Jam City – The Courts

With barely two official EPs in as many years, London producer Jam City has a quality : volume output ratio so skewed it recalls the dazzling monoliths of Dubai rising from the dunes. However, these EPs, which take grime/house’s rawest forms and push their melodic structure to brazenly conceptual heights, are some of the finest of recent years, with absolutely no exaggeration. Intellectually, they sound like things about urbanisation, the dazzling abstractions of the stock exchange, the maths of nature and the death of the author in a time of infinite reproduction. Arrestingly, they work perfectly as melodic dance tracks.

Now, his new video is out, with a new song, The Courts. Over basketball trainers, director Daniel Swan sets rotating images of Ancient Egyptian statues, fighter jets, DNA and bench presses, calling up Fiona Banner and those weird bits of cryptic architecture you see all over The City. The song is fantastic too – sonically massive, it suggests links between the minimalism of the drum track and the glittering artefacts of Western civilisation depicted while leaving such lumpen digressions to critics like me.

As FACT point out, The Courts will appear as a 12” on the 28th February, with his long-awaited debut album ‘Classical Curves’ finally out in May.