InitiatriX by Ship Sket

Ship Sket is 26 year old Josh Griffiths. Originally from Dorset, he's lived in Manchester for seven years and forged his own path within the city's welcoming and close-knit music scene, arriving on Planet Mu this autumn with his debut album InitiatriX. Sonically the album is a homage to the UK styles that Josh loves: dubstep, grime, drill and rap, but on an emotional level it’s about spirituality, fetish, and latent darkness hidden by outward appearances.

Josh says about his process “I like happy accidents, messing around and resampling, and kind of seeing how far I can push stuff before it disintegrates in front of me." Not so much deconstructed so much as derailed; "I’ve heard my tunes on a club system and gone wow that mix sounds bad, but the tune is still popping. My approach is a lot more stylistic than it is technical."

InitiatriX is a smeared mix of distorted pop, underwater drill, dubby musique concrète and the downright dada. There are dramatic string passages and naked piano; Josh drops from twitchy electronics to blooms of distortion, found-sound and lo-fi drum patterns and sometimes all those things at once. “I do think of production as a divine practice because it is a mass-channeling of creative force. Putting together a track is drawing down energy and organising it into the best possible shape, like a huge elaborate puzzle. Sometimes the tracks will write themselves, and that is a beautiful feeling."

This approach to writing is manifest throughout InitiatriX. Take Vendetta's Theme (ft. Charlie Osborne) - a pounding drill beat covered in a layer of filthy distortion with demonic vocals rapping about spiders, alchemy and isolation - the vocals and sample chops forcing their way through the song's web of grit; or the subtle intensity of Mimikyu’s slow paced and ornate strings, cast against repeated cute bleeps and incidental details to form a hypnotic club tool. Permanent Kigurumi's lonely melody, cloaked in a haunted atmosphere, rubs against explosive drill drums and a vocal snatch whispering “Just Like You.”

Ship Sket's music is strange and beguiling, rough and sensuous all at the same time.

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