NOT_MDK is not MDK. Like a human ship of theseus. Martin Wood-Mitrovski's 3rd album. 23 years since the 2nd. He lives at building number 23 in Skopje. MDKs ticket exploded. He can not return. This is NOT_MDK's first album. NOT_MDK is exploring ideas with depth, in depth. Every track is Grime and 140 BPM. Grime is a genre that covers a huge area of sound A fixed tempo is a gravitational well of coherence That is to say: Martin Wood-Mitrovski is a musical lifer - someone whose enthusiasm cannot be dimmed by time. The Coventry-raised polymath first came to public attention in the late 1990s as a keystone part of the Spymania crew, which also first showcased Squarepusher, Jamie Lidell and Cassette Boy. Even among such esteemed company, Martin's two albums, one EP and various collaborative contributions to the label stood out for their audacity and variety. Detroit techno, death metal, bleak ambient, golden age hip hop and dozens more sounds besides made implausible sense next to each other, and bleeding into one another. Now, though, relocated to the Balkans, returning to album making after over two decades of only sporadically slipping tracks out, Martin has taken an entirely opposite approach to genre. This album is entirely built around instrumental grime. But it's built with such finesse and a scholar's knowledge that there's still extraordinary variety within that. Subsets of OG 00s grime producton - Eski, Sino-grime, breakstep, sublow, and sounds with no name at all - are threaded together with the finessed modernist abstractions that came together around London's Boxed club in the 10s, and also with electronic predecessors. The ghosts of jungle, of bleep'n'bass, of warehouse techno, of various flavours of garage, leave traces through these tracks - or maybe he's waking those ghosts in the grime. It's a perfect fit for Belgium's W?M? Records. The label has always specialised in artists who get to the deep fundamentals of acid, electro and other pillars of electronica - and here, Martin has shown the wiring that were always there connecting those things into grime. It's a record where Timbaland and Terror Danjah, Nightmares On Wax and N.A.S.T.Y. Crew, Kraftwerk and Kromestar all operate on a plane of consistency. But it's no intellectual exercise or history lesson: the sounds and patterns here are there because they work - they sound spectacular coming out of big speakers. That's what it's always been about. Whether carving up genres in the Spymania days, or distilling them now, whether MDK or NOT_MDK, before all other considerations it's all about a joyful noise.
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