Play It Forward: Mala Sees The Space Between The Notes

In the inaugural season of Play It Forward, we've followed a musical chain of gratitude across genre, regions and time. First up was Dan Snaith, the Canadian indie-electronic auteur who records as Caribou. He was thankful for Glenn Copeland, an outsider musician in his 70s whose music went largely unnoticed until it was rediscovered by a Japanese collector in 2015. Copeland spotlighted a young band from Canada named Bernice, and its lead singer Robin Dann passed the chain to Georgia Anne Muldrow. Muldrow passed it to saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin, and Benjamin to James Blake.

In the last episode of dug into his musical past to pick an artist he's grateful for and our final artist in this chain. Before he went global, Blake was a figure in U.K. dance music and his biggest inspiration was Mala, a pioneering dubstep producer in the scene's vanguard. As one half of the duo Digital Mystikz, in the mid-2000s Mala helped turn a South London church basement into the epicenter of dubstep with a bimonthly night at DMZ.