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Music

ABBY's Anarchic New Mix Is Intended as a Soundtrack for Powerful Femininity

The New York and Detroit based DJ's 18-minute blend for the fashion label Chromat took inspiration from the flyboard champ Gemma Weston.
Photo courtesy of the artist.

ABBY, the genre-hopping DJ based between Detroit and New York, has an ear for the absurd. Over the last year, she's used her Soundcloud account as the home for a series of extraterrestrial mixes that run the gamut between contemporary club constructions, blistered noise, and sci-fi synth work, uniting disparate and asynchronous sounds under titles like "Probed: The Encounter" and "I Dance Like Shrek." She's a friend of the euphoric downers over at NYC label PTP, and their catalog gives something of an indication of what you can expect from an ABBY blend, disorienting and surprising sounds that threaten to suck all the air of the room before filling it back up with helium.

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Just a couple of months ago, ABBY shared a wild mix for Discwoman, but she's already back with another, this time for the fashion label Chromat. Recorded as a soundtrack for the runway show for the brand's SS17 collection HYPERWAVE, the blend's a little more corporeal than her previous efforts. Leaning heavily on chattery vocal samples and stuttering percussion (as well Portishead's most anxious track), it lumbers forward with a sense of embodied locomotion—the strange combo of awkwardness and grace that can only come from human movement.

Writing to THUMP, ABBY says that the mix was inspired in part by watching footage of Gemma Weston, a champion flyboarder. Thinking about that video, she sought to create a mix that evoked some of that strange power. "I wanted to create a soundtrack for the extreme and powerful female," she said. "I wanted something that could help me feel like how I presume Gemma Weston feels when she's up there flyboarding. After Becca showed me that video of her, I couldn't get it out of my head. I love picturing her walking somewhere listening to this and smirking, giving off this total air of superior femininity & strength. I could picture any of my girlfriends doing that actually. I want them to listen to this mix and have it make them feel cool as hellllll."

Listen here.