Where We Come From review: a groundbreaking history of grime

About a quarter of the way into Where We Come From, music journalist Aniefok Ekpoudom’s debut book, the text suddenly contracts to a thin strip of staccato sentences — a stark column of internal dialogue that is more like something you’d find in a chapbook of poetry. Deployed to visually mirror the moment when one of the book’s real-life protagonists struggles for breath in the depths of the Mediterranean, it is a heavy clue that, figuratively speaking, we are not in Kansas or even Kennington any more. That, really, this is a work experimenting beyond the formal genre boundaries of what could broadly be described as a music scene biography.