With the release of his electronic album ‘Beserka’ last year, Mark ‘Merka’ Ford is an already familiar household name in the breaks scene. This year, he teams up with MC Esha forming Mystic Man & Eshamanjaro to create a slice of retrospective, cutting edge, beat driven hip hop.

With the release of his electronic album ‘Beserka’ last year, Mark ‘Merka’ Ford is an already familiar household name in the breaks scene. This year, he teams up with MC Esha forming Mystic Man & Eshamanjaro to create a slice of retrospective, cutting edge, beat driven hip hop.

As shown in ‘Beserka’, Mark’s style of producing is to saturate his music with as many musical styles and genres as possible, and he carries this concept through to ‘In Heavy Weather’. The album opens with ‘Cheshire Cat’, the debut single released at the end of last year, presenting its upbeat 90s jazz piano riffs, a rubbery bassline, and silky strings and backing vocals.

The next single to be released is the more melancholic ‘Minds I’, which evokes a certain sadness by Eshamanjaro’s bitter politics, the soft male vocals and the reverberant instrumental solo melodies. Merka’s love and need to dip into the hip-hop scene with this new album may not be anticipated by the hip hop stalwart, but as an accomplished, talent riddled producer and lover of the scene, this venture will turn heads in and around the scene.

Merka leaves an impressive trail of productions, as well as remixes for the Dub Pistols, Unique 3 & Blatta & Inesha, with his debut album ‘Beserka’ cited as ‘...one of the most interesting and captivating albums the scene has ever produced...’ IDJ magazine. Influences are pulled from funk-fuelled jazz, the drum & bass feel of Photek, The Avalanches and even Lemon Jelly, and we get an explosion of bouncing beats, and funky guitars and basslines, with a quality of production that makes you think that the duo have been in the hip hop scene for years. Now, he has hooked up with friend and fellow philosopher of life Jon Driver aka Eshamanjaro, who has taken time out from studying his PHD in Philosophy of Mental Disorder (seriously!) to bring a fresh UK flow to Mystic Man’s soulful Hip-Hop fused beats. With Merka tipped by Music Week as a producer who is ‘truly light years ahead’, and Esha’s thought-provoking lyrical skills, ‘In Heavy Weather’ takes UK Hip-Hop to a whole new level.