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Music

Grime Weirdo Filter Dread Makes 21st Century, Alien Club Melodies

Listen to an exclusive track from 'MIDI Space', as Filter Dread runs through his favourite game jams.

This article was originally published in THUMP UK

As grime continues to get weirder by the day, there's a crop of new artists taking cues from the now-classic sound and melting it down into an altogether different mold. One such name is Filter Dread. More child of bedroom Nintendo marathons than Eskimo Dance, the Birmingham-based producer feels like a stylistic companion to Glasgow's Inkke; a kid who grew up loving grime, but at a remove from the grassroots scene. Duly, the effect is of am aesthetic trickle-down, through mixtapes, grainy videos and second-hand tales from friends and forums alike.

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Much in the way Inkke pulls from Memphis rap in his recent Faded With Da Kittens, Filter Dread's beat tape Space Loops—on Bristolian cassette outlet No Corner last August—was a pleasingly raw collection of grime, jungle, rave and dubstep-inspired loops. The overall effect was of driving a car through London estates without rhyme or reason, just about catching multiple pirate radio signals at once.

Now, Filter Dread's latest offering is the MIDI Space EP, due out on June 23rd on RAMP Recordings. The EP sees Filter Dread stay raw, but be a little more playful that his previous work. There's a hefty slab of bass in "Stolen Dub"—which we're pleased to premiere right here—that harks to that dubstep love, but there's smatterings of 90s rave, grime and jungle over a basic template of what seems to be a lifelong love of his—computer games.

To mark the release, we asked him to talk us through his favourite computer game sounds.

Tetris (for Game Boy)

My mates used to say that Tetris "looked like curry running down the screen," thanks to the strange green tint that everything had on the original Game Boy. It kind of did, but I was really excited when I got the big electronic brick one Xmas. The game that did come with the Game Boy was Tetris. The music in this game was incredibly catchy, and was my first introduction to 8-bit sounds.

Doom (for Mac/PC)