Sound Without Borders 🎧 📖

Reproduced from Cent Magazine...

---

Sound Without Borders: The New Wave of Culture-Crushing Music

Romée Pietersen

Listen

Do you hear the fusion? Somewhere between the beat and your breath, the algorithm and ancestry, today’s music hums with a curious kind of freedom. Genres slip like water between fingers. A track might open with 160 BPM breaks and end in whispered falsetto. House morphs into spoken word. Traditional chants phase into synths. The border between past and present? Blurred. The line between cultural homage and future shock? Beautifully unstable.

Read more in Sound Without Borders: The New Wave of Culture-Crushing Music

You’ve heard it, even if you haven’t named it, you have hummed it even if you don’t know it’s name. Maybe it was a looped tabla sample over ambient textures in a SoundCloud mix. A TikTok hit laced with Vietnamese folk melodies. A club night where the drop is a guttural chant, not a bassline. What we’re experiencing isn’t just post-genre; it’s a reprogramming of cultural identity through sound. And it’s not polite. It’s disruptive. Joyful. Complicated. Often, it’s intensely personal, hitting you in your solar plexus.

In this brave new soundscape, tradition isn’t something to be preserved in glass; it’s something to be manipulated, sampled, and reanimated. It’s a loop point. A building block. For a generation of artists carving space beyond labels and lineage, the past is no longer behind them. It’s inside the track.

Take the glitchy, emotionally raw sound of Yves Tumor, (American experimental music maker), bending gospel and glam rock into something sweaty and spiritual. Or Ethel Cain (nostalgic and Southern Gothic themes), whose dreamy Americana is filled with spectral echoes of religion and generational trauma. Charli XCX and 100 gecs don’t just play with genre; they torch it, rebuild it, and auto-tune it into oblivion.

Artists like Caroline Polachek and Rina Sawayama float between art pop, opera, nu-metal, and synthwave with the casual confidence of someone flicking between filters. There’s no neat shelf for any of them. And that’s the point.

But the most compelling artists in this moment aren’t just genre-bending for the thrill of it, they’re folding culture and community into their process. Shub, once known as DJ Shub, now going mononymously, doesn’t just sample Indigenous music. He is Indigenous music, reinterpreted for the rave.

On his latest single ‘Victorious’, a collaboration with Cree/Métis vocalist Tia Wood, Shub offers a sound that’s equal parts ancestral memory and drum & bass catharsis. The powwow drum; sacred and thunderous, sits at the track’s core, anchoring Wood’s soaring vocals and the track’s spiraling breakdowns. You don’t just hear the song. You feel it in your chest.

Initially, Powwow music was understood as a vocal-driven tradition; haunting, powerful, and percussive at its core. Built on the pentatonic scale, its melodies moved in spiraling descents, echoing both call and memory. Rather than lyrical storytelling, it spoke through vocables and carried feeling over meaning, vibration over verb. Framed by the deep, resonant pulse of the drum, the sound wasn’t just heard, it was felt, like language translated through heartbeat.

This, however, is powwow step; an Indigenous-led genre Shub helped pioneer. Fusing elements of EDM, trap, dubstep, and turntablism with traditional powwow singing and drumming, it resists simple categorization. It’s not just electronic music with ‘ethnic’ flourishes. It’s a reclamation. A re-centering. And with ‘Victorious’, Shub takes it further: the production is tighter, the message clearer. The beat, as ever, is political.

“Powwow step gives me a connection to my culture that other forms of electronic music don’t. It carries the voices of our ancestors”

The accompanying music video doesn’t shy away from symbolism either. Directed by Kit Weyman, it casts Shub as the Drum, a heartbeat for the people. Wood’s journey, from the open Plains to the concrete arteries of downtown Toronto, becomes a visual metaphor for modern Indigenous identity. It’s spiritual, yes; but it’s also just extremely cool.

Read our exclusive interview with Shub

Powwow Step is such a distinct and powerful sound. Can you tell us how you first found your way into it? Powwow has always been a part of my life. Growing up, I was surrounded by the culture, the music, and the energy of the drum. It’s something that’s deeply connected to who we are as Indigenous people; it’s our heartbeat.

When I first got into DJing and production, I was always looking for ways to blend my culture with modern sounds. I was inspired by hip-hop, dancehall, and electronic music, but nothing hit home like the power of powwow drums. When I heard groups like A Tribe Called Red incorporating powwow into electronic music, it sparked something in me. I realized I could take what I already knew, the rhythms, the vocals, the spirit of powwow, and fuse it with the bass-heavy sounds I loved. That’s how I found my way into Powwow Step.

For me, it’s more than just a genre; it’s a way to keep our traditions alive while pushing them into the future.

What does Powwow Step offer you that other forms of electronic music don’t?

Powwow Step gives me a connection to my culture that other forms of electronic music don’t. The powwow drum carries a spirit, a history, and an energy that you can feel deep in your chest, it’s more than just a rhythm, it’s a heartbeat. When I blend it with electronic elements, it creates something powerful, something that resonates beyond just the dancefloor.

