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Chie & King Bracket

Plenty of heads in Kent are well aware that the unsung region has a heavy hip hop underbelly with UK Boom Bap sounds infiltrating spaces from stoner sessions to illegal raves. The rest of the country might still be playing catch up, but the sounds from the coast are steadily creeping inland. Day one Brain Scran family, Chie and King Bracket, represent the cream of the grubby crop.

Born with a larynx that sounded like he’d smoked B&H everyday in the uterus, Chie has been scrawling explicit, funky bars since he could hold a Crayola and spraying words on buildings from the point he could misspell words. Between leading the filth on a merry chase across the UK, smashing up festival stages and getting regularly off his bonce, he has also been penning verses that will make your ears cum.

The kingpin/Mac Daddy of hip hop production in Kent. Bracket draws on people for a living, makes beats sicker than your dead great grandmother and dreams of one day owning a bazooka. A veteran of beat-making from dub to DnB, Bracket has been fine tuning his own brand of Boom Bap for years now.

The two of them have been in the lab sweating over heaters for the last year which have amounted to their debut LP Steezy Wonderz. It’s so much fire it could make Koalas extinct.

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Cracker Jon

There’s a very small clique of artists that can claim to have started their careers on what has become UK Hip Hop’s biggest label High Focus Records. In 2014 when the powerhouse imprint was in its ascendency Cracker Jon first appeared on the UK scene with debut LP You Can Take The Cracker Out of Croydon. The proudly raw project established a DIY sound, part East Coast US Boom Bap influences and part unfiltered South London vocal grit, which Jon has maintained to this day.

After a well received debut and subsequent phase of tearing down big stages, many a rapper would be hyper-conscious of the need to capitalise on the fame and get right back in the lab working on a sequel. Not so much for Cracker. In fact, aside from a respectable string of features that kept his name a presence on hip hop releases, the following seven years elapsed in a blur of live shows, paint fumes, weed smoke and various mischievousside quests.

Jump forward to the covid era and it seems that while many of us were losing our minds in lockdown, Jon hit his renaissance of prolifically writing and recording his unique brand of illicit heaters. 2021 saw a stream of singles and visuals culminating in 2022’s sophomore LP Bought Off and Silence by Gizmos & Toys with producer Violentlyill on his rising Belfast based label ILL Records. Showcasing a matured approach to his art that kept the piercing disdain wandering between character assassination and disgust at the dystopian but with a new air of insight and schemes that had noticeably levelled up. Keeping things moving 2023 saw the release of EP Don’t Blame and overseas collab with Italian rapper Sesto Carnera on banger ‘Sorrentino’.

Skip to the present day… Finding an additional artistic home as part of the Brain Scran Records family, Cracker Jon is back at it already with his third full length LP Slug Festival. This time in collaboration with Scottish producer Fraser Syme. Drawing on the imagery of George Carlin to envision an imaginary festival that nobody in their right mind would want to attend, Jon has been promoting said fictional event along with the album of the same name. The LP itself is similar levels of fire as depicted in the burning festival ground on the vinyl sleeve. Beats for hip hop purists layered with sharply written bars reflecting a vulgar reality and offering a fragmented, jaded critique of its various actors. Cop that on vinyl now!

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Katz With A K

The first whisper on the proverbial grapevine that we heard of Katz was Dr. Syntax describing him as “If Cannibal Ox were from Sheffield, sort of.” If that’s not an urgent invitation to immediately go absorb a soundcloud rapper’s music then water isn’t wet.

After the first earful of the discordant yet banging, jarring yet witty, offensive yet insightful musical paradox that formed his small discography to date, we took a perplexed look at the fact that hardly anyone had noticed yet… Then went about signing him and scrubbing his existence from the net so that only the small cabal of faithful followers who had stumbled across the good word of Katz even remembered that Sheffield’s one true nihilistic rap-prophet had ever existed… Since then, the time in digital exile has been spent feeding steroids and acid to the starting roster of tunes, throwing one or two into the garbage compactor of historyand birthing a couple new monsters that have yet to be heard by anyone. All of which make up a proudly weird debut EP, shortly to arrive on Brain Scran…

Who the fuck is Katz With a K?
Even prior to us doing the whole Men In Black number on his musical fingerprint, Katz was keeping shit enigmatic. Something of a ghost on social media, for somebody making bold music he’s not been shouting about it. The official Katz stance is that it’s because he’s been busy being a Toy Boy for a series of wealthy socialites, but it’s more likely down to an approach to writing that is what it is due to a long distilling process…

It’s lyricism that needed to wait until this stage of life to be said. Both rooted in the things witnessed from doing road as a younger, and after luckily avoiding the worst case scenarios, growing into a different kind of not giving a fuck that only comes with age. Drawing on unashamedly nerdy interests in cinema, literature and politics, deep rooted disdain and flippant humour, the stream of consciousness that emerges spawns quotables about fingering Tories, polygamy on heroin farms and selling fire to deities.

