Introspekt is careful with her words. “I’ve been thinking a lot about language, because I struggle with formulating words and sentences.” Choice of phrasing, when not approached with care, can do more harm than we think; an assumption forming the backdrop of how the LA-born, NY-based DJ and producer constructs her responses. Sat in a London sublet, hair in mini twists and eyes in a permanent crescent moon shape, her golden hoop earrings shimmy as she speaks. “When I first found my roots with dance music,” she begins to say, before correcting herself, “sorry, I’m trying to reframe my language around this, because I don’t think that dance music is just electronic dance music.”
It’s a turn of phrase most wouldn’t stumble over but Introspekt amends in real time. Referring to herself as a ‘recontextualiser’ – intentionally reapproaching cultural phenomena and forms of expression in alternative contexts – Introspekt wants to challenge dominant narratives surrounding garage and dubstep, expanding their official histories beyond the UK scene. “I hope that my recontextualizing isn’t too disruptive, because I’m also trying to learn from these people. As much as I’m trying to tell my perspective, I’m also trying to integrate these other perspectives into a broader picture of what’s going on.”
Introspekt is reshaping the sound and scope of UK garage and bass music through a distinctly Black trans, lesbian lens. Known for her striking fusion of dubstep, garage, and club music with sensual vocal samples and queer cultural references, she brings an urgent and feminine energy to traditionally masculine genres. Her debut album Moving The Center celebrates dubstep’s South London roots while reimagining its future through global diasporic rhythms and femme-centered power.
“My first language isn’t really English, it’s probably music, a more abstract form of language,” Introspekt continues. “Recently, I’ve been thinking about BPM differently.” Garage and dubstep are known for tough basslines, rattling hi-hats, and most importantly, high-energy beats. “I’ve been thinking about BPM in terms of the interplay between the double time and half time elements,” Introspekt says. “Right now, my optimum BPM range is 140, with 70 BPM grooves mixed in, because I like to dance slow and sexy, with a lot of hip movement.”
One would assume that hip movements weren’t the go-to dances for the genre pioneers, who we remember as Croydon-based pirate radio jockeys clad in Britpop fashion. Not Introspekt, who says, “sometimes, the faster you go, it’s more difficult to have elliptical movements in the body.” Harking back to language and etymology, she reminds, “I mean even the naming of the genre, dubstep, it’s dub, it’s reggae, it’s dance hall. Like, that’s how you dance to that stuff.” As garage and dubstep swelled into mainstream success, head-bashing and gun finger salutes are now associated with their history. “The direction that dubstep took in the latter part of the 2000s into the 2010s, it doubled down on this masculinist, very noisy mid-range approach to bass and frequency.”
Over 5,000 miles away from Croydon, in the Crenshaw District of South Central LA, Introspekt’s vision of these genres couldn’t feel more divorced from its supposed origins. “My frame of reference for how I came into [dubstep and garage] was through these broader, Black diasporic sounds.” Raised in a family that played jazz, blues, dub reggae, dancehall and African drums, once Introspekt started digging into music by herself, “I stumbled across old dubstep like Mala and Coki. That side of the genre really resonated with my musical heritage.”
By interrogating and redefining her optimum BPM range, Introspekt gives space for alternative modes of dance to flourish in these sounds. She first came onto the LA scene as an underage club goer in the early 2010s, uninterested in the area’s mainstream EDM parties, more so in the “bunch of weirdos who are into the deeper side of dubstep and the UK-centered side” of things. It would be “predominantly Chicano, Mexican, Mexican American, Latin and working class Black people” dancing to drum and bass and jungle music in East and Downtown LA warehouses.
For Introspekt, dancefloor dynamics were shaped as much by who was present as by the music itself. She had women friends in the dubstep scene, “and we would go out together and seeing the way that they dance to the music gave me a different perspective.” Through her own personal experiences, what she believed was the official version of events began to be challenged. “It was a vibe.”
