There’s a revolutionary energy reverberating through speaker boxes and live music venues across the UK. The polar opposite of the junk food-quick fix of manufactured black pop, this is audio gastronomy that nurtures, energizes and heals, and it’s being spearheaded by two very different London vocalists: Mpho Skeef and Eska.

You may have heard Mpho’s (pronounced “Mm-po”) voice on Bugz in the Attic’s “Booty La La” or the Phuturistix collabo “Comin’ At Ya,” but she’ll be pushing the boundaries further into ’80s electro-funk, jazz and techno when her solo debut is released later this year. Meanwhile, Eska’s future-earth-mama soul sounds have driven numbers by Troubleman, Nitin Sawhney and Ty, and received raves from the BBC and crowds at the London Jazz Festival. Raising their voices above the scene’s sublime, fusionist den of jazz, soul, reggae, calypso, dance, broken beat, hip-hop and African folk, meet British soul’s new first ladies.

XLR8R: What are you about as an artist?

Mpho: Expressing myself [and] the things I experience, and the cross-pollination of cultures that’s unique to London.

Eska: I am about communication, confronting limitations and stereotypes. My greatest motivation is if someone says it can’t be done.

Tell us about the scene you’ve come from.

Mpho: As artists we’re different but we have the same references: Soul II Soul, Prince, Stevie Wonder, Cassandra Wilson.

Eska: It’s a scene that makes room for exploration. People constantly try out new sounds, morphing and exchanging concepts, dreams and desires.

Who are the musicians/collectives you work with?

Mpho: Bugz In The Attic, Ty, Eska, Jade Fox…

Eska: IG Culture, Attica Blues, Reel People, Mpho Skeef–a whole global network of MCs, dancers, artists and journalists who look at the world differently.

How does your work differ from the mainstream?

Mpho: We merge sounds, we can’t be categorized. We’re aware of sales figures but it’s not the primary objective.

Eska: In the UK it’s about nourishing one solo act, not the musicians who support the act. It’s never about strengthening a movement. As a scene we work together, constantly switching between support and lead roles depending on the project.

Both of you have hits in the broken beat scene, yet you’re not broken beat artists…

Mpho: Broken beat is a great way of getting your voice out in clubland. It’s about breaking up the whole Carnival, dance music, Afro-vibe and putting it back together in a new way. But if you’re a good vocalist you can ride over anything.

Eska: Over the past two years I’ve been privileged enough to make some tunes with broken beat producer IG Culture. There are many places I have traveled where people of all races are expressing themselves in these kind of mutated rhythms.

You’ve both approached your debut releases via non-conventional routes. How is that working for you?

Mpho: I’m working with Documented, a government-funded record label. It’s not much money, but I have full creative control and I don’t have to pay back my advance. Their concept is to take an artist from a place where they’re doing their thing to a place where people have access to hear them.

Eska: My album’s still very much in the making. I worked out my tunes on the road, often playing them when they were half-formed. I needed the spotlight to think through my musical ideas. That’s a little weird I guess, but it worked for me.

What’s most challenging about building a musical career in the UK?

Mpho: Making opportunities out of what looks like closed doors. Keeping yourself inspired, staying humble and ensuring you continue to treat everything as a learning experience after years of making music.

Eska: There hasn’t been a really successful black English artist for 15 years. The UK music industry is unsure and ignorant about black music–for years it’s been an outlet to serve successful African-American artists. Black artists are only now acquiring the determination to create music for their communities without feeling they have to “de-black” to such an extent you wonder what on earth their music has to do with who they are as black people. Now there’s a thriving community of MCs, rappers, musicians and producers taking initiative and making it happen for themselves.

How would you recommend each other to new listeners?

Mpho on Eska: Eska is a big musical hug: warm, re-energizing and, at times, unexplainable.

Eska on Mpho: This sister comes from South African musical royalty. Her music reflects her cultural diversity and aspiration. She is a roots version of Sade but of her own space and time.

It was 1 a.m. on the fifth floor of an abandoned council flat in London. A massive system had been brought in from Bristol and the Heatwave party was living up to its name. A visit from the authorities and the threat of closure hadn’t stopped the headliner from taking the decks but all doors and windows had to be shut. Equipment was failing, a technician was under the decks screwing together a powerstrip, the place was packed with people and even at a quarter power the system was still thumping people with bass while MCs spit lyrical daggers. Everyone dripped sweat, the walls were sticky with it. As The Bug looked up from the decks, he was having another “love it or loathe it” moment.

