Hometown: London.
The lineup: Jack Latham (vocals, instruments, production).
The background: We're a bit anxious about presenting today's artist, not because there's much question about the quality of his music, but because he comes from a "scene" – or rather, entire subcultural space – that is generally documented with such staggering erudition and attention to infinitesimal detail you could listen to and read about nothing else for months and not remotely get up to speed.
We find it ironic, and not a little fascinating, that the truest, supposedly "realest" musical and lyrical depiction of life on "the street" – dubstep and its half-brother, grime – is the one that is least tersely and most brainily extrapolated upon, as you can see on the website of Guardian.co.uk/music contributor Simon Reynolds. The degree of scrutiny that he and other grime/dubstep aficonados bring to bear on the music is, frankly, astonishing, especially if the words on grime tracks appear to untrained ears such as ours to be mere gruff doggerel – it's far easier for us to understand why grime's more instrumental-based counterpart, dubstep, might be examined more closely and decreed "heartbreakingly beautiful", as per a recent excellent Guardian feature about the Hyperdub label that spoke about the music's haunting melodies, grainy textures and elegant synth patterns.
So anyway, we feel as though we've been dropped into some intimidating, desolate futurescape without a map in talking about today's act, Jack Latham, a 20-year-old Londoner who records as Jam City. This makes some sort of sense since the sounds Latham makes do conjure up an atmosphere, almost a psychogeographic space, with the feel of a chillingly elegant dystopia about it. The titles to his tracks bear this out: Clocktower, In the Park, Underpass Limiter, Island ... They're more than a little reminiscent in their language of Gary Numan and John Foxx song titles, and they have, beneath the icily imperious synths, a similar sense of Ballardian/Clockwork Orange-y disquiet that the synth-pop pioneers of the late 70s brought to bear on their music.
In fact, Latham, for all the blog blather that makes him seem like a Year Zero artist breaking with tradition to invent a new paradigm, sounds to us like the logical culmination of three decades of electro-pop exploration. You can hear in his kinetic and melancholy music elements of Numan and the Human League, the sleek techno and jacked-up house of Detroit and Chicago, the machine grace of the Germans, and the idiosyncratic experiments of Warp when it was in Sheffield. Sometimes you hear Jam City and you think of a London of the near future; other times it has the polyrhythmic range of a sort of world music electronica. Maybe it's a peculiarly lovely strain of post-grime house. We're not sure what to call it, what the coordinates are, or the extent of its radical invention, but even with our limited understanding we can tell that Latham is special.
The buzz: "I don't think I've ever been so excited about a new British producer as I am, right now, about Jam City."
The truth: He's the British Electric Foundation's latest recruit.
Most likely to: Inspire a university-level thesis.
Least likely to: Be curtly appraised.
What to buy: Nothing as yet – but you can hear a lot of his music at Fact magazine.
File next to: Carl Craig, Aphex Twin, Kraftwerk, Darkstar.
Links: myspace.com/jamcitytrax
Tomorrow's new band: Kate Voegele.