Long Winter

Dweller, New York City’s beloved Black electronic music festival/post-Drexciya speculative fiction project, returns for 2026 after a yearlong hiatus. For more than half a decade now, every February, the festival has functioned less like a traditional event series than as a kind of temporary institution, treating Black electronic music as a living, unfolding archive rather than a closed canon. Past lineups have moved deliberately between foundational figures like Jeff Mills, Theo Parrish, and Robert Hood and contemporary instigators, including LSDXOXO, Slauson Malone 1, HiTech, Keiyaa, and Evilgiane. That tension between lineage and disruption remains one of the most compelling things about Dweller, which briefly transforms a handful of Brooklyn and Queens venues into the American Mecca for Black Counter Culture. This year’s program is sprawling, but its strongest moments feel carefully argued. A Guy Called Gerald’s inclusion gestures back toward the diasporic roots of acid and UK techno, while a Nowadays night pairing DJ Travella with Juliana Huxtable b2b Bobby Beethoven and Slugo foregrounds rhythm as both local language and global export. One of the heaviest Pioneer Works bills I’ve ever seen — 454, Anysia Kim, dj blackpower, GIGGS, and Junglepussy — reads less like a genre exercise than a stress test, collapsing rap, club, noise, and performance into a deliberate overload.

“Difficult music implies the fleeting and inexplicable form of formlessness.” D.O.T. is a New York–via–Memphis audio arts label that has quietly become one of the most consequential platforms in the city’s underground, occasionally framed as providing American counterpoint to the murky output of Dean Blunt’s World Music Group. The label has built a catalog that oscillates between rap, noise, sound art, electronic and experimental composition, releasing defining records by Cities Aviv, Autobahn, Furniture Group, Dorothy Carlos, and Patch +, among others. This new performance, commissioned by Roulette Intermedium, marks a further shift toward audio arts proper. Less a traditional label showcase than an expansion of method, the evening brings the D.O.T. sensibility into a high-volume, deliberately physical context, a program of experimental music that treats intensity as structure itself.

I recently learned about a now long-defunct DIY venue called Secret Location, which I imagine is just as often a fun name to have as an annoying one. I imagine the curators at Earth, which is a kunsthalle-pilled project space named after a planet, bump up against this issue sometimes. It doesn't seem to matter much. Their programs featuring artists and writers like Tao Lin, Seth Price, Chris Kraus, JT Leroy, Amalia Ulman, and Eli Keszler, typically invite more foot traffic than the rest of the openings on Orchard combined. The Instagram post describes this as a "fashion performance structured as a boarding queue," choreographed by Sharleen Chidiac of PAGEANT/Voyeur and co-written by curator Liby Hays, whose "Manhattan Provisional Robo Theater" turned the space into a packed droid petting zoo last October. The arduino critters were dopey and unsure of their agency, their limited range of movement and planned obsolescence garnering a strange sympathy for inanimate objects. I was struck by the tragedy of a pizza robot with bagel wheels, spinning around a pizza box, doomed to decomposition. Sharleen’s gift is using movement to tease the absurdity out of the mundane. Given air travel is always a choreographed indignity, why not make a show of it? 

Lolina (aka Inga Copeland) is finally back in New York, and her solo output remains just as intangible and out of reach as her work as part of the duo Hype Williams: fractured, corroded haunt-pop—raw and eerie, like trying to remember somewhere you’ve only been in a dream. She's been putting out records on her own Relaxin imprint for years now:  LA Timpa, great area, and PI fave NEW YORK, who I interviewed on Montez over the summer. Like NEW YORK, Lolina deconstructs punk, experimental, and electronic music and performs in an unaffected deadpan, delivering her hypnotic soliloquies refracted through a haze of nightclub air and tobacco smoke. Her most recent release, gg, recalls Allina, the fictional pop star created by Danish conceptualists Smerz: clubbing, fashion, and fame rendered perverse, otherworldly, paranoia-inducing, the glamour of the city peeling away to reveal something strange and narcotic beneath. Techno experimentalists Lydo and Tomás Urquieta join Lolina, debuting their live ambient set. If their releases are any indication, this is going to be one of those rare performances where restraint becomes its own form of intensity. Hymn, the slower-burning DJ alias of Brooklyn favorite BATTYGYAL, opens the night. An evening of sounds that are haunted, deconstructed, and deliberately held at a distance. Everything exists in the negative space.

