Powder is an alchemist of time. Her ceremonious DJ sets invite listeners and dancers to extend their imaginations to abstracted spaces, while allowing the body to vessel the voyage in free, flowing style. Playful, thoughtful, and natural without knowing, Powder’s crates encourage abandonment of arbitrary boundaries and expectations surrounding genre, movement, schedule, and societal convention to revel, spirited and harmonious, in the passage of time.
Momoko Goto relocated from her hometown of Nagasaki, Japan to Tokyo in 2011. This is where the story of Powder, as the international dance music community knows her, begins. With the change in location came a change in lifestyle, where a balance of 9-to-5 office life and sacred, nocturnal recording sessions invited Moko to reflect on music’s unique ability to “stop the clock” and “expand or shrink our sense of time.”
While many workers across the world feel the pressure of artificially controlled measurements of time, Moko’s musical mission to transcend these weighty associations, to shed light on the positive possibilities of passing time, resonates far past her island’s shores. Experiencing the pleasure that comes from physical and emotional transformation. Creating and nurturing memories.
In embracing these positive properties of time, Powder uses the hypnotic language of patterns to communicate with listener-dancers. Patterns represent the meter by which bodies are compelled to move; they also represent a method for collection and organization of sound, where the cohesive stylistic and historical narrative of different pieces of music are laid over one another transforming both intimate and universal moments into a dreamy, experiential, and endlessly interpretable whole.
Moko notes that patterns, “are always ancillary and never playing the leading part of things, and the patterns themselves recognize this fact and act low-key.” This interpretation of sound and rhythm mirrors critical aspects of underground club culture, such as collective energy-making and protection, togetherness over spectacle, the layering of multiple bodies, and narratives upon one another in ecstasy.
Since her debut release on Born Free Records, 2015’s Spray, Powder’s sound has flirted with numerous unconventional dance institutions and outlets, releasing on ESP Institute, Wichelroede and the Cocktail D’amore imprint, as well as regularly contributing to the latter’s illustrious mega parties. For her Powder in Space mix, Moko presents two new songs that were created within a new schedule, with summers spent touring Europe and North America, welcoming the unique experiences offered by each location.
“New Tribe” toasts the global community Powder’s connected during her travels. Marching-band snares, breathy ostinatos, motivating chords, springy auxiliary percussion and bouncy melodic details – all Powder trademarks, coalescing into one of her most celebratory offerings yet. “Gift” is a subtler jam, shuffling and twinkling in perfect balance. Reminiscent of “Spray,” it sustains a retrofuturistic groove that defies the house / techno categorical binary.
On the the EP, Powder’s two new originals sit alongside Daphne’s “When You Love Someone (Groove Instrumental),” a sultry, twirling vibraphone deep house number from 1993; and the first ever release of Samo DJ and Hidden Operator’s atmospheric scene setter, “Захват Сзади Rox.” For the CD and digital mix release, these four originals weave within an impeccable mix of memories from Moko’s travels and experiences over the past years touring and sharing with new friends.
Powder In Space marks the first in a new series exploring dance music’s form and informality from Tim Sweeney’s Beats In Space Records. The friendly voice behind the longstanding Beats In Space radio show and a formidable DJ to dance floors around the world, the …In Space series, like the rest of the label’s eclectic catalog, is testament to Tim’s trust in the selector and vice versa.