But when you look at dubstep’s formation, this part of its history feels submerged, Introspekt claims. “People with different embodiments and gender identities relate to these sounds very differently.” Committed to oral knowledge sharing, she has discovered fresh perspectives from older generations that have been sidelined in the official genre narrative. “Especially with the deeper side, the sub-bass sounds that are less audible, but more felt. To me, that represents a feminine physicality that’s really at the core of dubstep, and that has been overlooked.”
Through recontextualisation, Introspekt is giving name to a necessary part of her life as a trans woman; where her existence is a direct challenge of norms rooted in biological essentialism and compulsory heterosexuality. “I have my own personal connection to it and how I’ve interpreted it through my cultural lens,” she says. Through her trans and lesbian identity, Introspekt not only reshapes genre boundaries, but invites us to reconsider the norms that underlie them.
Nothing is linear nor straightforward, especially in the music that Introspekt makes. Her debut album Moving The Center is “mostly instrumental, which means that the ideas involved in it are really abstract, and oftentimes, conscious artistic intent isn’t the motivating factor in the creation of the music.” The album’s title is an eponymous nod to Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s seminal work, a polemic about why he made the decision to write novels in his native language, and the ways that allowed him to encode meaning away from Anglo epistemology, but based in his native ways of knowing. “Before my album, my productions were working in this framework of the language of UK garage. Even though I was doing things with it, it still felt insufficient to me, like I was working in a language that was not my own.”
Thinking of Ngũgĩ’s work when producing her debut, Introspekt says, “the tracks I wanted to put in this very personal album were tracks speaking their own language that was not exactly UK garage. They were more based in ideas related to my upbringing and the communal context that I come from.” Her single Afro Bass, referred by her as the “thesis statement” of the album, took inspiration from a track by Plex titled Afro Breaks, “when I first found the record, I heard it, and I was like, What the fuck?” In this one track, Introspekt heard a myriad of sonic references: grime, breakbeat, early dub step, Baltimore club, bounce. “It’s an interesting track that I had never encountered until that point, and it contextualised the history of bass music for me.”
Introspekt is learning to embrace synthesis and liminality as she delves deeper into her craft. “There are these sounds, histories and experiences of different Black communities across space. Then there are these sonic intersections where they come together. SoCal relates to Baltimore and South London.” Rather than sticking to one specific way of being, one singular narrative of how things came to be, she’s opening herself to the multiple ways of producing sounds in the genres she loves. “We all come back to similar places, but oftentimes independent of each other.” It’s Pan-Africanism at its core: the belief in a unified global African diaspora. Introspekt has uncovered a merging collective Black identity through garage and dubstep sounds in Black communities across the world.
Even when thinking about how trans identities are currently being threatened, Introspekt caveats, “much of the focus of our understanding of the world is centered around these Imperial centers of the US and Europe.” She was recently in Brazil DJing for the Sao Paolo collective Mamba Negra, and was once again encouraged to recontextualise and challenge her assumptions. “Brazil just recently started issuing their first non-binary identification documents. They have a Black trans woman who’s a prominent representative in their political system. There’s positive stuff happening in different centers of the globe.”
This doesn’t negate the fact that trans rights are continuing to be eroded in the UK and US. It’s a scary time, for sure, but Introspekt has hope for her community. Calling on her Black and gender queer ancestors like Marsha P. Johnson, she reflects, “they really embody a spirit of resistance. And what I’m seeing amongst my peers in the face of these attacks is us channeling – and reacquainting ourselves – with this spirit of resistance.”
By reshaping the physicality of bass, the geography of dubstep, and the narrative of who gets to move through these sounds, Introspekt reclaims through rhythm. Her music recontextualizes not only genre, but embodiment and history. Whether on LA dancefloors, South London sound systems, or São Paulo parties, Introspekt channels a lineage of Black, queer resistance; one that’s less about fitting in, and more about moving the center. As the beat slows, stretches, and slips sideways, a new language emerges.
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