It feels appropriate that Logos took so long to produce an album. After all, he makes music with supreme restraint that seems to unfold with an almost meditative calm, every silence, every reverb tail painstakingly considered. This isn’t a quality commonly associated with grime. But while, at this point, it may be tempting to declare its co-ordinates firmly triangulated—Dizzee, Wiley, Musical Mob’s Pulse X—over the past year a new generation of producers has shown that there's still territory left unmapped in this decade-old style.
The London-based James Parker co-runs Boxed, a regular club night that's become something of a hub for this globally dispersed scene. But unlike many new grime artists—the likes of Visionist, Wen, Inkke and countless others—Parker doesn’t bring a youthful vigor to bear on the form. In fact, he’s something of an old hand: his love affair with UK dance music goes back to the late 90s and jungle; by the mid 2000s he was a devotee of legendary dubstep nights FWD>> and DMZ, whilst avidly absorbing grime through pirate radio.
Dubstep singles credited to Logos appeared as far back as 2008, but it wasn’t until last year that Parker would make a splash with the Kowloon EP. Its conceptual conceit was simple—Parker took Wiley’s remarkable and oft-referenced Eskibeat sound and jettisoned it into the cold void of space—but the results were surprisingly rich and absorbing. Cold Mission is Parker’s first solo release since that EP. So while it is, in a sense, one of the first major LPs to emerge from recent currents in grime—and certainly the best—it also belongs to an earlier moment. Parker’s focus on space and the careful application of pressure seems inspired by dubstep. He also invites parallels with other producers who grew to prominence after the style’s demise: "Ex 101"'s gorgeous warped chords are strongly reminiscent of Jam City’s "Club Thanz", for example.
Mostly, however, Parker works at the coalface of grime. "Surface Area (Main Mix)", with its shattered glass percussion and fanged bass pulses, follows Kowloon in its ultra-minimalist deployment of grime signifiers. The drums function more as interjection than propulsion, and a pervasive ground hum rears up in the in-between spaces, as if we’re hearing the amplified sound of a studio left idle between sessions. Elsewhere this familiar toolbox of sounds is turned to more aggressive ends: in "Seawolf", baleful square wave motifs and gun-cocking samples; in "Menace", downpitched strings and hovering-UFO bass. In each case Parker’s treatments manage to be both incendiary and wonderfully graceful. It’s like observing some sort of martial art in action, deadly but balletic.
It’s a hackneyed comparison, but Parker’s sonics often evoke rainswept urban dystopias of the Bladerunner variety; or, more specifically, Vangelis’ soundtrack to that film as channeled through the Akai samplers of countless jungle producers (think Dillinja’s evergreen "The Angels Fell"). Often, in fact, these tracks could be moody jungle breakdowns shorn of context, left to mark time in a state of infinite suspense. It’s an approach that recalls another explorer of rave’s hinterlands, Burial. But unlike his forebear, when Parker pays homage to the nocturnal spaces of his city—"E3 Night Flight" references an East London postcode—it’s not to mourn but, furtively, to celebrate (the track’s twinkly synth swells reach almost Oneohtrix proportions in the latter half).
As with any truly gifted producer, Parker folds all of these points of reference into an aesthetic that is fascinatingly, unmistakably his own. The only flaws in Cold Mission, in fact, come from the outside. "Swarming", with Houston newcomer Rabit, is a macabre delight, but two other collaborations sit like thorns in the album’s side. The fidgety bell-like motif on "Alien Shapes", featuring Keysound label bosses Blackdown and Dusk, feels almost painfully literal compared to the artful abstraction found elsewhere. "Wut It Do", meanwhile, is one of a string of collaborations between Parker and Mumdance: a body of work with its own internal consistency, but whose ruffneck intensity feels thoroughly out of place here. Still, Logos redeems himself at the close. The “limitless” mix of Kowloon highlight "Atlanta 96" sets those ornate synth riffs billowing across gorgeous, glistening, devotional space. It’s as if Parker is drawing a throughline from his past work, via the present, into some unknown future. While it’s not quite perfect, Cold Mission should give us all cause for optimism.
