PULL

Croydon, South London · b. 2003 · FARA Records

PULL (Kaine Osei, b. 2 December 2003, Croydon) will tell you at length that Croydon is a proper place and not a punchline. It's the town where this entire genre was invented — the record shop that produced dubstep was a ten-minute walk from where he grew up, and closed before he was born, which is a very Croydon fact. He grew up under the tower cluster you can see from half of Surrey, in a family that had been in the same postcode for three generations — Ghanaian-British, Croydon since his grandparents — with the specific experience of a place that everybody in London jokes about and nobody who's from there finds funny. He found his way in through sound systems before software: on a mic at house parties and youth-club nights from about fifteen, learning the craft of the call-out the way it's actually learned — in rooms, at volume, over other people's tracks. He started producing afterwards because he got tired of waiting for people to send him something worth MCing over.

Short, direct, low and placed. He doesn't rap in bars and doesn't fill space; the MC call-out tradition he comes from is about landing four words exactly on a kick and then leaving. Every phrase he delivers on this record sits on the heaviest beat available and nothing sits anywhere else. As a producer his signature is the half-time swagger — kick on one, snare on three, and an enormous amount of nothing in between, which takes considerably more nerve than filling it. His influences run the UK soundsystem MC lineage — the deep, sparse, patois-inflected call-out tradition rather than anything bar-heavy — and the original South London dubstep sound that was built about a mile from his house before he could walk. He's more interested in what a system does to a room than in what a track does on headphones.

Completely at home and entirely uninterested in the industry. On a mic he's economical to the point of being sparse, which reads as authority in a room and as shyness in an interview, and both are partly true. He's the one who knows everybody in the building and doesn't mention it. The record shop where this genre was invented shut before he was born, ten minutes from his house — he considers this the single most Croydon fact available. He learned to MC in rooms rather than a booth, and still writes call-outs by saying them out loud over a track at volume. His rule is four words on the kick and then get out of the way; he's never been talked into a sixteen. Grounded, dry, loyal.