Coco Dubz: traded a drawing for her first set of decks | Dubstep, Grime, 140 | DIFF Radio Guest Mix

‪@cocodubz787‬ started in 2021 on a pair of decks she got by trading away a piece of her own artwork. Only one fader worked, so she learned on two tunes. This is her guest mix for DIFF Radio, recorded in Cardiff. "I play dubstep, grime, anything bassy, anything with a nice R&B vocal. Heavy bass." What she plays sits between the two: "the mad thing of dubstep and grime — it's like in the middle, sub-low type of bassy grime." She calls herself a simplistic DJ and means it as a method. Grime runs in eights, so the switches are straight and the work goes somewhere else — into reading the room. On her own she builds the tension herself. With MCs on the mic it changes: "I'm watching how much they're spitting and when I need to bring the next tune in." She produces as much as she plays. Her days are spent teaching DJing and music theory at a college, so she's in Logic constantly — fifteen-minute beat challenges with the other tutors, a beat smashed out on the way home. There's a release coming on Pull Up she calls her favourite tune she's made all year, heavy dubstep. Before that was the Oh My EP, held back a year and finished with twelve producers remixing it. Plenty of what she drops in a set is still unreleased, her own included. One of her favourite sets came with a condition attached — a Red Bull booking where every tune had to be unreleased. "It's one of the best grime sets I've ever done. Usually you'll drop a well-known tune and get them gassed. The boys were getting gassed off tunes that they've never heard." Since those first decks: fabric, Shambhala in Canada, Prague. The fabric booking came out of a phone call she wasn't on. Someone asked whether there was anything going on with grime and 140, and her name came up. "You never know what's around the corner having people saying your name in conversations." Her new track, Sao Tome Riddim, is out now! Heart of Cardiff Ep. 6 with Coco Dubz is out Wednesday 4 November. FOLLOW COCO DUBZ Instagram —   / cocodubz_   TikTok —   / cocodubz_   Spotify — https://open.spotify.com/artist/3ie7c... SoundCloud —   / cocodubz23   DIFF RADIO YouTube —    / @diffradiocdf   Instagram —   / diff_radio   TikTok —   / diff.radio   Spotify — https://open.spotify.com/show/56GIF9i... Mixcloud — https://www.mixcloud.com/DIFF_Radio/ Website — https://diffradio.com