Out of anyone to emerge in the UK funky scene, Scratcha DVA has been one of the key antagonists of the sound. His style veers wildly between moods, from sweet introspection to dutty swagger, quite often in the same bar. Between a show on Rinse FM and an increasingly steady release schedule on Hyperdub, in some ways DVA has transcended the trappings of his grime background to reach a kind of creative liberation where almost anything goes in his music. There’s a common kind of groove across the whole of Pretty Ugly, which is the closest delineation to DVA’s UKF contemporaries, but beyond that the tracks go anywhere and everywhere.

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