A major focal point over the last year has been the resurgence of grime, and in particular the instrumental aspect that was somewhat lost due to the dominance and focus on MC’s. New talents such as Royal-T, Faze Miyaki, Mitch and others, alongside more established heads such as Terror Danjah have been at the centre of this continued renaissance. This is in no small part due to the efforts of Elijah and Skilliam and their Butterz label. Established in 2010, Butterz has given instrumental grime a re-birth of sorts, opening it up to a wider audience and pushing a sound that for so long was kept within itself, allowing it to gain prominence alongside more established and recognised names.
Elijah and Skilliam first garnered attention on Rinse FM, their show focusing on creating a solid beginning, middle end and arc that refreshed and changed people’s perceptions of what the genre should culminate. Butterz soon followed, and the combination of legends such as Terror Danjah reinforced with fresh newcomers like Swindle opened up an entirely new passage for themselves and the genre. The significance of this new perspective should not be underestimated, with names at the forefront of Dubstep and ‘Bass’ also getting involved; Ramadanman releasing the seminal ‘Woo Glut’ and Starkey also releasing remixes on Butterz.
Rinse 17 therefore is the current peak of their rise, although undoubtedly acting as a stepping-stone to bigger things. It focuses on the amalgamation of their label releases and also their shows on Rinse; a bonafide journey through the best of what they have to offer, and it’s glorious. In anticipation of the release, Elijah and Skilliam took the time out at their FWD launch party to say a few words on the label, their meteoric rise through the ranks and what it really means to release a Rinse compilation.
Could you give us a brief background of yourselves and the label, and how you got started?
SK: We both went to the same university, there wasn’t much to do, and we got bored. Elijah brought his decks to his halls, I went round there and we started playing music. We got a slot on our university radio station, Rinse contacted us about doing cover shows, we started doing covers, and then they gave us a proper show on Tuesday, 3-5, we did that for a about a year.
Didn’t it start out as a blog? Grime Forum?
E: If we talk about that we’re gonna be here for double the time. But yeah I was blogging from about 2007 to last November. Then we started the label in 2010 and then started putting out the guys we were playing on the radio and the clubs. Now we’ve got kind of a crew and energy and that’s how we got to where we are now.
The subsequent success of yourselves and your label implies that you’re doing something differently, what would you put it down to?
E: I’d say that we don’t do anything deliberately different to be different, we’re just doing stuff that we like doing, but not a lot of other people that do what we do are into the same things. It’s not like we’re purposely trying to go against the grain but a lot of things we’re into don’t go in the same way, so it’s kind of just come naturally, we’re not forcing it.
SK: it’s just about taking ideas from somewhere else and applying it to what we do, it seems like we’re doing something different but we’re just doing what everyone else is doing outside our circles, so it seems like its new but it might not be new.
How did the opportunity arise to release a Rinse Mix?
E: They just gave us a call one day and said they wanted us to do one of the compilation cd’s this year, and I was like ‘shit’.
Was it still a big deal even though you’ve been on the station?
E: Yeah because it puts you among a lot of bigger DJ’s that have done it like Skream, Skepta, Geeneus, they’re people that I grew up listening to and now we’re like, I’m not saying we’re on the same scale as them, but when you look at the CD’s with the faces on them, that’s kind of nuts, on that kind of level. That’s what’s sick about it.
SK: It’s just trying to build on top of that, it’s not the cut off point, it’s like building an Elijah & Skilliam sort of brand.
What are you hoping for next? What comes after the CD?
E: Now we’ve got more exposure it’ll be easier to get things done. We were doing events before but now we can do Saturdays at Cable. They’ll be bigger and better because people know us, it’s not just the Butterz name, it’ll be easier to get things done.
Your shows on Rinse stand out from others due to the importance placed on a clear structure and a ‘beginning, middle, end’. Would you say Rinse 17 follows a similar pattern?
SK: More or less, yeah.
E: Not to sound like an album, you know, but it does take you on a journey, but that sounds so corny.
