The world first met gyrofield because of a joke. It was 2019, and Kiana Li was a teenage music producer making beats on her computer from her bedroom in Hong Kong. She had 2,000 Soundcloud followers. “That was a good time,” she says with a smile. “I was feeling like anything could happen. I just had to make the music to see.”
So they made a track designed to take the piss out of the burgeoning tech house scene, built on eighth-note basslines, minimal melodies, and occasional spoken vocals. They took the formula and recorded their own voice talking into a cheap microphone. Then, for a laugh, they ramped up the bpm and added a beat more like something you’d find in drum-and-bass, a genre they knew little about. “I was a complete outsider to dance music,” they say. “I was like, drum-and-bass? Fast rhythms, lots of synths, high energy and all that. I didn’t know the roots of the culture.” {read}