"The scene is alive and well, and it's thriving in some not-so-obvious places like Dubai, Croatia, and St. Petersburg," Bukem said. Taipei has a small drum 'n' bass scene in comparison, but Bukem sees himself as something of an ambassador of the genre; taking it to new audiences, while at the same time playing for a die-hard fan-base.
"I have to pay homage to promoters like Luxy, who take a risk to let us play to the hardcore foot-soldiers on the scene, who may be small in number," Bukem said. "But these gigs also let us get this stuff out there to new heads."
Bukem and Conrad's artistic partnership draws influence from mid-20th-century jazz, which they both cite as an influence, as much as their work looks to the future.
"Someone recently gave me the best compliment about my work," Conrad said in a separate interview also from London. "That my rhymes are like jazz drumming, with fills and riffs, and that's great, because I take a lot of my form from the syncopation of jazz drummers."
The art of deejaying has changed significantly over the last few years with the advent of new technology, but can the same be said about Conrad's rhymes and couplets?
"I wouldn't say I'm an urban poet, but I'm a wordsmith," Conrad said. "It's a mix between personal experience, message and word-play, and people get different things from that. When people come up to me and say that what I said made sense to them in their experiences, or that it constructs a question about the issues they are asking about life that maybe they wouldn't construct themselves, then that's what reconfirms what I do."
Conrad is a little like Bukem in his back-to-basics philosophy, and he also looks to the potential of emceeing. Conrad reckons, for example, that modern urban poetry should be on school curricula in the UK.
"People listen to me, to gangster-rap, to Dizzy Rascal and UK grime, and they hear street slang in this stuff. But if you put it on paper, then people have time to understand the double-meanings, how street slang can be understood in different contexts," he said.
"Putting these ideas into English classes at school could at least give people the chance to think about the way they use these ideas and how they think about themselves, and this gives them some space to think about how they make sense of their own lives."
Bukem and Conrad both argue that words and music should be, in essence, timeless.
"I want to collect records that I'll still be playing when I'm 90-odd," Bukem said.
"I don't claim to be, but I aim to be, a future-proof MC," Conrad said. "Hmm. That rhymes. I'm writing it down now."
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