Available on: Keysound 12″

London is a well worn subject material in electronic music. The Bug fashioned a mutated portrayal of the city on London Zoo, with echoes as deep as underground train lines and the overpowering claustrophobia of cramped inner-city streets. Then of course, Burial built his distinctive sound out of the austere ambience of London’s most desolate urban sprawls, bringing the suffocating grey and drizzle of a walk through the city’s streets at night.

Enter fellow Hyperdub alumni LV, a production trio whose 38 EP brings another facet of the city to life with stunning detail. What Burial did for the city’s lonely heart, LV do for its circuitry system. Through lyrical support from grime-inspired wordsmith Josh Idehen the passengers of London’s infamous [well, it was in a Wiley lyric we guess – Ed] 38 bus route are imagined and animated with dark hue, prickly humour and vivid realism.

As ever, LV are on fine form here, with backing varying from the skeletal atmospherics of ‘Face of God’ to the dark rolling bass of the bleep-speckled ‘Early Mob’. The variety of the beats is genuinely reflective of a cross-section of passengers on a London bus, from the jittery rudeboy skip of ‘Your Coat’ to the sense of the city’s overwhelming heat and presence depicted on ‘Lost’. But despite these vivid productions, the star of this EP is Idehen, whose slick poetic turns and incisive lyricism bring five very different commuters to live.

As the 38 snakes through Clapton and into the heart of the city, Idehen brings each personality to live without pretension. Whether depicting the mournful tragedy of city life (“many aim for the stars and get stuck in the gutter / you’ve got to be acidic to survive the city’s gut”), the self-sure aggression and furious posturing of the London night (“walkie talkie won’t bring you no messiah”) or the countless problems of the city’s countless people (“the young in your elders / the fear of a first time mother”), Idehen’s portrayals glow with a combination of humour and poignancy that few can match.

Through these vignettes Idehen and LV work symbiotically to create genuine samples of London’s populace. Whether it’s the desperately overwhelmed or the hopelessly arrogant, Idehen lets them breathe, and together with LV’s deft production work, lets the characters and chaos of the 38 bus come to life with stunning vividity.

Mike Coleman