Terror Danjah ranks alongside the likes of Wiley, Jammer and Dizzee Rascal as one of grime’s most innovative producers, and he’s also arguably the genre’s most distinctive.

Armed with a penchant for wildly altered synth sounds and ‘The Gremlin’, a signature cackle that you find on nearly all of Terror’s tunes, the Londoner has provided production for Roll Deep, Kano and members of his own now-defunct (sort of) Aftershock crew in the past, and grime heads count tracks like ‘Boogeyman’, ‘Cock Back’, ‘Code Morse’ and ‘Zumpi Hunter’ amongst the genre’s all time classics. He was also a pivotal figure in the short-lived ‘R’n’G’ movement, providing some of London’s most underrated slow jams of the past decade in ‘So Sure’ and ‘Love is here to Stay’.

At the end of the month, long-standing electronic tastemakers Planet Mu (home of IDM touchstones like u-Ziq, Luke Vibert and Venetian Snares as well as current producers like Starkey and FaltyDL) will release Gremlinz, an 18-track compilation of Terror’s greatest instrumentals. On the eve of the release, Simon Reynolds talked to Terror about his background in drum’n’bass, and his pivotal role in grime’s 21st century ascendancy.

You started out in the late Nineties with Reckless Crew, an East London jungle/drum ‘n’ bass collective of deejays and MCs. How did that come about?

“I formed Reckless in 1998. The other members were D Double E, Bruza, Hyper, Funsta, Triple Threat, DJ Interlude and Mayhem. We came to fame from being on Rinse Fm and playing at local clubs and raves including One Nation, Telepathy, World Dance, Garage Nation, and Slammin’ Vinyl.”

What did you learn, as a producer, from those drum and bass days? Who did you rate at that time and would consider an influence?

“I wasn’t much of a producer back in them days. I was absorbing the musical sounds from Roni Size, Dillinja, Shy FX, Krust, DJ Die, Bad Company, Andy C and DJ SS. I learned a lot from listening to their music – jungle was the first British music we could say was ours. I’d grown upon on reggae, R&B, soul. And also house music, on account of having an older brother. I was deejaying on the pirates and I got into producing drum ‘n’ bass, because I wasn’t getting a lot of tunes from producers. They’d be giving me one or two dubplates, but they had the big DJs like Brockie to service first. So I started making my own “specials” and did loads of tracks. But I didn’t put them out, just played them on the radio. My own personal sound. But DJ Zinc and a few others cut my tunes as dubplates.”

When did you make the transition to UK garage and that MC-fronted 2step sound that was the prototype for grime?

“I did two garage tunes and they blew up so I decided to stick with that. In 2002 I did ‘Firecracker’ b/w ‘Highly Inflammable’ on Solid City, Teebone’s label. For a while I was part of N.A.S.T.Y. Crew, because I’d been at St. Bonaventures [a Roman Catholic comprehensive school in Forest Gate, London E7] with a couple of members of N.A.S.T.Y.  But all the time I was doing my own thing and eventually just branched off.

“Then in 2003 I formed Aftershock with this guy called Flash, who I’d met at Music House where everyone goes to cut dubplates. The first two Aftershock releases were Crazy Titch’s ‘I Can C U’ and N.A.S.T.Y.’s  ‘Cock Back’.  That got the label off to a flying start – everyone was buzzing after those two releases. Then it was Big E.D.’s ‘Frontline’ and then in 2004 I put out the Industry Standard EP. That’s the one where people thought ‘this label is serious’.”

Industry Standard is where you can really hear your three-dimensional “headphone grime” sound coming through, on tunes like ‘Juggling’ and ‘Sneak Attack’. With those tracks and all through your music, the placement of the beats, the way sounds move around each other in the mix – it’s very spatial.

“Some of that comes from listening to a lot of Roni Size and Andy C and producers like that. Lots of abstract-y sounds rushing about, coming out of nowhere. There’s a sense of more life in the music. That’s what I do in my tunes.

“Drum and bass gave me ideas about layering sounds and placing sounds. But it also comes from studying music engineering at college, doing a sound recording course.  I learned about mic’ing a drum kit and panning.  You’ve got the pan positions in the middle of your mixing desk, and the crash should be left or right, the snares should be slightly panned off centre, the kick should be in the center. So you’ve got a panoramic view of your drum structure. Obviously I went beyond that, started experimenting more. The bass stays central but the sounds always drift. So each time you listen you’re not just bobbing your head, you’re thinking “I heard something new in Terror Danjah’s tune”. So it always lasts longer.”

Industry Standard was the breakthrough release, in terms of people realising that here was a producer to reckon with. What came next?

“Payback was the biggest. That EP of remixes was one of Aftershock’s top sellers. It was getting caned the most, especially my ‘Creep Crawler’ remix of ‘Frontline’. That cemented it for us.”

Basically you took Big E.D.’s ‘Frontline’ and merged it with your own ‘Creep Crawler’ from Industry Standard.  It’s got a really unusual synth sound, harmonically rich, with this sour, edge-of-dissonance tonality. It makes you feel like you’re on the verge of a stress-induced migraine. A sound like veins in your temple throbbing.

“It’s a normal synth, but where many people would just use it straight out of the module without any processing or texture, I’ve learned some techniques to give it more. I add that to it. I can’t tell you how, though. Certain producers might go “ah!”