Merci Jitter – 2018

Side-stepping club tropes to deliver something with the potential for timelessness...

Like much of the best and most ambitious electronic music, 2018, the new V/A from London-based label Merci Jitter, prides itself on escapism. Not blindly or without intention, though. Focussing on a fictitious exhibition space where art happens ‘URL’, artists were invited to take part in spontaneous and unexpected conversations and collaborations, knowingly or not.

In fact, entire strata of club music’s lineage are traced, digested and repurposed in the service of the impeccably up-to-date. 2018, then, serves as this compilation’s perfect title. Take the opener, for instance: Kim Kate’s View. Boasting an instrumental that echoes Tunnidge’s early cuts and Deep Medi-era Mark Pritchard viewed through an acutely contemporary lens, its energy is multiplied tenfold by the impossibly charismatic and animated flow of South-Korean grime MC Damndef who features. Or Geysir, a collaboration between Kate and Merci Jitter co-founder Daniel Ness, featuring verses from Seoul’s Moldy: trap dismantled threw the kaleidoscopic club framework favoured by Sega Bodega, Coucou Chloe and the rest of the Nuxxe camp.

Perhaps the most striking thing about 2018 is the almost total absence of English MCs. Following two years of grime as a potent force in the charts, it seemed inevitable that the cross-pollination of MCs and club producers would go international. 2018 represents this proliferation. To describe it as a grime compilation would be somewhat reductive, though its constituent elements neatly inhabit the negative space between grime and heavier, harder contemporary club styles.

Merci Jitter has the foresight to go one further than the current crop of club experimentalists, identifying the potential in the incorporation of vocalists. As such, a compilation so brilliantly of its time is rife with the potential for timelessness.

8/10

Words: Sean Harper

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