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Listen up! These rising musicians are making their voices heard, seen here rocking noisemaking emerging designers. PHOTOGRAPHY CHARLOTTE HADDEN FASHION DOGUKAN NESANIR TEXT LIAM HESS 50 VMAN.COM
POWELL IN Y/PROJECT In 2015, electronic producer Oscar Powell Powell’s journey to becoming one of (better known by his surname) emailed leg- London’s most highly regarded underground endary noise-rock producer Steve Albini dance producers has been as unconvento clear a sample of one of his songs, to tional as his approach to promo. Making which Albini replied with a rant about his music as a hobby since he was 15, Powell deep loathing of electronic dance music. eventually mustered up the courage to conPowell’s next move? Slapping the mes- tact one of his heroes, techno artist Regis, sage across billboards around London as who set him on the path to establishing his a means of promoting the record. “If you’re record label Diagonal—a breeding ground going to [promote] a record, you might as for some of London’s most ambitious elecwell try and do it in a fun way,” Powell says— tronica, from Blood Music to Handy. “I never before caveating: “Although even if I have really thought I was any good at it,” he adds. a sense of humor, it doesn’t mean I don’t “It just took somebody saying they liked it for take my music seriously. The next stuff I me to start.” do might not be so flamboyant. Let’s see,” Powell’s signature style can be described he laughs. as a computer music aesthetic laid over with
punk samples. As cacophanous as that sounds, Powell’s unlikely mashups always come together as post-punk, hypnotic thrashes. “Sometimes dance just needs a big fucking injection of energy, something to go against how boring, anodyne, and predictable Internet-era dance music can be,” he says. Now signed to XL Recordings, home to artists like Jamie XX and Adele, Powell’s recent releases include his EP with artist Wolfgang Tillmans, produced under the collaborative moniker Powell Tillmans. Next, he’ll try his hand at his first full-length album. “I still haven’t quite cracked the medium yet,” says Powell of LPs—a relative rarity in electronic. But for Powell, it seems, the rarer the better.
