Consider trippy music and, as you light that joss stick, it might bring to mind long-haired, bearded men in tunics bent over guitars. Or trance, with its fluffy boots and angel wings, in a desert. But Teneil Throssell, AKA Haai, has a knack for searching out hypnotic sounds and blending them together without it ever feeling forced, mining the psychedelic end of Middle Eastern rave one minute and African drumming the next.
Throssell moved to London from Australia to make a go of her rock band but, when they split, she quickly became a superstar spinner in the ascendant. She was discovered playing Turkish oddities at a small Dalston bar in 2016, given a residency at Brixton nightclub Phonox and hasn’t looked back since. Her wide-ranging sets go from techno to attitudinal body music, brash Eurodance and even Bruce Springsteen, a dynamite combination that led to her winning the Radio 1 essential mix of the year 2018.
The music Throssell makes herself is darker. Last month she released her first EP on Mute, Systems Up, Windows Down – a bolshy collection of vibrant face-melters, taking in big-room breaks, shards of trance, playful samples inspired by her travels and punishing beats that could crack bones under a strobe light at 6am. Snobs have bemoaned her supposed lack of cohesion but while it’s easy to blag conformity, you can’t fake personality and Throssell’s tracks have tons of it. A debut album and a huge 2020 await.
Systems Up, Windows Down EP is out now on Mute