseas. But Lag and his contemporaries weren\u2019t making the music to break. They were making it for their streets, block parties and dancehalls, trying to raise the eyebrows of their rougher and grittier entourage. “It sounds different to my ears,<\/em>” Menzi clarifies, “but it’s more or less the similar with the gqom sound cause it shares the same energy.<\/em>“<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt’s the same shit.\u201d <\/em>Scratcha laughs. \u201cThey get shut out of that, so they make their own thing. It’s the same with grime. It’s like, \u2018Fuck it. You’re not letting us in, we’ll make our own thing then.\u2019 And that’s why me and Menzi are doing this. Because we see that.<\/em>\u201d Scratcha and I cheers to Menzi, and down another shot. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The South African connection <\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Although Scratcha first found gqom from the epic aforementioned Gqom Oh! <\/em>compilations, the whole story is a bit more serendipitous. It\u2019s as if the emergent phenomenon was waiting for a brain like Scratcha\u2019s to tune into the signal. Again, check out Scratcha\u2019s friend and collaborator Terror Danjah\u2019s \u201cStop Start<\/a>\u201d from the 2008 Zip Files<\/em>, years before gqom hit the scene. Or Scratcha\u2019s own New World Order<\/a> <\/em>package from 2010. The rhythm, dark ambient undertones and textural thizz are written on the proverbial wall. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet, Scratcha\u2019s first trip to South Africa had nothing to do with gqom. Originally Scratcha flew there on a whim, chasing down singer Zaki Abraham who wasn\u2019t replying to calls or texts during the making of his Pretty Ugly<\/em> album. Dead set on getting her voice on the project, Scratcha booked a ticket and a flat down in Cape Town to track her down. \u201cShe started flaking out on me and I just had this mad idea to go and find her. I was like, I need this singer on this album,<\/em>\u201d Scratcha laughs. With the help of OKZharp, Scratcha was able to find the studio and make \u201cFire Fly<\/a>\u201d. But it was later, at a show in Jo\u2019burg, when Scratcha was playing some UK Funky that an artist approached him. \u201cHe’s like \u2018Yo, Scratcha, see that stuff you’re playin\u2019? It sounds like that stuff that the kids are making in Durban. You need to come to Durban!\u2019\u2019 <\/em>Scratcha recounts. \u201cAnd that was then in 2011.<\/em>\u201d Later that day when someone played him some gqom, the lights went on. \u201cI\u2019m like, oh, that’s what you meant.. this shit. Yeah, we was doing this shit just in a different place.<\/em>\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After that the collaborations, samples and reinterpretations started rolling in. Some of the most obvious hit around 2019, after some serious marination, like on The Classix <\/em>EP collab with fellow UK funky mainstay Karen Nyame KG. By 2021\u2019s \u201cRazzclart<\/a>\u201d and \u201cMurderer\u2019s Reprise\u201d with LR Groove and Razzler Man (the two making Tribal Brothers, a group that’s revved up the BPMs on amapiano and specialized in another sort of UK-South African merger) the sound had sunk its teeth into Scratcha\u2019s work. This all culminates in the Afrotek<\/a> EP <\/em>featuring South African singer Mxshi Mo, among others, and brings that serendipitous moment in Johannesburg full circle. \u201cI want to go back there again,<\/em>\u201d Scratcha says. \u201cNow that I’ve soaked all this up. I want to come back and be like, \u2018Hey guys, this is what I made with your stuff.<\/em>\u2019\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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B2b with the gqom sensation<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Both several tequila shots deep, Scratcha speaks freely, unraveling UK dancefloor history with names and moments like some kind of human almanac. Stories of growing up on jungle, or going to Music House to cut his first dub plate with Terror Danjah. Seeing Ed Rush there and Optical, and hearing a young and unknown Skepta claim he\u2019ll be bigger than Dizzie Rascal one day. On the subject of Music House, one of London\u2019s legendary dub-plate studios, Scratcha remembers, \u201cI’d go there and cut my little dub with my \u00a335. I\u2019d get to see my heroes and I’m like, you know, if you see your heroes in the same space on a Saturday, you’re doing something good.<\/em>\u201d With this background it\u2019s no wonder Scratcha has endured, evolved and enamoured listeners. \u201cI’m constantly listening to music all the time. I’m consuming it from morning to night. My mum always had music on in the house, even when we was watching TV,<\/em>\u201d he says of his tune-soaked past. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of it brought us here. Waiting in the ice-cold hanger, the homie Jlsxndrs sitting next to us, dropping his own grimey footnotes. A massive b2b a few hours away. Another small notch on the belt of a DJ and producer for whom this has become like clockwork. But that doesn\u2019t mean the man still can\u2019t be impressed. When asked about Menzi, Scratcha replies, \u201cI personally think he’s crazy.<\/em> I think he’s mad. He’s on some, Aphex Twin, Mad Planet level of thinking.\u201d <\/em>No arguments here. I first saw Menzi at a Nyege Nyege party in Paris some years ago and was totally floored. I went on to follow him from Utrecht to Uganda, nailing down a mini-doc<\/a> and running out to buy him a whistle after he lost his because, in his hands, it seemed like some kind of party super-weapon. Each set<\/a> is hypnotic, trance-inducing madness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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To give a proper rundown of his b2b partner, Scratcha waxes poetic with an analogy about Chicago\u2019s footwork scene and uses a cosmic metaphor. \u201cSo it’s like Teklife\u2026 Sorry to jump around,<\/em>\u201d Scratcha says with a grin, \u201cbut<\/em> it’s like footwork and Teklife and you know? You got all the footwork guys in Chicago and they all have their own different layers of how they wanna do stuff, right? You got DJ Spinn, Rashad, you got RP Boo and everyone’s got their own little something, but it’s all the same stuff. Same with gqom, right? You got Citizen Boy, Lag, Omagoqa\u2026 But Menzi is on another planet. It’s like, you guys are in all these planets here, but I’m actually in a different universe doing your thing. And that’s how I see him. He takes it and stretches it as far as it can go to make it so you can\u2019t even call it gqom at this point. That’s what I like about him.<\/em>\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kindred spirits? There\u2019s a line to be drawn between Scratcha\u2019s studio beginnings with Orange Productions, recording live dhol drums and sarangis for the label\u2019s bhangra music by day, and bringing in grime MCs at night, and Menzi secretly picking up samples from his father\u2019s work as a traditional healer in their home to use later in his gqom productions. Both have a sensibility for the odd and incredible sounds of the world and a willingness to integrate them. In any case, the respect is mutual. Menzi adds, talking about his first time running through Scratcha’s catalog, “I was listening to his old stuff, and I was like, yeah, this shit is crazy!<\/em>” Not to mention the duo’s mind-bending EP, Drmtrk Re:clarted<\/em> with wild fusions including the Menzi remix of “Whoo Hoo”. Word is there’s another 4-track project on the way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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