Premiere: Plastician – Lightning Bolt

If you’ve tuned into Plastician‘s weekly Rinse FM show this past year, you’ll have caught the London pioneer building wildly variegated sets out of tracks from relatively unknown producers, refusing to stick to any one genre or sound and generally supporting a huge number of artists who otherwise might not get play on a platform like Rinse. Despite being over a decade into a trailblazing career that has involved key contributions to the rise and continued life of dubstep and grime, Plastician still finds the time to dig for new sounds, put on artists via his Terrorhythm label and aforementioned Rinse slot (Utah, J(ay).A.D, Wallwork, Tsvi, etc.), all while providing a genuinely positive voice in a culture filled with ungrateful self-promotion and a general lack of historical awareness.

“Lightning Bolt”, teased out earlier this year, is Plastician’s final output of 2015, a Dizzee Rascal freestyle sampling effort that looks to the UK’s road rap tradition as much as it does East Coast club forms. Built on a fire-y line from Dizzee’s “Creeper” version, Plastician’s production is at once militantly sparse and bizarrely hypnotic, a pulse-led monster completely devoid of melody. Considering his work on Rinse, an anthemic Jammz collaboration and an ever-expanding curatorial repertoire, Plastician doesn’t owe us anymore this year, but “Lightning Bolt” is the perfect cap to a banner year. In 2016, Plastician will be touring South America (Lima, Buenos Aires, Rio De Janeiro, Curitiba and Sao Paulo) and taking over a residency at Hackney club Oslo. Stream “Lightning Bolt” below and download here.