soom t - dirty money

sometimes i find myself writing about songs that i have listened to over ten years ago and where certain lyrics have found themselves in my conciousness again. in this case it was "aftermath" by the orb, which featured indian/scottish sumati bhardwaj aka mc soom-t/soom t, that has the lines "pouring all your tears in to a whisky & coke / and i see you taking money, why'd go up in smoke".

i did what i usually do then: see what soom t does nowadays and found that she has recorded albums with bus and disrupt. she's also released a few records under her own name and guested on several other tracks but she's been primarily working with german jahtarian dubber disrupt.

a name that i became familiar with after my good friend jan henrik introduced me to his music with the skinny of being mainly chiptune dancehall. that concept was intriguing and it reminded me of swedish producer pavan's pre-skweee excursions. it really fit well into the time when skweee was making a name for itself in the tropical bass music movement.

"dirty money" was one the first tracks i heard after this rediscovery and i liked it from the first second with synthesised squarewave drum roll. the song is really catchy, both musically and lyrically and that hook is brilliant. i cannot classify this in any other way that just chiptune one drop reggae. but the spectrum isn't devoid of bass just because the most of the sounds like it was borrowed from nintendo, that distorted saw bass is thick and heavy.

i had only heard aftermath prior to this one so i don't know when soom t started spitting in patwa but i think she does it really well. i really like her flow as she really has that spark and she rides the beat well, even in a slower riddim like this one. soom t's looks may bring to mind m.i.a. circa the galang era but her voice is much more like someone like leshurr or patra with a higher pitch.

the only hard thing was to decide on which track from the dirty money i was going to write about as while the title track is brilliant, so is "survivor" and "doobee dee doo". the latter has soom t going off really hard over disrupts riddim which has a bassline that sometimes sound like the james brown's moog noodling from the intro from fred wesley & the jb's "blow your head"