In theatre terms, the cyclorama is a blank canvas. A backdrop that blankets the walls of the stage, it can transform the scene into a sunrise, a sunset, a playing field for light to provide the illusion of depth and space. Ariel Zetina is a theatre kid. The Chicago DJ and producer arrives from a background as a playwright, and arguably this sense of drama has crept into her work on the dancefloor. Over the past few years, she’s established herself as an essential new voice in Chicago’s LGBTQIA+ underground scene as a resident at the city’s celebrated Smartbar, and nationally as a part of New York based femme-led collective Discwoman. She cites her Belizean heritage as a key source of inspiration, pulling from styles like punta and brukdown to formulate her style of techno that has often been referred to as ‘multifaceted.’ Much like the cyclorama itself, Zetina opens herself and her music to ceaseless transformation and reconfiguration, an approach that proves foundational on her debut album which shares a name with the backdrop itself.
Download and stream Cyclorama here
For Cyclorama, Zetina hones in on the references that have shaped her thus far. These are colourful, sprawling ideations of techno that feel like self-contained theatre scenes in of themselves. Zetina’s techno is exceptionally kinetic. The title track flutters about, a looped arpeggio against a subtle four on the floor dancing like beams of light upon a cyc, functioning as an introduction of sorts to the play that Zetina begins to unfold. The influence of punta is palpable in the way she shapes and layers her rhythms on tracks like Birdflite Tonite, where regular time thuds work in service of more polyrhythmic patterns. This makes for propulsive and energetic listening, especially when Zetina throws curveballs like she does on Smoke Machine, snatching the beat back and revealing a kaleidoscopic skeleton of backspins and breaks. But Cyclorama’s most engaging scenes are the instances where Zetina weaves party with the political, drawing from her journey as a trans woman of colour to create powerful little dioramas of this lived experience. Have You Ever is one such case, a walloping techno banger that crafts itself around a weighted central inquiry. “Have you ever been with a girl like me before?” is a question that instantly touches on the anxiety of trans and femme queer sexuality, a question familiar to encounters with cishet men, one loaded with equal amounts danger and desire. Have You Ever remixes, disrupts, and quite literally distorts this question along a throbbing beat. It concludes with a thrilling and empowering monologue from Zetina’s close friend, Cae Monāe, whose triumphant cries of “touch this skin, motherfucker!” will echo long after they have dissipated. On Slab Of Meat, Zetina extends the argument of Have You Ever further by exploring the trans body as posthuman and hitherto an other; an effect laden, cyborg voice chanting “are you going to fuck me, or are you going to leave me?”
On the album’s evocative artwork, Zetina and her collaborators appear in an imagined theatre show. They appear as clowns and nuns, an alien, The Virgin Mary, and as champagne popping Real Housewives. They assume the multiple masks of queer identity, some inherent, some enforced. They bring these iconographies together on a single stage, a rainbow of foil balloons crowning them from above. Like this tableaux, Cyclorama is an album that explores the many masks of the nightclub as experienced by Zetina and her underworld. The dancefloor becomes her stage, the revellers merely players. It’s a curious, joyously realised project that finds itself at the intersection between fantasy and reality, and by playing both these sides, lifts the curtain and points the spotlight at its creator.
Listen to Have You Ever from Cyclorama below.
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