Artist Profile: Cooly G

By age seven, Cooly G (aka Merrisa Campbell) was DJing in earnest and learning the craft early. Her adolescence played out in Brixton’s soundsystem culture, and in the wider South London ecosystem that fed jungle, UK garage, grime, dubstep, broken beat and UK funky. She left school at 16 and, within two months, was teaching music technology to men three times her age. The education, in other words, had already happened.

She is often placed within the UK funky movement that animated South London clubs in the late 2000s, and she has long pushed at the edges of the category. Her music exceeds tidy classification through scale, detail and atmosphere. Cooly G belongs to a lineage and works across the whole continuum.

That became unmistakable in June 2009, when Kode9’s Hyperdub released Narst / Love Dub. At the time, Hyperdub carried strong associations with dubstep’s darker experimental afterlife, and Cooly G’s arrival widened the label’s picture. The release quickly became pivotal. Both sides were staples at FWD and at her own monthly Brixton night. Cooly G helped articulate a zone where dubstep heads, house listeners, and funky dancers could all recognize something of themselves in the same music.

Her early Hyperdub run, including Up In My Head / Phat Si and Landscapes / It’s Serious, was sparse yet weighty. The rhythmic swing was unmistakably London, and the emotional atmosphere felt unusually private within club music.

In 2012, at Kode9’s suggestion, she made her first album. Playin’ Me remains the clearest statement of her first full creative phase and one of the great South London records of its period. Produced at home with a setup that included Ableton Live, FL Studio, Logic, a Launchpad and a Korg Kaoss Pad, the album was shaped through instinct. The 13 tracks trace the collapse of a relationship through textures and atmospheres.

Her second album, Wait ’Til Night, released in 2014, narrowed the palette and deepened the feeling. Hyperdub described it as sensitive, lo-fi bedroom music. Wait ’Til Night is sparse and nocturnal with bass rumbling beneath everything.

After the second album, the narrative around Cooly G grew quieter while the work continued in a different rhythm. Hold Me, Armzhouse, and the Magnetic EP pushed further into skeletal club function with her own sense of atmosphere. Alongside the official releases, Bandcamp and self-directed projects opened up a more independent archive of work.

In 2010, she formalized Dub Organizer Records, extending a CD-R culture and hand-to-hand circulation practice that predated her Hyperdub breakthrough. Through Dub Organizer she could release her own work, platform others, and maintain a more direct relationship with the scene around her. She also taught sound engineering and ran music production workshops for disaffected teenagers.

On New Year’s Eve 2018, a fire tore through the Croydon storage warehouse where she had placed her family’s belongings after a flood. Studio equipment, hard drives, children’s possessions, and her father’s soundsystem vinyl were destroyed. Community support followed. Kode9 launched a fundraiser. Boiler Room organized a benefit. One donor wrote that Cooly G had changed her life as a woman of color playing “Narst” in 2009. In that message, she carries her career summary.

Her later work confirmed a continuing forward motion. Save Me in 2021 folded amapiano and drill-adjacent textures into her established language of dubwise spaciousness and low-end sensuality. Her radio and mix work, for FACT, Boiler Room, NTS, Groove, Fabric and beyond, has consistently shown a selector with unusually supple instincts, able to move between funky, house, amapiano, R&B and bass mutations. She knows how to let the groove breathe, how to make the bass seductive, how to keep a set mobile with the groove running throughout.

Twenty years of music and Cooly G's records still feel lived in. The dancefloor logic is always there, the south London low-end is always there, and underneath it all is the sense of a real person working through something genuine. That's what keeps drawing people back. Hear it for yourself on March 19 as aim+wall return their residency to Control Club with Cooly G in tow.