The Bug is the brainchild of producer Kevin Martin, who has been blending hip-hop, industrial and dub sounds together since the early ’90s in groups including God’ce and Techno Animal. The Bug is a solo project and yet it’s not, since every track is a collaborative effort between himself and a vocalist. He’s been able to assemble an A-list of Jamaican talent over the last several years, with deejays giving voice to his twin obsessions of rhythm and noise. “I’ve never really felt part of any scene full stop,” he says from his London studio. “I basically try and make records that I want to hear that I feel haven’t been made elsewhere.”

After the 2003 release of Pressure, Martin started the Razor X label with Rootsman to release small runs of amped up splattercore breaks. His new album, Killing Sound, is due this month from Rephlex–it collects Razor X’s four singles (“Killer,” “WWW,” “Slew Dem” and “Imitator”) and adds five new ones with vocalists Cutty Ranks, The Mexican, El Feco, Tony Tuff and Warrior Queen (who redoes “Killer”). Instrumental versions will be included to create what Martin describes with a satisfied chuckle as “one fucking obnoxious, noisy, brutal, unforgiving, relentless antisocial headfuck of a record…Babylonian babbletalk really.”

Martin admits that Killing Sound represents the most extreme end of The Bug, but it continues to reference his obsession with Jamaican music. “The challenge is to be open to the roots of where The Bug has come from: my love of dub, dancehall, reggae, roots and ragga, filtered through my own history.” Though the Razor X drum programming is often manic and the tracks geared toward upper midrange frequencies, they continue to be anchored by bottom-heavy basslines.

Martin’s musical and production style mirrors the cobbled together nature of many Jamaican soundsystems. His speech is filled with words and phrases like “meld,” “combine” and “mutate.” He built his studio up piece-by-piece from just a CD player, a saxophone and effects pedals to its current combination of digital and valve-oriented equipment. “I’m no purist,” he laughs. When he performs out now, he either takes a 24-channel desk with ADATs, synthesizers, effects units and CDs, or uses Final Scratch with add-ons. (“Whatever tickles my fancy or is appropriate for the show really,” he explains.)

He is building a soundsystem with help from Russ D of roots/reggae outfit The Disciples–ten 18-inch woofers together with mids that junglist Dillinja sold him, all run with help from dancehall MC Ras B and dubsteppers Digital Mystikz. Pulling from different scenes gets to the heart of what Martin is about. “To get into The Bug stuff you have to be open-minded,” he says. “I’m just constantly drawn to new sounds and new directions and new mutations in music. And that’s why for me there’s a beauty in dancehall and grime and still (to an extent) hip-hop, where it’s not so much about being retro, it’s about moving onwards and not looking back. Music for me should never be limited and should always be open and have an outward-bound trajectory. It shouldn’t be trying to hold on to something.”

True to that, Martin already has two projects well under way. One is a new The Bug album with MCs Warrior Queen and Ras B. “After Razor X I’m more interested in bass and moving people with low end,” says Martin. “The new album has two directions. One is acid dancehall, taking acid lines and merging them with dancehall rhythms, and the other is a cross between grime and dancehall…much more minimal stuff.” The other project is a new 7″ label called Ladybug. “One side of each release will have a toaster, rapper or grime MC–women like Warrior Queen and Lady Sovereign. The other will have more idiosyncratic singers, people like Nicolette, Ari Up; Cobra Killers have agreed to do vocals on the freaky side.” The first single, “Dem a Bomb We” featuring Warrior Queen–”a song about being blitzed out in London at the moment by suicide bombers”–will be out this month as well. Like all of Martin’s stuff, expect to love it or loathe it.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” laughs Naeem Juwan. “It just wasn’t supposed to happen.”

Seated inside a Brooklyn falafel joint in the midst of an extended stay in New York City, the Baltimore-bred, Philly-based MC better known as Spankrock is having a good laugh at the strange arc that has led him to be associated with Baltimore club music, the bass music variation suddenly on national blast after more than 15 years as a secret handshake of sorts for Maryland-area black kids.

“I would have never thought that I’d have recorded a song with Scottie B,” the soft-spoken 24-year-old says of a recent collabo with the B-more breaks originator. “I would have never ever guessed I’d be interviewed about Baltimore club music.”

Like many Charm City youth in the ’90s, Juwan spent his nights at high school dances and clubs like The Paradox and Hammerjacks, freaking out to the sounds of Miss Tony and DJ Spen. But as a scrawny prep school kid sheltered from the city’s rough streets, he felt a bit out of place as he came to embrace an entirely different avenue of urban culture.

