Trimbal | th

23-year-old Trimbal - real name Javan St Prix - mixtapes offer an arena for him to test his creative boundaries. "I treat them as training," he says. "I'm not trying to make the best record in the world. What I'm doing is pushing myself, being different and seeing where that takes me. Mixtapes are all about challenging myself and experimenting. There are lots of sides to me, musically and as a person. This is a way for me to get all of that out there and show people what I can do."

His current release, the third in his Soul Food series, shows grime at its most experimental and innovative, the MC's laconic flows barely recognising rhythm or rhyme scheme. Eschewing many of the genre's established conventions, his stark stream-of-consciousness narratives, dished out under a variety of aliases, paint enthralling pictures of inner-city life and balance confrontation with a rare sense of introspection and vulnerability. Nowhere is this better illustrated than on The Bits, a mesmerising collaboration with producers Dusk & Blackdown on which hallucinatory evocations of Tower Hamlets streets slowly uncoil over a rhythm built from samples of a traditional Chinese zither.

YO this is harmonimix (aka james blake) & trim .