Selections: Ma Sha

Selections: Ma Sha

You wouldn’t know it when listening to her intrepid productions – which curve from boisterous bass music into pockets of twisted techno, hard drum and beyond – but Ma Sha is prone to overthinking. “I often find myself questioning ideas from the day before, feeling unsure or disconnected from why I made a certain choice,” the New York-based artist and Kindergarten Records boss told DJ Mag earlier this month. “With my new release, I wanted to shift that pattern. To tell myself: if you made that decision yesterday, just go with it. Trust that flow.” True to her word, ‘Hydrofall’ is Ma Sha’s most instinctive and emotionally raw work to date, concocted through a series of live jam sessions and fluid, freeform synth experimentation. “This release for me is a sonic trust fall—emerging from moments of emotional release and machine improvisation, turning instinct into form,” she added.

The record – landing 31st July on Steel City Dance Discs – spans four impulsive rave workouts that hit the sweet spot between the body and brain. Here, Ma Sha swaps out the high-impact sounds of her previous releases on labels like Nervous Horizon, TraTraTrax and Nerve Collect for a palette of swirling, dubby textures, instinctual rhythms and morphing basslines tooled for maximum mind-opening. “It became less about designing sound and more about listening to where the sound wanted to go,” she told DJ Mag. In keeping with the theme of new creative beginnings, Ma Sha will be debuting her first solo live set at MUTEK Montreal later this summer, colliding her techno, bass, and leftfield club influences in real time.

Both projects signal an exciting new era for the artist, who has blossomed into a vital force in the global underground through her event series, label and radio show Kindergarten. Founded in 2017 in her Brooklyn backyard and expanded into a label during lockdown, the project has become an essential outpost for multifunctional club music in The Big Apple and beyond, including recent releases from Martini & Drummy, Stolen Velour, Ayesha and more. Dive into a mix from its catalogue recorded by Ma Sha here.

Ahead of the release of ‘Hydrofall’, which you can pre-order here, the label chief spotlights brain-bending bass music, driving drum tracks, slippery post-dubstep, and more. Check them out below.

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