A Call From The North: Inkke - The City

Kelvingrove Park is located in the West End of Glasgow, Scotland, and popular among both locals and tourists.

Grabbing his board, Rory Wood goes there to skate and meet friends. Kelvingrove is the place where he met Inkke, a Glasgow based producer that Rory describes as someone who “dresses and is really into New York hardcore punk”. When he found out that Inkke produces grime instrumentals, this caused pleasant surprise.

Rory Wood aka. Rawtape was born in Preston, a small town outside of Manchester in the north of England. SABUKARU did a short interview with Rawtape about his short film, ‘Y2Kids: Glasgow’, a few months back. This film explored and documented Glaswegian youth, whilst touching on a super-charged political landscape. With a varied soundtrack ranging from DJ Assault to metal, the film superbly captures a range of emotions. Some of the deeper and more reflective parts to the film utilise chilling grime instrumentals, produced by Inkke himself. That marked the first collaboration of Rawtape and Inkke.

Years later, the two met again. Skating in Kelvingrove park, Inkke told Rawtape about his upcoming EP and asked if he would be interested in shooting a music video for it. A choreographer friend of Rory’s, Tom Heyes, had been in touch with Rory about a collaboration not long before, and soon, synapses were firing. Tom’s self-described style is “performance art, [with] butch inspired rave moves”, which started to make sense as Inkke’s new EP featured tunes with more Hardcore influences.

Rawtape drafted in Chris Henderson as stylist, who dressed Heyes in an all-white 80’s Stone Island piece, Tom McKean as photographer, and Tin Ed, also known as One Norff, as creative assistant. Now, the crew was complete.

All hailing from Preston, except Tin, who is from Rochdale, the crew formed a heavyweight North West collab. The guys took to the streets of Manchester to film, and searched organically for engaging locations. Rory described the whole process as “five friends getting together to make something, not for money or clout, just for the culture”. From the streets, for the streets.

The video itself is shot on MiniDV, the same way as Y2Kids. By playing and experimenting with the boundaries of tape and MiniDV, Rawtape was able to create a lo-fi quality look where the dancer appears more like a 16-bit video game character due to the low quality of the footage coupled with frequent and dissociative overlaying of images.

Normally, Inkke is a grime producer, who, in 2015 produced British grime rapper Novelist’s track “Mmm Yeah”. In 2017, Inkke released “Simmer”, featuring Skepta, D Double E and Rapid. The music on the new EP, however, is inspired by Jungle, Hardcore and Drum & Bass.

Together, Rawtape’s style of film, Tom’s choreography, Chris’ styling, and One Norff’s creative direction produce an incredibly engaging clip that breathes English style through and through. It’s English, it’s potent, and it’s oh-so Northern.

The whole project shows the creativity that boils in the North of England. (Even though here we can find influences from southern Scotland, too).

The SABUKARU team is excited about what comes next for all the creatives involved and you should be too.

director: @rawtape
dancer: @blackhaine
assistant: @onenorff
photographer: @tomckean
stylist: @_chrishenderson