Vinyl LP
The way the landscape of underground electronic music has changed in just the last decade is, frankly, boggling. Not that there have been tectonic shifts (the remarkable global spread of South African amapiano notwithstanding), but the sense of who the music is by and for is in a constant state of quiet revolution. We are a very long way from a truly representative industry, but the way that women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and creative communities from the Global South have built what we know as dance culture is finally being broadly acknowledged, and the formerly monolithic old white boys’ network of music production and DJing is finally—finally!—starting to look like it isn’t the only game in town.
None of this has come without concerted efforts to kick the doors down. Collectives, projects, and labels like Juke Bounce Werk, HE.SHE.THEY, Super Drama, BEAUTIFUL, and Saffron have consistently organized to represent the marginalized, all of them driven by—and this is crucial—absolute commitment to their aesthetic values and to the pleasure principle and social value of the dancefloor as much as to any ideology. That is to say: Their righteous drive is partly to do with the simple fact that a more diverse scene is simply a better scene, with better music.
And so it is with London’s foundation.fm, a “music platform prioritizing women, queer, and non-binary folk” since 2018, and their debut compilation album demonstrates this perfectly. It kicks off with supreme confidence with a collaboration between Karen Nyame KG and Hyperdub stalwart Ikonika, in which Afro-house, Afrobeats and electro-inspired synths flow together with immense elegance. It sets the bar high, but immediately the challenge is met by DJ Lycox’s “Dia 14,” a lavish, ritualistic-sounding bit of dembow salsa, followed by the ultra-crisp, ultra-psychedelic electroclash dancehall mysteries of PESH’s “Poison and the Cure,” each track reveling in its own uniqueness.
So it goes on, through bedroom drum & bass dreampop (by Ouri and Klurax), fizzing 6 a.m. meditations (Tamanaramen), dissociative two-step (Yangze), a writhing stream of filtered percussion (Ariel Zetina), sci-fi grime (LUXE)—never settling into any familiar genre, never letting up on quality or weirdness. Somehow it all flows together too, despite not being linked by any tempo or rhythm. The shared dedication to traveling outside any standard stylistic boundaries all makes sense—it feels like an album, not just a showcase. Most important of all, there’s not a weak link, which in turn shows that advocacy doesn’t mean tokenism. We are all better off for this diversity.
