Instrumental Grime

Instrumental grime is the producer-led wing of grime, centred on the beats built for MCs rather than on vocal performance. Developed in London in the early 2000s by producers such as *Wiley*, whose 'eski' sound set the template, it uses cold square-wave melodies, video-game bleeps, sparse percussion and abrupt turns at around 140 BPM. Freed from the constraints of vocal tracks, producers later pushed the form towards abstraction, and labels such as #Butterz#, #Keysound# and #Planet Mu# issued albums by *Mr. Mitch*, *Slackk*, *Logos* and *Visionist* that recast grime as experimental electronic music.