TEETH

Nottingham · based in Borehamwood since 21 · b. 2003 · FARA Records

TEETH (Jodie Fenwick, b. 18 May 2003, Nottingham, based in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire since twenty-one) grew up on sandstone, in a city with more than eight hundred man-made caves cut by hand into the rock underneath it — carved over centuries, low, warm-walled and acoustically extremely strange. Growing up there means knowing the ground under a city is hollow, and it's the reason this record sounds and looks the way it does. She got into caves before she got into music and has never entirely separated the two: her first experience of really loud sound in an enclosed space was underground and not at a gig. She found one being used for a genuinely illegal party in her first year at university and has been chasing that specific physical feeling ever since — enclosed, too hot, nowhere to go. She found her way in through a borrowed 303 clone at seventeen and about four hundred hours of turning one knob; she's a producer first, and the vocal exists because the track needed a voice on it and there was nobody else in the room.

Dry, close, half-spoken and completely unsung. She chants rather than sings, delivers slogans rather than lines, and treats her own voice as another percussive element in the machine — exactly right for this genre and a deliberate refusal of the role female vocalists usually get handed on dance records. There's no melody in her vocal anywhere and no attempt at one. The rest is her: a 303 line built to be mean and memorable in one bar, rigid drum-machine programming with no swing in it at all, and minutes of filter automation doing what a chord progression would do elsewhere. Her influences run the original Chicago acid records and the specific brutality of their arrangements — one machine, one pattern, no chorus, nothing decorative — with almost no interest in the British rave nostalgia that grew out of them; the thing she wants is the raw functional version rather than the remembered one.

Dry to the point of hostility and much warmer than that sounds. She has a Midlands directness that people from London consistently mistake for rudeness, and she's stopped adjusting it. Live she plays long and hard with the lights almost entirely off, and the one thing she won't do is a nostalgia set. She lives in Borehamwood now, a quiet Hertfordshire commuter town twenty minutes north of London where almost nothing happens, and she's completely clear-eyed about why: it's where the rent is. There's a good joke in a twenty-three-year-old making the most physical, illegal-feeling record on the roster from a semi in Borehamwood, and she tells it herself before anybody else can. She considers the smiley face to have done acid house more damage than any drought. Blunt, funny, unimpressed.