Momentous 2022

ARCA

Arca is one of the world’s most transformative musical talents. Since breaking through with her 2012 EPs Stretch 1 and Stretch 2, she’s created an unprecedented body of work drawing from club music, experimental noise, and the ballad tradition of her native Venezuela, while reaching beyond music to encompass performance, visual art, and technology. She’s collaborated with Björk, Kanye West, FKA twigs and worked with the Weeknd, Frank Ocean, Rosalía, and Sia. She’s stretched contemporary music’s sonic boundaries and helped set the sound of her era. As a Latinx nonbinary trans woman, she’s redefined the role of the diva for a new generation.

FOUR TET

Four Tet is the electronic outlet for the solo work of UK artist Keiran Hebden. Their first single was the 36-minute “Thirtysixtwentyfive” on Trevor Jackson’s Output Recordings label (1998). Dialogue was Four Tet’s first full-length album, fusing hip-hop drum lines with dissonant jazz samples. Hebden has also remixed artists including Madvillain, Bloc Party, Super Furry Animals, Beth Orton, Badly Drawn Boy, The Notwist, Boom Bip, Kings of Convenience, and Radiohead.

 BEN UFO

Over the past five years, Ben UFO has acquired a deserved reputation as one of contemporary dance music’s most daring and wide-ranging selectors, with his keen ear and razor-sharp technical abilities enabling him to cut between eras, lineages and mixing styles with dazzling ease and fluidity.

Having cut his teeth in early dubstep and drum ’n’ bass, his roots lie in UK rave culture–yet his selections cast the net wider, drawing new mutations of this culture into the orbit of house, techno, and other global dancefloor sounds. In the club, his sets somehow manage to be simultaneously considered and raucous, sliding from sidewinding broken rhythms into an irresistible four-to-the-floor groove, or broadsiding you with unexpected tangents, old favorites, and bizarre secret weapons.

JLIN

Jlin is one of the most prominent female producers of the current generation. She grew up in Gary, Indiana, just 20 miles from downtown Chicago. Though previously using samples in her work, she now refuses to, and her tracks are composed of all original material.

Phong Tran

Phong Tran is a Brooklyn-based composer and visual artist. His work revolves around emotional experiences in nonphysical spaces. His most recent album The Computer Room is an acknowledgment to virtual worlds, video games, message boards, and the people that filled them in the early 2000s. His practice is as much curatorial as it is creation as he places his wide influences in full display combining elements across genres and mediums.

Phong performs in MEDIAQUEER, a synthesizer and violin duo formed in 2018 with Darian Thomas. Phong’s solo work has been released through New Amsterdam Records, people | places | records, and slashsound. He has also recently performed as part of Bang on a Can’s Long Play Festival in Brooklyn, New York, and Loud Weekend at Mass MoCA.

BGI DJ (fka Total Freedom)

Big Gay Idiot DJ fka Total Freedom is a multidisciplinary artist, DJ and producer based in Miami. BGIdj was a founding member of Fade to Mind, a Los Angeles-based music label, and a resident DJ at New York’s Gh20G0th1K parties since their inception. BGIdj was the creator of WILDNESS and Grown, two popular weekly underground club nights in Los Angeles and was also a resident at the city’s beloved Mustache Mondays. More recently the parties Melting Point in NYC, Evian Christ’s Trance Parties in the UK and PDA in London have claimed BGIdj as a part-time resident. Known for collaborations, BGIdj has worked with fellow artists including Ryan Trecartin, Isa Genzken, Arca, Wu Tsang, Xavier Cha, Boychild, Josh Johnson, Kelela, Akeem Smith, and Jason Moran.

HYD

Hyd burst through cracks in the surface of pop music with their self-titled EP in the fall of 2021, marking the emergence of a lifetime of underground materials. Through whispered vocals, ethereal drips, sharp drops and heavy synths, Hyd leaked out.

An elusive force, deeply enmeshed in the art world and music communities, Hyd dedicated their practice to
reinventing systems–systems of communicating, systems of sexuality, systems of interacting with our environments. Whether through large-scale sculptural practice, where they create fluid, transformative art installations for galleries across America and Europe, or through clear transmissions with the natural world, Hyd understands the need to fortify relationships with compassion. Always curious, always evolving, always looking inward. Hyd’s debut album emerges late 2022.