Tice Cin – I’m About
Award-winning author, interdisciplinary artist and director Tice Cin today shares her debut single ‘I’m About’ alongside her self-directed debut short film, starring Aziz Kemal (Mood, Gangs of London) and Elikem Agbesi (Top Boy, Supacell, How to Have Sex).
The short marks the first release from Keeping the House – The Mixtape, out 1 July via her Neoprene Genie label and platform.
A rave-ready bubbling, bass-laden blend of 140, grime and UK funky – the single and captivating film for “I’m About” form a powerful centrepiece in Cin’s sonic adaptation of her debut novel Keeping the House. Rooted in real North London life, the mixtape extends the world of the book into audio and visual form, offering a vivid, at times surreal portrait of community, care and survival in ends.
On the track Tice shares, “I want it to be known that I’m doing something within poetry and rap, something in between – I’m barring with an out of time-ness, while I’m going between slow and fast. I’m heavily inspired by grime, and the poetry of grime, and also the rhythm of non-anglophone poetry, along with these Turkish epics that have these long monologic introductions before we get into the sweep of song – it’s become its own flow in my mouth.”
Produced by North London’s Rei Sky (Lex Amor), and featuring North-West London poet and MC Kareem Parkins-Brown, ‘I’m About’ is a haunting, immersive track exploring the fragmented connections within hyper-local estates. The lyrics and production spiral around a surreal concept: an all-seeing entity known as The Window watches over a girl being chased by two assailants, as her path crosses with a local dealer lost in his own quiet storm. “Sometimes, when there are no witnesses, we’re left with the windows and walls to hold our stories,” says Cin.
Cin’s accompanying short film brings this world to life with ends surrealism – a visual language where dream logic and real-life hardship blur. Shot on a tight budget through her self-founded company Neoprene Genie, ‘I’m About’ centres on characters whose lives briefly collide within a tightly wound estate, under the gaze of The Window, who decides who escapes, and who remains. Inspired by real accounts of gendered violence, the film offers a counter-narrative – a reimagining that bends reality to reclaim power.
“There is no one main character in a residential setting,” Cin adds. “We experience life without witness, even as we live side by side. I wanted to show the loneliness of hardship, and the fragmented way we exist in modern Britain.”
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