And so Planet Mu step into the Grime arena with the debut full-length from scene veteran Mark One. With a spate of releases for all the right labels : Soulja, Tempa, Texture, Southside, Immunity, his own Contagious imprint and, most recently, the notorious Grime compilation on Rephlex – Mark fuses a dirty low-end scrape and tumble with a ghetto mentality – shards of Hip Hop, R & B, Garage, 2-step and even electro stainin his template in fine gangsta style. ...more

In London the major label free-for-all signing of grime artists continues and the hype is verging on the ridiculous. Meanwhile in Manchester, MarkOne and the Virus Syndicate MCs drop an album on an IDM label and it's like hardly anyone really even noticed.

Distinctly different from the clicky, militaristic state-of-the-art sound of London grime, MarkOne's productions combine the breaks of older garage with towering DNB basslines. The results are immense ...more

It needed someone outside the capital to synthesize the East and South London Grime sounds. The Billingsgate verbal frenzy of the East and the depopulated post-nuclear Croydon ring road of the South have been met in Manchester, on a ‘Dance’ music LP that, gratifyingly, is compulsive over its full length, The album actually outstrips the potential displayed on the MarkOne tracks from Rephlex’s brilliant Grime comp. It leers and lurches with a controlled synthetic ...more

The new Mark One LP on Planet Mu is fucking excellent, by the way.
A nice mixture of dense, brooding, Grimey/Sub-Lo skunkstrimentals and upliftingly-grubby little shoutalongs spread across three thick slabs of vinyl. Detuned square-wave synth-sounds give an early Warp Records/Bleep vibe to a couple of tracks, while others seem to revel in oppressive, paranoid beats and orchestral-stabs worthy of mid-period Cabaret Voltaire: you can almost hear the CCTV ...more