If there's one thing you can count on UK music for, it's unpredictability. This country has a rich musical history with an eclectic list of standard bearers. One producer looking to set up camp in the outer reaches of UK music is Gaika, a one-man thesis on the UK's future as a source of diverse and progressive sounds. Gaika just dropped the 10-track Machine tape (assisted by Inkke on mixing duties), an exciting, genre-bending collection of cerebral beats, complex melodies and ambitious concepts. Ostensibly, this release sits on the outskirts of grime, but there's so much more to it than that. It owes as much to grime as it does R&B, dancehall, UK garage, and hip-hop. "I like the idea of putting these organic sounds into a weird, mechanical space," he told Dazed. It's a vast and varied collection, but one with a definite cohesive thread running right the way through.
