Part 2

Part 2 is UK urban music’s best-kept secret. In a production career spanning the best part of a decade, he has been consistently ahead of the game, many of his innovations pre-figuring the current Black Music renaissance in this country.

As producer for New Flesh he has been described as “a master of a variety of styles” (Sunday Times Culture), “the sound of the UK underground at its most sublime” (The Face) and an “unassailable” producer (DJ), been praised for his “dizzying invention” (Jockey Slut), “more than a match for his US counterparts” (Music Week), “as English as roast beef, as modern as X-Box” (Muzik), and “one of the best that hip-hop in the UK has to offer” (Touch.)

In addition, Part 2 has remixed and produced for a range of artists including Roots Manuva, Ty, Serge Gainsbourg, Trilok Gurtu, Wu-Tang’s Killah Priest and Saul Williams. And alongside this, he has had a highly successful career as a spraycan artist, exhibiting in the UK and across Europe and universally respected as one of the pioneers of the hyper-realist style.

But perhaps he has suffered from being a backroom boy, the quiet man behind the sound desk.

“Live From The Breadline” features a fantastic line-up of vocalists including Fallacy, LSK, Sandra Melody (of “Diplo Rhythm” fame), fellow New Fleshniks Juice Aleem and Toastie Tailor and Lotek, the heart of the record lies firmly in the beats.

Utterly contemporary, raw and streetwise, Part 2 has also developed a sound which encompasses the last twenty years of Black British Music, develops it, warps it to fit his own preoccupations and spits out a new blueprint for the next twenty. With warmth, humour and soulfulness as well as a feel for the harsh, avant garde sonics of grime, Part 2 has made perhaps the definitive “UK Urban” album with "live from the breadline" – a record which develops and changes, which is stylistically diverse and artistically complete, which takes you on a journey and which, crucially, could only have come from this country.