Words by Emma Warren

North London duo Blue Lab Beats have a powerful feature on their new album Motherland Journey. It’s a guest from beyond the grave in the shape of Fela Kuti and was enabled after the legendary afrobeat singer’s estate granted them permission to use an acapella from his 1975 classic Everybody Scatter. 

“I really wanted to make it feel like you were in Accra, in West Africa, production-wise,” says drummer and production whizz NK-OK aka Namali Kwaten. “I wanted to recreate all the sounds I heard when I was there. I was adding birds, bus noises, all of that stuff.” It turned out that the latter was a good choice – not least because Fela Kuti was speaking about a bus journey in the lyrics they used. 

Their ambitious album contains the pair’s top-flight playing and production alongside multiple features and guest spots (Tiana Major 9, Ego Ella May, Ghetto Boy). It combines the sun-soaked DNA of classic hip hop, neo-soul, UK jazz and afrobeats and brings all these elements together in a truly individual North London style.

NK-OK and his multi-instrumentalist musical partner Mr DM aka David Mrakpor are now signed to Blue Note but it all began in a more humble laboratory. They started in a bedroom studio in Golders Green (‘we made a lot of crazy stuff there’) using a broken-down keyboard handed down from a parent. ‘It had an insanely slow RAM, says NK-OK. ‘I could only load up ten channels, maybe six. It made me learn to be patient.’ Their debut album Xover came out in 2018 and Voyage followed a year later. Remix successes with Dua Lipa and Rag’n’Bone Man meant they could upgrade to a better computer and move to the studio shed they currently inhabit. A Grammy nomination for their production work on Angelique Kidjo’s Mother Nature boosted them up another level as did their 2021 MOBO nomination for ‘Best Jazz Act’. 

Blue Lab Beats produced the Kuti-featuring title track with multi-award winning producer and songwriter Killbeatz at his studio in Accra. It was a last-minute invitation after the artist’s management clocked the pair were in town, and they headed over to his studio in the early hours. “It was a pretty hilarious taxi journey,” remembers Mr DM. “It was meant to take 20 minutes but it took an hour for some reason. “He was playing us all these amazing drum patterns,” adds NK-OK. He had a little rough chord idea then he was like, ‘David, try and expand on this’. Sonically what he brings to the table is amazing.”

Another amazing aspect of the duo’s music and practice is the fast-finger technique known as ‘the Blue Lab Jab’. It began when NK-OK started going to jams, playing with drummers on his Native Instruments Maschine V3. “I was like, 'oh I can’t do drum fills yet, but I want to do my own technique’. I was just practicing doing it for crazy amounts of time. For the first two months, I had to wear plasters on my fingers. People were like ‘you’re crazy, you know you’re hurting yourself’. I was like ‘nah, I don’t care’, pushed through. At the start I could do it for half a bar, then a full bar, two bars, four bars. At gigs, I do eight, but I can push myself to twelve.” As far as he knows he’s the only finger drummer with the jab. “I wanted to invent my own technique.” 

There’s a joyfulness to Blue Lab’s sound that permeates everything they do. This partly comes from their background in jams, but also from the friendship that underpins all the music. “During the whole Blue Lab creative process, whatever I play I try to bounce off the drums that have been laid down,” says Mrakpor. “It can be small things like bouncing off the kick pattern or responding to the snare. My thing is responding to the movement of drums, the rhythmic patterns, conversational stuff.”

His main ‘composing weapons’ are keyboards, bass and guitar, with which he builds the harmonic structure, melodies and basslines. His first weapon was drums, which he started at age three, adding piano the following year. He began playing guitar aged ten, and bass aged twelve. Drummer and drum machine fiend Kwaten brings production, mixing and sound design. “I’m trying to understand and bring an atmosphere to each track. Is it more of an outside, country track or is it more in the city?’.

Jams themselves have been an important element of their evolution. They were both part of esteemed youth music educators Tomorrows Warriors and WAC Arts, both of which encouraged their creativity and commitment to communal music-making. At 17, Mr DM began attending a jam at a pub in West London with the funk band W3 and gradually joined the jazz-famous sessions at Troy Bar. By the mid-late 2010s, he was a regular at the Space Rhyme Continuum jazz-hip hop jams and Unit 31’s brilliant Salt Peanuts sessions hosted by the much-missed UK rapper Ty. 

It had amazing energy, says NK-OK. It was also open to his Maschine in a way that other jams weren’t. “Unit 31 was the first jam where I could bring my drum machine,” said NK-OK. “Most jams were like, ‘you can’t bring that in here’. I wanted to bring it to jam sessions so I could understand the musicians’ vocabulary, instead of me just getting them into the studio and not really understanding what’s happening when they’re soloing. A lot of the time, the musician takes can be really restrictive. People don’t know how to get the best solo out of the musicians, the best way comfort-wise – or how to get them out of their comfort zone. Me bringing my drum machine to jams gave me more knowledge, definitely.”

Another jam, Straight Pocket (which sometimes included surprise guests from Thundercat to Angel Bat Dawid) deepened their relationship with Pure Vinyl record shop in Brixton whose owner Claudia Wilson is a rare Black woman running her own vinyl emporium. She was giving over shop space to Straight Pocket every Monday, filling the space with the youngest of the new wave musicians and their friends. “It was packed, it was crazy,” said NK-OK. “Each jam was legendary and it got crazier each time,” he says.

In the round-up of the jams that surround Blue Lab Beats, there’s Orii Jam where they made their video for Dat It featuring Kiefer. The energy that you’ll see is typical of a Blue Lab show, with NK-OK on his Maschine with a midi-controller ‘for on-the-spot arranging’ and for solos. He uses it mostly for drum programming, arrangement and sometimes sampling (‘it’s hands down the best sampling kit, no argument’). “Sometimes I’ll make a rough arrangement which I’ll give to David and we’ll take it from there. I’ve been learning about velocity zones and finding live drum samples then programming each velocity so that the snare hits from really quiet to really loud instead of it being one level. When I do that, I’m editing for a good hour, just for one snare. I’m really dedicated like that. I want a proper live thing.” 

Mic experts Shure called them up to make a process video, which fitted nicely with their ongoing series of challenges, where they invite lyricists and vocalists to freestyle over bespoke loops. “We always like making backing tracks, simple pocket grooves. Whoever can solo on it, freestyle on it, it’s just for people to express themselves over a good backing track, that’s the vibe.” The challenges led them to at least one collaborator, vocalist Farah – ‘her vocal range is incredible’ – who will be appearing on a forthcoming EP.

The pair have a sync deal coming up for TV, but they can’t reveal anything about it just yet. In the future they’d love to turn their skills to gaming, citing Andrew and Simon Hale’s LA Noire score as an ‘absolutely outrageous’ favourite. “We haven’t done any scores yet, but we’d love to,” says NK. “I think gaming is missing more jazztronica stuff.”