The artists & DJs behind London’s instrumental grime night

If you’re locked into London’s explosive underground club scene, the chances are that you’ll recognise Boxed’s artwork. Whether it’s on Resident Advisor’s ticketing pages, illustrating a piece in a music mag or advertising the night on Twitter, Boxed’s images are hard to miss.

This week, Boxed will be hosting a night at The Laundry E8 in Hackney to celebrate its third birthday. Headlined by Mumdance, the event will see some of the biggest names in instrumental grime come together to pay tribute to three years of the night. Those three years have seen Boxed go from strength to strength, becoming a hotbed for new producers and a regular haunt for some of the UK’s leading artists like Murlo, JT the Goon and Dark0, making it a name synonymous with ‘experimental’, contemporary grime.

Back in 2013, Boxed’s first event saw barely 90 people through the doors at Peckham Palais. Since then, the night has gone on to fill clubs like Dance Tunnel and Corsica Studios as well as hosting rooms at Bloc, staging Rinse FM takeovers and releasing vinyl under the Boxed label.

Grime exploded in the mid-noughties, with MCs becoming household names and regulars in the charts. Everyone knew the “boy done good” stories of artists like Dizzee Rascal and Wiley; their music was winning awards and their songs were being played on mainstream radio, as opposed to just on pirate stations or Channel U. With this increased attention and the MCs being given record deals off the back of their hits, grime stars rose through the ranks and then disappeared, leaving the producers often unacknowledged and anonymous.

From around 2008 this started to change. Grime began to acknowledge instrumental music and producers no longer wanted to be seen as mere appendages to an MC. Things changed, and Boxed operated at the forefront of a shift in attitudes. On the eve of Boxed’s birthday, we caught up with kingpins and residents, Slackk, Logos, Mr. Mitch and Oil Gang.

“We were making music that wasn’t for MC sets on radio, or for MCs to make songs to,” says Mr Mitch. “Boxed came at a time when it was needed.” By 2013, there was a whole movement of producers who were thinking on the same wavelength, but who had no place to play their music. And so, as earlier grime artists had done before them, Boxed simply created that space for itself, laying “the foundations that would allow the grime producer to be seen as an electronic artist in their own right and not just a beat-maker for MCs” says Mr Mitch.

“We’ve had opportunities to be more bait over the years, but that’s not really our style” says Slackk. “We don’t give a shit about the money or the popularity aspect of it in a traditional sense.” Festivals and nights who’ve wanted to book Boxed and capitalise on the highly specific brand with the premise that they “throw a load of dickheads in that we don’t rate” have been turned down point blank.

Boxed went full circle and back to the roots of grime, holding onto that ferocious energy that drives the genre. It’s this maintenance of quality, their unique focus on instrumental grime, that has seen Boxed grow in popularity. It’s also highly inclusive, like other great musical movements. The blending of different types of grime, coming from people of all different backgrounds, translates to the crowd. Oil Gang seems stumped by the question of who the audience is. He’s almost incredulous. “The audience?” he asks “it’s anyone who wants to come. No drama, just music”.

This purist ethos is something reflected in Boxed’s artwork. Instantly recognisable, the colourful, stand-out flyers that advertise Boxed are reminiscent of 90s rave posters. The man behind them is Oil Gang. “Oil Gang is a boss! It’s been a massive factor in establishing Boxed as brand” says Mr Mitch. Making sure that the Boxed flyers looked different from anything else out there was key to Oil Gang’s vision. The “pure square waves and presets match the blocks of bright colours perfectly” he says.

“We’ve had opportunities to be more bait over the years, but that’s not really our style. We don’t give a shit about the money or the popularity aspect of it in a traditional sense” – Slackk

In the same way that Boxed DJs play music that they’re naturally drawn to, Oil Gang’s artwork is composed of the things that he enjoys visually – William Morris wallpaper, African fabrics and Persian patterns are all his key points of reference. While he says he creates the flyers with his musical tastes in mind, Oil Gang’s artwork reflects the simple, repetitive grime he enjoys – “I wanted them to be bright and basic”.

To do this he only uses the standard colours on the RGB palette in Illustrator alongside stock patterns. They had to get done quickly and to look strong, “I’m a big believer in less is more”, he says. This is certainly true of his stripped back sound, which he describes as “square waves, claps, Triton presets and flutes in the forest”. There’s no prescribed style for grime flyers, meaning Oil Gang could do what he wanted with them. “No one else looks like we do and that transmits to the sound as well” says Slackk.

If you speak to people who work in music about Boxed, there’s a strong feeling that they deserve what they’ve created for themselves. Not just because the music that comes from the Boxed camp is so good, but because they’ve worked hard to get where they are.

“When you take a minute to see how far everything’s come, I’m like, shit, we started this,” says Mr Mitch, with Slackk agreeing that the whole experience has been “mental”. All of the guys cite Spooky’s performance at last year’s birthday as a high point of the last three years, but what can we expect from this week’s bash? “Loads of new dubs and a loud stripped-down focus on the music, as ever,” says Logos. And the future for Boxed? Slackk is emphatic: “same disciplines, no compromise.”

Check the Boxed 3rd birthday mix by Logos below: