Micah Boateng

Tottenham, N17, London · b. 2001 · FARA Records

Micah Boateng (b. 20 October 2001) grew up in a Ghanaian-British household on an estate off the High Road in Tottenham, N17. His mum worked nights on a hospital ward; his uncle ran a barbershop that functioned as the neighbourhood's actual news service, where the same week could be described three completely different ways depending on who was in the chair. That gap — between what was happening on a street and what was said about it in a council letter, a local paper or a headline — is the thing he has been making records about ever since. Bright at school in the way that gets you noticed and then quietly filed, he was the kid who read the small print on his own school reports.

A cracked DAW on a hand-me-down laptop at thirteen, learning by making drill beats for people at school. He was good at it and then he got bored — not of the genre, of the volume. He started pulling the drums down instead of up, until the space around them became more interesting than the hits. The first thing that felt like his own was four minutes of a pad, a sub and a train going past his window. He kept the train in — it's still in everything he makes. His influences run Burial's space and Dean Blunt's flatness, the weight of UK drill's low end without its aggression, Vangelis and Jóhann Jóhannsson for the pad-work and patience, Actress for the haze — plus, outside music, the British documentary tradition and the plain administrative prose of official letters.

On stage he's almost entirely absent, deliberately — no face on the artwork, no ad-libs, no hype. He stands at a desk in low light and doesn't address the room until the last thirty seconds. It reads as arrogance to people who haven't listened and as consistency to people who have — the record argues that presentation is the mechanism, so he presents as little as possible. He reads terms and conditions in full and keeps a folder of the worst clauses he's agreed to. Precise, patient, unimpressed.