TYGAPAW grew up as Dion McKenzie in Mandeville, Jamaica. Today, the Artist, producer, DJ and label owner resides in Brooklyn, New York, where they have spent the better part of a decade uplifting frequencies representative of the Black electronic music diaspora. Their sonic palette—informed by the dancehall of their hometown as much as it is the techno emanating from the warehouses of Detroit—has made them an indispensable figure in Brooklyn’s electronic music scene.
Since 2014, McKenzie has been carving spaces in New York for queer people of color through their queer club night, and now label, Fake Accent. The platform is part of their broader mission to forge liberating spaces for marginalized people, particularly Black, queer and trans people, an agenda embedded in the various layers of the artist’s work. Early records like the breakthrough EP Handle With Care (2019), Ode To Black Trans Lives (2020) and their debut album, Get Free (2020) established McKenzie not only as a skillful producer, but further as an emotive storyteller. Through their production, they are known to weave together stories of queer immigrant life, radical self-preservation and Black communal joy.
Their music, much like New York, is a cultural stew made vibrant by influences as local as New York’s ballroom community and as distant as Berlin’s hard techno circuit. In 2021, one of techno’s most vital institutions, the Berlin venue and record label Tresor, enlisted MacKkenzie to contribute to their 30th anniversary compilation, where the musician was in the company of techno luminaries like fellow contributors Juan Atkins, K-HAND and Robert Hood. In 2022, McKenzie brought their visionary take on techno to life with a three-part techno opera, Devil Woman (Obeah Woman)—the first iteration of which premiered at New York’s The Chocolate Factory Theater, and Queens Museum before the project traveled to Berlin.
2023, TYGAPAW’s second album love has never been a popular movement, was released on fabric Originals in the spring. This album is a special one for several reasons: It’s the first album the musician produced with hardware rather than Ableton, their first record that features their vocals prominently and it also sees McKenzie try their hand at songwriting. In eight tracks that hopscotch across atmospheric techno and East Coast club, love has never been a popular movement addresses, with unshakable confidence, fierce self-love and TYGAPAW’s journey as a Jamaican reckoning with their trans identity.