This verbal road-less-travelled is fittingly matched with the joyously bizarre beatscapes provided by producer Phoneutrian. In his own words, he doesn’t really make hip hop. Which is probably why the hip hop he’s making doesn’t sound anything like standard offerings from the genre. Prone to splicing styles and pinching sounds from unlikely places, it’s this eclectic ethic and a propensity for jagged snares and buzzing subs that (added to Katz’s off the wall lyricism) gives the duo a fiercely alternative sound. Nobody’s doing it quite like them. Sharing more in spirit with the kind of counter-scene that US label Def Jux embodied than it does with your average UK hip hop,the comparison to the likes of Ox is hitting the perversely angled nail as close to the head as possible.

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Komposa

Man like Komposa has been writing bars to spin a spitter and steal his Mrs for a long time now. Established in the capital but exported to Bristol, the genre juggling lyricist is building a rep in both scenes. Still perplexingly under-rated for an artist that’s been putting out fire for years, most recent LP Charging Up was a fitting codename for a project that showcased an MC just starting to hit his stride.

Fighting for space to be heard in an era where infinite digital voices all struggle to emerge out from the shroud of the algorithm is an increasingly difficult game. Komposa may still be under its shadow for now but he’s definitely better equipped than most to break out from it. Permanently working on multiple avenues of creative growth, heads in the know in multiple scenes and areas are starting to take note. Keeping things multifaceted from day, equally at home bodying a grime instrumental or fronting a live band as honing his own brand of hip hop, whatever the beat… K’s got it covered. Demonstrating an eclectic passion for music, this chameleon-grade ability to switch things up while retaining a trademark sound and persona, coupled with a talent for penning melodic hooks followed by a flood of rapid flows, add up to make the guy a serious problem.

It’s not really a surprise with this approach to music that Komposa has a bunch of irons in the fire in 2021. In addition to formidable solo efforts on the way under the Brain Scran imprint, keep em peeled for moves from himself and others on his own platform Ntt Ents. Already amassing a growing list of collabs with respected Bris based artists including K*ners, Slowie, Baileys Brown, Wish Master, Jinxsta JX, Twizzy and Chillman, he’s developing a rep for killer team-ups. Having received national airplay on BBC Radio1, BBC 1Xtra and KISS FM this year, the buzz is real. Throw in an impressive history of smashing diverse live performances for platforms/events from Sofar Sounds to iluvlive to FHP to Eskimo Dance and it seems mad that he’s not yet a bigger name. With his best music yet to drop and a slew of electric live dates on the way though, Komposa is coming for what’s due.

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Lebbs

As one half of Portsmouth team-up PROSPECTS, young Lebbs has been putting work into helping build a potent strain of lyrically complex hip hop that’s unique to the duo. If, like any diligent explorer of the underground, you’ve already caught an earful of their work… You might be tempted to take an educated guess at what a Lebbs solo effort would sound like. If you think you’ve got the lyricist / singer / producer figured though, he’s probably one step ahead of you.

Like some schizophrenic musical wizard with a chaotic array of melodic tricks up his billowing sleeves… Brandon Lebbie is on a permanent bob and weave. Multiple personalities have already seen him fronting reggae bands and waxing lyrical over various combinations of kicks and snares. More recently the alter-ego known only as Lebbs has finally pushed to the forefront to take control of his solo career. And things are getting moody, jazzy and smoother than cleaning your room after lubing your hoover. But also still with a bunch of rap thrown in. Because Obviously.

Critics in his own mind have thusfar dubbed him; among other things…

“The grand young duke of funk” ★★★★★ “Frank Ocean but franker and with more ocean” ★★★★★ “Hampshire’s Ray Charles on salvia for the rap generation” ★★★★★ “Eric A Badu” ★★★★ “Soul Goodman” ★★★★★ “The best thing to happen to bandanas since Cory from Trailer Park Boys” ★★★★★ “Cory from Trailer Park Boys” ★★★ “An uncompromising visionary” ★★★★★ “Not quite as good as Mos Def” ★★★★ “Neo-soul for people who like hip hop” ★★★★★ “Hip hop for people who like other music as well as hip hop” ★★★★★ “To the Portsmouth hip hop scene, what Hannibal is to mountaineering with elephants.” ★★★★★

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Mysteronz

The first carbon-based lifeforms to land on planet Scran. We caught some gully interplanetary Boom Bap on an air band radio scanner in Autumn 2019, sent out a welcome transmission and built a crudely constructed landing pad. Upon first contact we offered them eternal sovereignty over the realm of man and mastery over land and sea. They just wanted to get high and put out a hip hop EP. No sooner had Parental Guidance dropped than they were gone.

It may take years for scholars to work out what they were trying to tell us. Last seen graffing up moons of Jupiter. They may or may not return.

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