Have you been back since leaving? Do you keep up with the music that’s been coming out since you’ve left?

No! I'm trying to go this year, but I haven't been back yet. The music's actually starting to get more notice over here, though. Afrobeats has kind of blown up; it's not hard [to keep up], it's in my face now. Now everything's a fusion, innit. I actually like it. It gives more credit, it makes Afrobeats more of a bigger genre. Everything I do has Afrobeats influence, and it's not even on purpose. I like that other people are taking the Afrobeats and bashment vibe and messing with it and creating.

How did bashment enter your life?

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When I got back to London at thirteen, when you'd go to parties, that was all they would play, bashment. Before then, we obviously knew about Sean Paul, Beenie Man — they were huge, they were almost pop. But in terms of the underground artists, it was when I actually got back to London and started raving, that I started really getting into stuff like that.

When did you start getting serious about production?

When I got back to London, I did, courses at a place called APE Media. They taught me the basics of Logic, so I went from Fruity Loops to that. Just playing around with that, I felt like sending stuff out. I had an uncle who was a rapper at the time, so I was sending stuff to him, and he kind of helped me a lot. He probably played the biggest role in terms of getting me to a certain level. He actually had a set up, and he brought me over every weekend for about five years, from age 14 until about 20. He would let me use the computer if they weren't using it, and he put me around producers that I actually looked up to. Next door there was Sticky, who was producing music for Ms. Dynamite and others, just big producers, and they would all let me just sit in their room and watch. That was the biggest thing for me, because they were all five, ten times better than me, a whole bunch of different producers from different genres. Some were doing dubstep, some were doing grime, some were doing reggae, and it was all in one building, so I could literally walk from room to room and be in a different world in terms of sound. That taught me a lot. That's where I learned like 95% of everything I know.

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That was every weekend. When I dropped out of college, I was there every day for like six months. I would literally go home and shower and I would go back and I was there. I had no social life. That was my life, just being in the studio. I could see myself progressing quicker than in anything else I tried. I could actually see results. I would make a beat and then the next week, I'd make another one, and it was three times better than the first. And I wasn't getting any tired of it, like I was with a lot of other things I was doing.

Who is your uncle?

Well, his artist name is Blem, or Blemish. He might have changed it. I'm not sure, but he's a writer-rapper. But he started the the production company JOAT I was under before now. JOAT, it was the beat tag for everything that JOAT produced. So there were three of us: me, my uncle Blemish, and Randy Valentine, a producer-artist. For about two or three years, we were just producing for artists as JOAT. But last year, I would say, when we started doing J Hus, that's when it actually kind of took off.

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You mentioned APE Media. Can you tell me a little more about it?

APE Media is a non-for-profit organization that works with a lot of people that get in trouble. It's like, people that are not in education, people that've just come out of jail, and stuff like that. I was on a course there because I think I was on probation for something stupid. I think I got to do less community time or something like that if I took on a course with APE Media. It is well-known, but mostly for these people that get in trouble and people that've come out of jail. They advertise it quite well, for you to know that there are options to get qualifications. But it's not as big as it should be, because you have to kind of get in trouble to know about it. If I wasn't getting in trouble, I would not have known about it. But it's probably the first professional environment I was in, music-wise.

So, I took on a course, and they taught me how to use Logic, and they actually gave me a job teaching music after the course. So I took courses for about two years, and then I was working with them for about another four years teaching music production. In my courses, I focused on radio broadcasting, and music production. They had everything from TV to acting to fashion, but those two are what I was really interested in. I wanted to do the radio station there, but my timing wasn't as good as it should have been. I'd be ten minutes late to a radio set, but that's not actually acceptable. So I realized it wasn't for me. Whereas with music production I had a bit more flexibility.

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They work really well in terms of finding out what level you're at and they progress from there, they don't really waste your time going back and forth, like they do in a uni course where everyone has to start at one point. It's really catered around your needs.