Love Thyself by Tygapaw

Press Release

Capping off a run of releases in the final months of 2017, Sweat Equity closes out its offering of records for our year with Love Thyself, the debut EP from New York producer Dion McKenzie, aka Tygapaw.

As the founder and resident of New York’s venerable QTPOC collective and party Fake Accent, McKenzie has been a figurehead of New York’s nightlife, and is now turning her attention worldwide, with dates in Asia, Europe and the Americas under her belt in the past year. Now, she’s offering another angle on her skills, readying her first outing as a producer and writer.

Showcasing the sheer depth of her abilities as a producer and dancefloor visionary, “Love Thyself” feels like a victory lap of sorts, celebrating her expansive abilities as a sonic curator while marking a continued evolution in her creative voice. Tracks move from baile funk to New York vogue to Baltimore club and back, mixing together McKenzie’s own vision with a well-read sense of track production from any number of classic schools of practice.

The record has been a labor of love, spanning a year’s time as McKenzie experimented with various ideas and voices, bringing in close friends and longtime collaborators to flesh out ideas and concepts before arriving at the final product, five tracks of emotive, expansive club fire that has no problem walking a line between the surreal and the compelling. In “Detox,” skittering percussion and rising basslines afford a central motif around which a delicate, serpentine sample winds itself, always propelling the listener forward, while in Tygapaw’s collab with Baltimore rapper Abdu Ali, her stripped-bare style winds together multiple signifiers of the East Club circuit into a heated call of self-love, punctuated by moments of lilting, swelling synth work.

Love Thyself will hit stores 11/21.

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