barn: 171. TYGAPAW (NYC / Jamaica)

more info + official tix at barnradio.live


TYGAPAW is a musical artist and composer born in Kingston, raised in Mandeville, Jamaica and based in Brooklyn, New York, their multidisciplinary practice is inherently political; sitting at the intersections of gender, race, migration and spirituality. For over a decade, they’ve operated as a nightlife maverick soundtracking and cultivating subversive spaces of belonging for New York’s queer underground through live sound performance, music production, sculpture, graphic design, essays, film and club nights under their label Fake Accent. 

Alongside their community-driven work, TYGAPAW has brought their vision to renowned art institutions and international stages. In 2024, they presented the techno opera iteration Duppy Know Who Fi Frighten as part of the BOFFO Performance Festival on Fire Island, NYC, alongside a live composition created in response to Carrie Mae Weems’ groundbreaking installation The Shape of Things at Gladstone Gallery. Their practice has also reached global audiences through live sets at major international festivals, including Atonal (Berlin, 2025), Bad Bonn Kilbi (Switzerland, 2025), and ADE (Amsterdam, 2025).

As a Parsons design alumni TYGAPAW continually rethinks how tools—technological, cultural, and communal—can be used and repurposed. Finding visionary uses for complex electronic hardware has cemented their undeniably unique and timeless take on Techno, as recognised by their recent signing to historic Berlin label Tresor leading to the release of their two track ep IMMIGRANT in the fall of 2025, as a precursor to forthcoming album Together You Gather All Power Applied Worldwide (2026). As with previous releases, the record centres the voices of women drawn from TYGAPAW’s long-standing community, celebrating chosen family, sisterhood, and the building of worlds where Black queer and trans siblings can thrive. Throughout the work, they create space for the wisdom of Black women.

Over more than a decade of sustained practice, TYGAPAW has built a prolific production catalogue, including their debut album Get Free (2020, NAAFI), an 11-track collection featuring vocals from Mandy Harris Williams that explores Black joy, and Love Has Never Been A Popular Movement (2023), Fabric Records). Produced across eight tracks using hardware rather than Ableton, the latter addresses fierce self-love with unshakable confidence. They have also collaborated globally with seminal peers, producing remixes for LSDXOXO, Kelela, and Kevin Saunderson, among others. 

The past five years, has firmly established their presence within the Berlin and New York art scenes. This trajectory began with a 2021 live A/V concert at Creamcake Berlin, part of the installation series Paradise Lost, where they dismantled imagined boundaries, shed self-doubt, and explored the liberation of body and mind through techno. The project marked the emergence of their live performance practice as we now know it.

This momentum led to participation in the 2022 group exhibition Real Corporeal at Gladstone Gallery, alongside luminaries Klein, Space Afrika & Arthur Jafa to name a few. A crucial turning point was a year-long residency for Issue Project Room. During this residency they created Devil Woman (Obeah Woman) — a three-part techno opera that premiered at The Chocolate Factory and later at the Queens Museum in 2022. The work repurposes and deconstructs sonic material rooted in Jamaica’s colonial history, simultaneously decolonizing operatic form while expanding the possibilities of techno’s own colonized histories. Widely acclaimed, the project redefined contemporary understandings of techno as both musical and cultural practice.

This body of work culminated in their first institutional solo exhibition, combining video, sound, and a live modular synthesizer and drum-machine performance, presented at Art Omi’s Newmark Gallery from November 2023 to February 2024. Titled 3WI (Third World Immigrant), the exhibition draws from their complex experience of immigrating from Jamaica to the United States. Continuing their exploration of historical erasure, the project critiques the flow of cultural capital within the globalized gig economy and its replication of broader systems of disenfranchisement, transphobia, and racism.

Inseparable from their lived experience as a queer trans immigrant and guided by a ritual return to ancestral lineage —their work bridges techno, design, and diasporic memory. This sensibility extends beyond sound, giving rise to a striking visual language and a practice where sound, form, and intention move as one. An example of this is through bespoke live performance Rage Alchemy 2024 for National Sawdust exploring the spectacle of resistance music, the anger, frustration and internal chaos of oppressed peoples becoming profoundly moving art.  

Additional Highlights include performing DJ sets at global festivals and historic clubs across Europe, the Americas, and beyond, such as Primavera in Barcelona, Hyperreality in Vienna, Whole Festival in Berlin, Dweller in New York, Unsound in Poland, Homobloc in the UK, Melt in Germany, Dark Mofo in Tasmania, Australia, Mamba Negra in Brazil, Draaimolen in Tilburg, Netherlands and Bahidora in Mexico City. They have also held sets at iconic venues such as Berlin’s Tresor, RSO, and Berghain, London’s Fabric, Brussels’ Fuse, New York’s Nowadays and Paragon (as a resident) and Barcelona’s Niitsa, bringing their distinct sound to audiences worldwide.

Beyond the stage, TYGAPAW’s influence is captured on film, appearing alongside Sherelle and TOKiMONSTA in the music documentary UNDERPLAYED, directed by Stacey Lee, which explores racial, and gender equality within dance music. In recognition of their influence on contemporary electronic music, TYGAPAW was nominated for Best Breakthrough Producer, in Best of North America and featured as a cover star of DJ Mag in 2022. 

Emergent from TYGAPAW’s diverse practice is an unapologetic embrace of duality — a call toward fierce, authentic expression as an antidote to the matrix of domination we exist within. Their work is devoted to reclaiming sound, space, and performance to honor histories and communities often erased. Their art is rooted in both liberation and joy. With 2026 poised to further cement their vision, TYGAPAW stands as a defining artist of our generation, reshaping the possibilities of techno and contemporary performance for a new era.