Off the Grid, the Wexner Center for the Arts’ annual event to benefit their education programming, returns this Saturday, promising some shimmering and sweltering fun in the middle of this up-and-down weather. There’s plenty of talk about how great the party is, and it’s all true. The samplings of food – this year including Hadley’s, Fusian, and Dough Mama – are delicious and the people are wonderful. Rowe Boutique’s Instagram has ideas all week for your look. But there hasn’t been as much about the music which, if you’ve got any interest in the various stripes of electronic music, has been at a very high level the last few years with the center bringing in some of the finest DJs in the country. That promises to continue Saturday with headliner Shyboi, part of the same Discwoman crew that brought last year’s blistering sets from Bearcat and Umfang.
After Dr. Scientist kicks the night off for the VIP crowd at 8:30 p.m., Columbus native Funke gets the general admission crowd going. Her mixes blend the cosmic and earthy in the right proportions of all great dance music, getting the crowd’s blood pumping and making them see themselves and each other anew through the blur of frenzied motion. Anyone I talked to who saw her open for contemporary Afrobeat royalty Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 at the Alrosa marveled at the smoothness of the mixing and the hard-hitting, sensual beats. A Soundcloud link to a Funke mix is at the bottom of this post to whet your appetite.
Headliner Shyboi came of age in Jamaica and, since moving to New York, has linked up with the KUNQ collective along with Discwoman. She’s played the best parties in NYC from MoMA PS1’s The Warm Up to The Boiler Room. In a Warm Up promotional interview with DJ/Rupture, Rupture (Jace Clayton), remarked, “[She’s] doing really interesting things within club space I think of as ‘taking the outside in.’ Bringing in issues of gender identity, queer identity, class, and bringing in – in [her] case – deep roots in Jamaican music. Pulling all these things together in the club as not a space of escapism but a space of other possibilities.” On the improvisation, in-the-moment nature of her sets, she said, “I perform strictly in reaction to how I’m feeling that day, so my performances are very reactionary in that sense.”
In a fantastic interview with Aurora Mitchell for FACT, Shyboi talked about the dancefloor as a place for identity and self-realization. “I’d sneak into shows, borrow IDs, bust through emergency exits, you name it. I just had to be on a dancefloor with the community. I needed us to feel the beat together; it was imperative to me,” she remembers. “Nightlife has given me a chance to foster a community of creative, eccentric hardworking queers – but it’s the conversations that happen beyond the club that hold us together…Queerness is the umbrella that brought us together, but it’s our mutual appetite for destruction and refusal to replicate failing power structures that keeps us together.”
The metaphor of destruction and resurrection has long functioned for a raging dance night, from “burn this mother down” to “tear the club up,” but I’d never heard it used with that kind of conceptual framework. She’s one of the leading lights of a generation who fuse hard, flexible beats with an intellectual underpinning trying to say something. She takes threads from the history of electronic music, and the soundclash roots of her Jamaican heritage then sculpts and mutates them into something her own and immediately identifiable. Hearing her on the best sound system in town promises to singe some hair and melt the ice in some (bought for a good cause) drinks. A Youtube video fo a set from the Boiler Room and a Soundcloud mix are at the bottom of the post to give you a taste of what’s in store.
Off the Grid gets rolling Saturday, March 4 with VIP access starting at 8:30 p.m. and general admission 9:30 p.m.. For tickets and more info, visit wexarts.org.