Sometimes we don't need to travel all around the city to alleviate cabin fever, for those of us in Ridgewood, world-class shows happen only a few steps from our doorsteps. Alice Does Computer Music  is a serious champion of DIY culture, organizer of consistently compelling shows, kind person, and a genuinely great composer working at the intersection of contemporary classical music, art pop, and experimental electronics. Alice recently posted about trying to torrent the Benedictine mystic Hildegard von Bingen's music on Soulseek, only to mistakenly download a record by a 90's neofolk ensemble doing trip-hop edits of her sacred monophony. This might've been completely accidental, but it reveals the aesthetic territory Alice operates in: a computer musician who downloads Gregorian chants alongside the Addison Rae album, someone who could feasibly share a bill with Kali Malone or Kelly Lee Owens or Frou Frou and make the programming feel inevitable. Alice is playing "new works in progress," which sounds like an ideal way to spend a cold Thursday evening. Jadelain, who played on Montez with Alice a few months ago, makes some of the most exquisite music-box-counterpoint-MIDI-music I've encountered—delicate, architecturally precise, completely absorbing. I haven't spent much time with Joan Kelsey or Mutual Benefit yet, but I'm planning to arrive early. Then I'm going to the Oli XL show.

Oli XL builds pop songs that refuse to stay assembled, which raises an obvious question: How does he play them live? How do you perform music that exists in a state of permanent reconstruction?  Stockholm's glitch-pop auteur has spent the past decade making tracks that feel structurally impossible—sounds materializing in the gaps between other sounds, chamber orchestras warping into glittering arpeggios before dissolving due to packet loss. Sometimes it’s kind of like Fennesz remote-producing Daft Punk’s Discovery through a pair of Metaverse goggles: MaxMSP electro-pop refracted through twenty open browser tabs and a weak internet connection. If anyone can figure out how to stage that kind of chaos, it's Oli. His work operates on a tightrope between mad science and pop immediacy. It's rarely clear how many instruments are in play, or whether "instrument" is even the right word, yet the songs remain instantly gratifying: playful, intricate, reliably sticky without sanding down the strangeness. Whether that's happening in a DAW or on a stage might be irrelevant. Dream-pop futurist james K opens with a DJ set, and if I get there early enough, I will probably check out Ambient Skate, featuring Instupendo and DJ Listen To Your Heart B2B Texas Baby. The whole night happens in a roller rink, which somehow makes perfect sense to me: restless music in a room designed for continuous motion.

This show isn't happening until March, but I'm DJing and the lineup is so legendary that I can't stop talking about it. Locust, aka downtempo pioneer Mark Van Hoen from the band Seefeel, is headlining the mainstage. Van Hoen's been making spectral, dub-inflected electronic music since the early '90s. It’s a rare treat to catch him playing in New York. Corridos Ketamina is (unsurprisingly)  bringing ketamine-addled corridos tumbados posse cuts, twisted into cloud rap and hypnagogic pop. Seeing them open for Joanne Robertson at Nightclub 101 was an evergreen reminder that skipping the opener is the cardinal sin of live music. The bill coheres around hypnagogic pop and plunderphonics, music that lives in the fog between memory and source material. Niontay's unintelligible, time-stretched samples at their murkiest sound like James Ferraro trying to get a Veeze placement. Car Culture, whose Rest Here was one of my favorite records of 2025, pushes vaporwave, shoegaze, dream pop, and quiet storm beyond their logical conclusions and lands on one of the most beautiful ambient releases in years. Mackeeper is a relatively new project from brothers Miles Cohen and Nick Harwood—think Madlib meets Blur meets Elias Rønnenfelt—and they seem especially primed for cloud-rock stardom. I'll be DJing between sets. No pressure.