Newham raised & currently living in Essex – I’m a producer on my off time and day to day I work in fashion.

When I got into university, my parents purchased a laptop for my studies. Being a Limewire/ Bearshare (torrenting software) baby, my natural inclination was to stock up my laptop full with any and every software I could get my hands on. So, naturally, Fruit Loops Studio was one of the first applications I downloaded and I literally just played around with it. At the time, I had a couple of friends who produced deep house music, so I started with that sound.

The name comes from my Tumblr. I needed an unused username and was inspired by the Japanese producer, Nujabes, who created the hip-hop influenced soundtrack to an anime called Samurai Champloo I was watching at the time. His real name is Jun Seba and he flipped it to make Nujabes. So I went with Mellow K & flipped it to KwolleM.

The idea came organically going back and forth with major contributor Joe James – initially, the plan was to release West Ham as a single. But, I felt as it would be my first release on Spotify, Apple Music and other digital streaming platforms in a while, I should make it a two-track single. The beauty of Joe and I’s relationship is he’s Essex born, but grew up in London. Whilst I’ve been in-between both most of my life.
So, the moment I told him we needed to make a track called Basildon, he understood what that meant. SSS, (Shoeburyness/Southend-on-Sea) came at the same time as Basildon – I sent him two instrumental options and Joe’s workmate meant two tracks in one. Understanding we essentially had three stops on the c2c now, the concept loosely had already presented itself. So ultimately, we just needed to work on more stops, I had to figure who else to feature on the project and how their inclusions made sense for the journey.
Going song by song, SSS embodies the seaside trips in the morning/afternoon contrasted by seeing the Southend FC fans at the end of the night. Basildon reflects puppy love, basically an Essex teen love story. Barking/Dagenham is more country to concrete – growing up, drifting further away from Essex to London to make money and date London girls.
West Ham, one of two Newham stops on the project, I wanted to sound as cinematic as being in Newham at night actually feels. But it needed the contrast caused by the distraction of a pretty girl on the train ride.
Stratford Interlude with The Rayf feature was another proponent of the mellow grime sound with the sentence “Got one life and living it ain’t easy”, yet things only seem to get harder the further down the line you get. Woolwich Arsenal is a necessary literal diversion on the project, the train metaphor wouldn’t have been complete without one.
Fenchurch St. is the last stop on the C2C line and the outro on the project. The song is literally the whole project condensed into one. Meeting a girl on the train in Essex & trying to move to her the whole journey.

This project focuses more on original music – as a producer, Joe James is essentially my vocal presence allowing me to communicate how I feel, especially as we think alike and we have had very similar experiences.

Joe’s been a friend of mine for the past five or six year – we were in Ayia Napa in Turkey together with our partners and friends a month ago. Joe and I literally became friends at a time where we both separately started making music. We listen to the same music and we’re from similar areas, I could send him an instrumental, talk about a stop for five minutes and we’d have a song. So, working with Joe was a no brainer, I wouldn’t have been able to make this project with anyone else.

I started off making deep house music abd it was Alchemist’s productions that even made me move from sampling neo soul hits or R&B vocals for house or hip-hop tracks. It’s less obvious now as I focus on British music, but I was making mellow Alchemist type of tracks with hip-hop acapellas. In regards to other artists, I would say Knxwledge and Cookin Soul.

Literally cyber crate digging – I just spend my time listening to music until I find something that moves me and then go from there. It’s whatever works, to be honest. I might slow the sample down, increase the speed, reverse it, chop it up, loop a specific bit. I have a mantra that I follow and it’s simply whatever’s clever, essentially meaning do whatever works.

It’s a formula I’m very comfortable with now – I don’t think there’s a balance to be honest, I think people love the juxtaposition in whatever degree provided. That’s what I’ve learnt after five years of this and how people took to c2c.

There’s multiple angles to look at it from. I know that grime purists hale Dizzee Rascals' Boy In Da Corner as the best grime project ever, but I lean towards Kano's Home Sweet Home. My preference is based on the fact that Kano didn’t box himself into the pure grime sound, which makes it considerably more palatable. Of course, my intention was never to make grime easier to listen to, but the fact that’s the case can’t possibly be a bad thing. I just like the idea that you can sneak realism in easier when the instrumental is softer.

This was the first track made for the project – the mindset attacking this song was I wanted to make the darkest grime track I could, but I had broken it down into moments of happiness to mellowness and to love. That goes as quickly as it comes – as you snap back into the reality of being in West Ham. Realistically, all this was required for me not to make a mellow grime track and instead have grime with grime and have the mellow with the mellow.

Crazy Titch is a grime icon hailing from Newham. Devlin is the most famous Essex rapper/MC and Roachee is a Roll Deep original who hails from the East End. I wanted every feature to relate to the stop their particular stop, for example, Crazy Titch’s relation to SSS would be the singalong reference in conjunction with the football chant.

Working on making a little film with a of couple tracks on the project.