Watch your snowballs: the First Lady of Beatdown, Lady Blacktronika, is hopping on her magic sleigh and coming down the mountain for Honey Soundsystem on Sun/22. She'll be giving SF some much-needed transwoman power on the decks, and it will be the tea.
That mountain would be Mt. Shasta, where the prolific, San Jose-born producer and DJ has been headquartered lately, releasing track after track of absorbing, soul-seizing grooves on her Sound Black Recordings label. Her aesthetic takes the expansive and unrushed Detroit beatdown blues-house sound (with which she's had some personal experience) and the mesmerizing moodiness of artists like Theo Parrish and Alton Miller in unexpectedly deep directions -- using her notable experience as a singer and some lovely dubby effects shared with her former production partner Mattski to give the malleable beatdown sound some intriguing new shapes.
In anticipation of her first DJ gig in San Francisco after spinning around the world, I chatted with her over email about her gospel music-loving roots, the challenges of being a transgender woman in the electronic music industry, and some of the women on the scene that she admires.
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