It’s not entirely surprising to hear the news of Terror Danjah’s death, given he had been very unwell since suffering a stroke in 2019. But it still hits just as hard, and leaves a gaping absence in British music culture. Born Rodney Pryce, he was not only a foundational figure in grime at the turn of the millennium, but throughout his prolific career remained a great enthusiast, evangelist, musical explorer and connector of people.

He was one of the first grime producers to work with singers, the first to have his instrumentals released in album form, and reached beyond the sometimes insular scene, joining dots into other areas of bass and club music, and helping grime itself to achieve maturity and longevity. He was also crucial in documenting the culture, and any conversation with him never stuck to music – his generally salacious anecdotes were packed with detail of how X was Y’s cousin or went to school with Z, all precisely located on a detailed mental map of record shops, clubs and pirate station studios, and filling in inter-generational detail. So hilariously gossipy were his stories, it could often feel like an episode of grimey EastEnders, but it also brought the music culture vividly to life.

Growing up in Forest Gate, east London, he had a standard early 90s adolescence listening to ragga and hip-hop, then jungle hit just as he was starting to collect records and DJ as Terror Danjah. He quickly built a reputation doing the rounds of house parties and youth clubs with his schoolfriend MC Dee – soon to be spelled out as D Double E. But he already had a deeper musical grounding, too: he had older siblings with diverse tastes, his brother-in-law had been on early pirates playing electro and house, and his dad was of the pre-reggae Jamaican generation and filled the family home with jazz, classical and country.

He and Dee quickly got recruited by local pirate Future FM, then the bigger Rinse FM, and at the end of the decade, Terror Danjah tried his hand at his own jungle/drum’n’bass productions to little effect. But though he didn’t like it much when his pirate peers made the switch to garage near the end of the decade, the minute he tried producing at that tempo, MCs and listeners were thrilled. The name “grime” didn’t exist yet, but he was tapping into the same set of influences as fellow Rinse names Wiley, Target, Geeneus and co, and tracks such as 2002’s Highly Flammable helped cement the sound: a wildly futurist music based around lurching bass, freezer-burned drum programming and fast-chatting lyricism.

But Terror Danjah was already in a lane of his own even as he operated right at the heart of the nascent scene, having Skepta and Kano jumping on his beats, working with Nasty Crew and his own After Shock collective, and launching the careers of MCs like Bruza, Mz Bratt and Tinie Tempah. He helped create the R&B-grime hybrid “R&G” with singers like Sadie and Shola Ama, but his instrumentals for MCs also had a unique musicality, combining Timbaland-style fidgety percussion, huge reggae soundsystem bass, melodic hooks galore and above all a natural sense of funk.

This all helped him reach a wider electronica audience, and Gremlinz, his 2009 collection of beats for connoisseurs’ label Planet Mu put a flag in the ground for grime as instrumental electronic music just as dubstep was beginning to outflank it. This was followed by music on Hyperdub alongside the likes of Burial and label boss Kode9; helping to launch the Butterz imprint and parties, emphasising grime as party music above all; and generally forging links through the wider club and “post-dubstep” scene.

I first interviewed Terror Danjah around his early Hyperdub releases, and was bowled over by his geniality, generosity and love for his scene and locality. He became the biggest single inspiration for my book Bass, Mids, Tops, which mapped out UK bass music, and he took a starring role.

Through the 2010s, his mercurial creativity seemed like maybe it kept him from the breakout success he deserved – he’d leap from making borderline EDM bangers to ultra-minimal dancehall, concept albums about planets to R&B rhythms for vocalist IAMDDB – often churning tracks out with little fanfare on his own Hardrive imprint. But every time I interviewed him or bumped into him at an industry do or rave, he seemed creatively fulfilled and happy to have the respect of his peers, getting regular collaborations with everyone from Wiley to Four Tet.

It’s bittersweet that he had just made his most coherent album yet, Invasion, when he was taken ill in 2019 – the thought of what might have come is almost too much to process. But he was already the best producer in all of grime, and so much more besides: his influence will only become more apparent with time.