Name: Jianbo

Where He’s From: South London

When He Started: “Properly in 2015, but I always tried to MC over random instrumentals playing out of phones when I was a kid. It was just fun to me, until I started taking it seriously.”

Genre: Alternative Rap

File Next To: Knucks, Lo-Wu, Nix Northwest

Sounds Like: “I’d say it’s like yin and yang. I like to think of it as a sound of pain vocalised in a peaceful way.”

First Music That Inspired Him: “Really early on, I used to listen to radio rips of garage and grime sets that my cousin played me. So it wasn’t a particular song that inspired me—it was more a general desire to become an MC, like Wiley or D Double E, and being able to tear up a live set. I remember there was one Rossi B & Luca mix I got given that I listened to all the time. When it came round to actually making tracks in the studio, though, I’d say it was probably ‘Round We Go’ by Dizzee Rascal that left a lasting impression on me. The storytelling and cultural context of that song was captivating to me, as well as its relatability and musicality.”

Having grown up between Vietnam and refugee camps in Hong Kong, Jianbo’s mother didn’t connect with the music that soundtracked the UK when she moved here as a teen. Jianbo’s music education would have to wait until his teenage years. As he grew up, he started to find the music that excited him, putting his own feelers out to find out what worked. Late ‘90s and early 2000s R&B and hip-hop from the States were his jump-off points before UK pioneers like So Solid Crew, Artful Dodger and Crazy Cousinz piqued his interests.

Eventually, Jianbo’s older cousins took him under their wings, giving him a crash course in their wide and varied tastes. “It was a mixed bag, because I’ve got so many cousins,” he jokes. Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jeff Buckley and Nirvana from one cousin; Iron Soul, Low Deep, Scruface & Stimpy, and DVDs like F*ck Radio from another. Later on, he says, he caught the rising tide of dubstep and began hoovering up the low-end rumblings of Mala & Coki and Caspa & Rusko.

You can find traces of all of these disparate sounds in his music: the alternative bent of the ‘90s rock acts informs his drive to be different, while the lineage of soundsystem culture—running from So Solid to Rusko—can be heard in the productions he sources. That patchwork of influences also informed his approach to creativity as he began scouring the internet for instrumentals to start practising on. The ability to record and distribute music at the time was becoming completely democratised, and the DIY approach was king. “I made 100s of songs that will never see the light of day,” Jianbo says of his early experiments on SoundCloud. “I think the first one I ever made though was probably some silly vocal dub over ‘Pingu Riddim’ or some other vaguely-named bluetooth track.”

When Jianbo started recording his own music and really dedicated himself to it as a career, he held early Kanye—“the young, talented and hungriest version of Kanye West”—as the standard of creativity to aspire to. “2000s Kanye West is the most overall influential artist to me,” he says. “Not only for his music but also because of his complete artistic vision—from the original sonic direction to the music videos to the fashion, Kanye had the full package.”

But even though rap is a huge part of him, the bass-fuelled UK underground will always be embedded in his psyche. Jianbo has a new project on the horizon and it’s anyone’s guess what that could sound like. Whether it’s a package of D&B firecrackers like his recent Denham Audio collab “Fuel”, something more akin to the hybrid garage sounds of Tears In My XO Sauce, or a combination of all of the above, we can at least be sure it’ll be different.