Hudson Mohawke

Scottish electronic producer Hudson Mohawke smashes genre borders with pulverising hip-hop beats and pitched vocal effects. Born Ross Matthew Birchard in 1986, he started DJing at 15 and helped found the influential dance music label LuckyMe in 2007. He adopted the moniker Hudson Mohawke that same year and started creating dance music blurring the experimental tendencies of acts like Aphex Twin with booming percussion inspired by hip-hop. A handful of early releases helped him land on Warp Records, resulting in a 2009 debut full-length—Butter—that matched crystalline synthesiser melodies with thunderous rap-indebted rumblings. He continued exploring this dynamic, both solo and alongside Canadian producer Lunice in the trap-based project TNGHT. He kept pushing past genre limitations via individual boomers like 2014’s “Chimes” or collaborations with Kanye West on his album Yeezus. His disregard for typical boundaries predicted electronic music’s shift toward pummelling percussion and fizzy electronics in the second half of the 2010s, while Birchard remained focused on pushing floor-filling sounds into wonky new directions on releases like 2022’s Cry Sugar.