London-based producer E.m.m.a has just released her Blue Gardens album of kaleidoscopic, synth-based club tracks and dilapidated grime instrumentals through Dusk & Blackdown’s Keysound label. "Where on earth does the knackered grime of E.m.m.a call home: its melancholic, sing-song melody lines, its bob-and-weave UK funky rhythms, its overly sugary synth fizz spun like candyfloss across barebones percussion?" we said in our review. "If anything her debut album Blue Gardens postulates how grime might have sounded had its key protagonists instead grown up next to a decrepit old South Coast seaside town promenade."
Now she’s released a free-to-download mix of unreleased early material and a scattering of tracks from the album (including the oddly anthemic ‘Jahovia’, featuring a surprise cameo from Congo Natty), which you can listen to and download via the embed above. Entitled ‘Lost Encarta Files’, as the name suggests several of its tracks were inspired by the Microsoft CD-ROM encyclopedia of the same name, which you may remember from pre-Wikipedia information shy times. "Encarta was a natural influence for me because, unlike these days where you have to sift through the s**t to find a gem on the internet, Encarta delivered cold hard facts in an accessible way," she says of the mix and those tracks. "This is now missing, but I’ve tried to at least replicate this ethos through musical form."
The tracklist for ‘Lost Encarta Files’ runs as follows:
‘Midnight Highway’
‘Encarta 96 intro’
‘Nuclear Fission’
‘Jahovia ft Rebel MC’
‘Grey Garden’
‘Glass Eye’
‘Rainbow Dust pt II’
‘Mood Ring’
‘Fabuland’
‘Hovercraft’
