Barnsley, UK · techno

Blawan

1 upcoming festival

Hardware-driven UK techno at genuinely punishing volume — the live rig is the whole point, wrangling machines into some of the genre's most physical sound.

Blawan is the main alias of British producer Jamie Roberts, who came out of Barnsley and first drew attention around 2010 with tracks that sat between UK bass music and techno. His output moved steadily toward stripped, percussive industrial techno, often built from heavily processed drum machines and distorted vocal fragments.

He also records as half of Karenn with Pariah, a project built around live hardware jams, and the two run the Voam label. Blawan's own performances are typically hardware sets rather than DJ sets, with the machines patched and manipulated in real time, which gives the material a rougher, less fixed shape than the records.

techno