TaliaBle & Joe Goddard – Soundboi

From the Clubland masculine archetype, North London’s TaliaBle morphs to something far more subversive on ‘Soundboi,’ her joint effort with Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard. Intentionally, the tackiness of misspelling the title, replacing ‘y’ with an ‘i’, denotes precisely who was kept out of the old school rave culture and who is re-taking control of the narrative now. The collaboration came from the kind of open and experimental space that such an artist needs, one operating within the realms of music and visual art. Her repertoire includes experimental artists’ fashions.

TaliaBle’s conceptual framework goes beyond simple representation. Her “Soundboi” turns into a figure who disrupts established hierarchies through his very presence rather than through protest. The track’s broken beat underpinning is the perfect vehicle for this disruption—the rhythmic complexities reflect the artist’s very refusal to adhere to the structures of conventional rap or clubland expectations.

And yet it ends up being pretty thrilling — the kind of track that you’re just as likely to hear in a club as a stinging examination, and it proves that ‘experimental artists’ doesn’t have to be ‘hard to get into’ when it’s this direct.