SK: But that’s what tunes do. It’s basically one big tune.
E: Yeah, that’s how we treated it.
SK: The structure of the tunes that’s how we sort of like them, it’s not just a 8-bar repetition, it’s not constantly high-energy, in tunes like ‘Music Please’, in the intro, the silence sort of breaks up the whole mix, you notice the silence, we like that sort of style.
How did you go about picking the tracks?
E: I say this to everyone; they just picked themselves, because it’s the best of what we’re playing at the moment, or when we mixed it.
So it was a current thing for you guys?
E: Yeah, the best parts of the label which are still playing out anyway, when people see us I expect them to know some instrumentals, we’re always going to incorporate what we put out into our DJ sets. So yeah, there was about 10 or 15 tunes that we considered.
Was there any conflict between you?
SK: None that I recall.
Do you ever have any?
SK: Not really, because we both know where they should go.
E: I think it’s just the order. The tracks themselves, it’s like a puzzle. Sometimes you could put things together differently, and it would sound completely different, but I think we could have organised it in a totally different way. The way we played it, we didn’t have any conflicts really.
SK: Because we do a lot of radio shows, you might even hear little convos like ‘ok, that goes together, that works, so these sort of tunes go together’ if it doesn’t work, then we’ll move something around.
E: The trial and errors at the radio, we do that on the radio all the time so when it comes to mix the CD it doesn’t take that long because we’ve already mixed it, we’ve mixed these tunes hundreds and hundreds of times, its easier.
You played in Amsterdam recently…
E: Yeah it was sick. It was myself, Skilliam, Royal-T, Swindle, for 4 hours.
Are people as receptive?
SK: Yeah. You had Distance in the next room and these heavy Dubstep people.
E: People came out, had Butterz t-shirts, grime t-shirts.
Do you think grime is in a healthier place than it was a few years ago? Has the resurgence of the instrumental aspect of it contributed to that?
E: Definitely from when we’ve started it’s improved, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to do Rinse 17. When we started you wouldn’t really see many grime DJ’s at FWD and Fabric and Cable, all these London clubs that I was going to just as a customer. But now your seeing producers coming out, getting on the DJ circuit as well. I don’t know, I don’t think the general persons going to notice, it’s going to be years before people clock on ‘Ok, that person, Elijah did that.’ Sometimes these things take ages to set in, but it seems to be happening.
Do you think the genre is more accessible than it used to be?
SK: OK, talk about Skream, doing dubstep tunes with a grime MC, doing collaborations. Now he’s got a big following. Even that little Trim collaboration, someone might say ‘I like Trim now, I might go see what else he’s done’. You can catch grime from that.
What’s the next step for Butterz? Are you looking to release full lengths, or will the focus remain on singles and vinyl?
E: Yeah, gonna stick to the singles. I’m just a singles person, we don’t listen to albums, even on the road, in a car we listen to sets and radio shows, we don’t really listen to albums, so it’d be dumb for us to go against what we’ve consumed ourselves. It’s easier for people to digest. If I gave you 10 or 20 tracks you might go ‘errr’ but if I gave you one you’d probably listen to it and take it in, but I think with the amount of music that everyone can get from everywhere you don’t need albums from us right now. It’s too much, man. Overload. I’m not against it. The producers we work with do albums elsewhere, like Terror Danjah on Hyperdub, and Swindles gonna do projects elsewhere, but in terms of ‘us’, just stick with the singles, tunes that people recognise, they might not know it’s a Butterz tune, but if I was to play 10 tunes, you might recognise 2, those 2 would probably be tunes from the label, so that’s how I want to keep it.
Finally, have you got anyone waiting in the wings, any up and comers?
SK: Can we say?
E: If you listen to what we play, and you like something, then that’s the up and comer. You decide who the up and comer is.
SK: There are people like Preditah, Faze, they’ll send us music, if it’s good then we’ll take it from there.
E: That’s not a straight answer. I don’t think your going to get one.