Other forms of electronic music can be high-energy and exciting, but Powwow Step is rooted. It carries the voices of our ancestors, the strength of our traditions, and the power of our people. It’s not just about making music; it’s about storytelling, identity, and keeping our culture alive in a way that speaks to both the past and the future.

There’s an undeniable emotional and spiritual depth to your music. Is creating it a spiritual experience for you?

Absolutely. Making Powwow Step is a spiritual journey for me. The powwow drum itself is sacred, it represents the heartbeat of Mother Earth, and when I build a track around it, I feel that connection. It’s not just about making a beat; it’s about honoring something much bigger than myself.

That manifests in the way I create. When I’m working on a track, I don’t just throw sounds together; I listen. I let the drums and vocals guide the direction, and I build everything else around that foundation. Sometimes, it feels like I’m just a vessel, bringing these sounds forward in a new way.

It also comes through in the live experience. When I play a set and see people from all walks of life feeling the energy of the drum, moving together, and connecting with the music on a deeper level, that’s spiritual. It’s a reminder that this music isn’t just about entertainment; it’s about healing, unity, and keeping our traditions alive in a modern world.

Your upcoming album sounds like a deeply personal body of work. What emotions or stories shaped it?

When I was creating the tracks for this new album, I tapped into a range of emotions; pride, resilience, nostalgia, and sometimes even pain. Each song has its own energy, but at the core, they all come from a place of deep connection to my culture, my family, and my journey.

There are tracks that carry the spirit of celebration, those ones are high-energy, designed to make people move and feel the power of the drum. Then there are songs rooted in reflection, where I pulled from stories of survival, strength, and the realities of what our people have been through. Some moments were heavy, especially when incorporating my mother’s voice or sharing personal histories, but that weight is important, it’s part of our truth.

At the same time, there’s always hope. Powwow Step isn’t just about looking back; it’s about pushing forward. So even in the most emotional tracks, there’s a feeling of perseverance, of rising above, of coming together. That’s what I wanted this album to carry, a full spectrum of feeling, but always with a purpose.

How do you nurture your creativity and keep your sound evolving?

My creative journey works best when it flows naturally, when I let the music come to me rather than forcing it. Inspiration can come from anywhere: a conversation with family, a memory, the energy of a live show, or even just hearing a certain drum pattern that sparks something inside me. I’ve learned that the best music happens when I trust that process.

Collaboration plays a big role, too. Working with other artists, whether they’re vocalists, producers, or traditional singers, always brings new perspectives and energy. It pushes me to explore new directions and evolve.

But at the core, my creativity is fuelled by culture and community. When I feel connected to who I am, where I come from, and the people around me, that’s when the music comes alive. It’s not just about making beats; it’s about storytelling, honoring tradition, and creating something that has meaning beyond just sound.

In a different, yet equally bold, sonic territory stands ROY INC. His double release ‘Rivers of Blood’, a haunting title that nods to Enoch Powell’s infamous (inflammatory and racist) speech, is a politically and emotionally charged offering. Built in collaboration with producer Darren Morris, the track glides on percussive drums and eerie, synth-drenched textures that bleed into trap and soul.

It’s lush, but uneasy. Defiant, but hypnotic. Where Shub brings the drum as legacy, ROY INC brings the voice; silky, powerful, and distinctly queer. This isn’t just protest music; it’s art as reclamation, defiance wrapped in velvet.

ROY INC is known as a longtime icon in queer music culture whose sound is as magnetic as his presence. Rooted in funk but far from retro, his music slides across silky house grooves, synth-drenched atmospheres, and basslines that strut rather than stomp. There’s a kind of cinematic sensuality to it all; bold, theatrical, but never hollow.

ROY’s voice, unmistakably rich and commanding, doesn’t just perform; it claims space. Across decades, he’s been shaping and embodying the intersections of queerness, Blackness, and avant-pop with a sound that invites you to dance and reflect. His latest release is no exception; elegant, political, and deeply felt, it carries the legacy of ballroom, protest, and the club in equal measure.

What unites these artists isn’t just their refusal to sit still within genre; it’s how they use sound as identity. Music becomes a vessel: for grief, for resistance, for joy. For telling your story when language fails or doesn’t fit.

And this movement is global. In South Africa, Muzi blends Zulu heritage with slick electronica. In Brazil, Linn da Quebrada turns funk carioca into a platform for trans liberation.

In London, Shygirl pulls from garage, grime, and club to create a whole new sensual lexicon.

Across continents, across sounds, a pattern emerges: artists reclaiming their roots not through preservation but through experimentation. These aren’t just “new genres.” They’re new frameworks; ways of being, ways of remembering. And ways of dreaming forward.

You can call it post-genre, but that feels too easy. What we’re hearing is something more profound: a generation less interested in fitting into sounds, and more compelled to create sounds that fit them. Sometimes raw. Sometimes grand. Always personal. Because in this new musical landscape, culture isn’t static. Identity isn’t fixed. And genre? That’s just the starting point.