TYGAPAW

TYGAPAW is a Jamaican-born, Brooklyn-based musical artist and composer whose multidisciplinary practice sits at the intersections of gender, race, migration and spirituality. For over a decade, they have cultivated spaces of belonging within New York’s queer underground through live performance, music production, sculpture, design, film, writing and club nights under their label Fake Accent. Rooted in their experience as a queer trans immigrant, their work bridges techno, design and diasporic memory, reclaiming sound and performance as spaces for liberation, resistance and joy.

Their practice has increasingly moved between nightlife and major international art institutions. Following a 2021 live A/V performance for Creamcake Berlin’s Paradise Lost, TYGAPAW participated in Gladstone Gallery’s Real Corporeal (2022) and completed a year-long residency with ISSUE Project Room, where they developed the three-part techno opera Devil Woman (Obeah Woman), presented at The Chocolate Factory and Queens Museum. Their first institutional solo exhibition, 3WI (Third World Immigrant), ran at Art Omi’s Newmark Gallery in 2023–24, exploring migration, historical erasure and cultural capital through video, sound and live electronic performance. Further commissions have included Rage Alchemy at National Sawdust and Duppy Know Who Fi Frighten at BOFFO Performance Festival in 2024, as well as a live composition responding to Carrie Mae Weems’ The Shape of Things at Gladstone Gallery.

As a producer, TYGAPAW has developed a distinctive hardware-driven approach to techno across releases including debut album Get Free (NAAFI, 2020) and Love Has Never Been A Popular Movement (Fabric Records, 2023), alongside remixes for artists including LSDXOXO, Kelela and Kevin Saunderson. In 2025 they signed to historic Berlin label Tresor, releasing the IMMIGRANT EP ahead of their forthcoming 2026 album Together You Gather All Power Applied Worldwide. Their work centres community and chosen family, particularly the voices and wisdom of Black women, while examining the histories and structures embedded within electronic music.

Alongside their institutional practice, TYGAPAW has performed at festivals including Berlin Atonal, Bad Bonn Kilbi, ADE, Primavera, Unsound, Dweller, Whole Festival, Melt, Dark Mofo, Draaimolen and Bahidora, and at clubs including Berghain, Tresor, RSO, Fabric, Fuse and Nowadays. Their contribution to electronic music has also been recognised through an appearance in the documentary UNDERPLAYED, a DJ Mag Best of North America nomination for Best Breakthrough Producer, and a 2022 DJ Mag cover. Moving fluidly between club culture, contemporary art and experimental performance, TYGAPAW continues to expand techno’s possibilities as both a musical form and a vehicle for cultural memory, resistance and collective liberation.