“Baltimore is neat for young kids ’cause you can go to some pretty crazy parties when you’re, like, 14,” Spank says. “I went to the clubs a lot. But I was really trying to be a conscious rapper like Mos Def. I thought I’d be signed when I was 16 on some backpacker, underground shit. I was coming up to Brooklyn and making demos with (Boot Camp Clik/Black Star producer) Sean J Period. I honestly thought I was gonna be a part of Black Star… I only realized (club music) had an effect on me when I heard Low Budget play Baltimore club records for the first time in Philly. I flipped because I hadn’t heard that music in years.”

Posse Up
Wearing glasses and a hooded sweatshirt accented with a pair of punk rock-ish buttons, Naeem Juwan looks like he might be more comfortable carving a bowl on a skateboard than toasting cocky cool-like about wet coochie. But give him some shades, his gold “Spankrock” chain–and beats from production wiz XXXChange (a.k.a. Alex Epton, the other half of Spankrock the group) and DJs Devlin and Darko–and you have the phenomenon that’s been rocking parties up and down the East Coast for the past year.

“People get confused ’cause my rap name is Spankrock,” Juwan says. “Then XXXChange and I signed the deal together [under the Spankrock as well]. We’re kind of a rapper/producer team–like GangStarr, just more retarded. But everything I do is very family-oriented.”

More than even a family, Spankrock is a movement of sorts. Their live shows often include Amanda Blank, an up-and-coming white femcee from Philly; the Love Peace Project, a family of trained West African drummers and dancers from B-more; and “The Eagle,” a Philly chick who Juwan says was “always on the dancefloor dropping down just getting her eagle on anyway.”

Spankrock’s traveling booty patrol was foreshadowed perfectly by their debut single, “Put That Pussy On Me,” which outed on Turntablelab’s Money Studies label last summer. With cover art depicting a perfectly round ass with a thong pulled down right below the crack, the 12″ is sure to turn heads in the electronica section, where it’s probably been inadvertently placed since Ninja Tune subsidiary Big Dada picked it up. But no one’s mind is blown more by the Spankrock concept than Mr. Spank himself.

“It’s different than anything I would have expected of myself,” he says. “It was Alex’s idea for me to make poppy, ass-shaking music. When you set yourself up as socially conscious and a good person and then suddenly someone is asking you to make, like, a Luke record, that’s a big change. But it was more honest for me then writing about politics ’cause even though I try to stay up on that’ spent a lot of time in parties getting fucked up.”

Spank Mode
There’s more than just ass and bass in the Spankrock mix, though. With his nasal voice and relaxed flow, Juwan’s take on rhyme evokes Schoolly D, another Philly MC who combined ig’nant lyrics with sonic innovation. One of the first songs Juwan wrote in Spank mode was “Rick Rubin,” an ode to the very notion that party music and artistic experimentation are not incompatible.

“Before Alex’ was working with this guy Steve McCready, just trying to push away from underground rap,” Spank recalls. “No one really liked what we were doing. (McCready’s) beats were strange, harsh on the ear almost, but I loved ’em–I got excited trying to figure how to rap over them. I kinda figured how to make things exciting again. I stopped going to open mics and trying to battle people at parties and got to thinking, ‘How do you have your influences and still create something totally new?’ So I used Rick Rubin as an example of someone who really pushed the limits of what rap could be.”

That freeform vibe runs throughout YoYoYoYoYoYo, the debut LP from Spankrock due this spring. Although earlier Spank releases–like the Voila sampler (Money Studies/Big Dada) and the remixes on the “Pussy” 12-inch–cram everything from Can to the Beach Boys into the mix, YoYoYoYoYoYo contains very few samples and a whole lot of improvisation, according to XXXChange.

“It is mostly me trying to play instruments badly and then chopping them up,” says the Brooklyn-based producer, an old friend of Juwan’s from Baltimore who briefly studied jazz drumming at the New England Conservatory and interned at DFA Records. “There’s a couple songs where my girlfriend at the time sang because we didn’t know any singers.”

While a certain Baltimore spirit is apparent in Spank’s delivery, B-more breaks don’t figure into the mix more than, say, UK grime or even post-punk. But with club music on national blast at the same time Spank is arriving–thanks to Hollertronix, NYC’s Aaron LaCrate and an army of internet cheerleaders–the reference is only natural.

“We’re both from Baltimore so obviously [B-more club] is an influence, but it’s more dance music in general,” XXXChange explains. “There’s artsy shit on there, but it’s hard for us to sit in a room and make serious songs.”