Written by KAVARI’s music sears like a controlled fire, destroying the underbrush to make room for the new. That was literally true of the Glasgow-based producer’s 2025 EP Only Pleasure in Flame, a collection of slash-and-burn field recordings that sucked the air right out of your ears. The Scottish sea air has produced a number of maverick electronic musicians—Rustie, SOPHIE, Hudson Mohawke, Proc Fiskal—and in recent years, KAVARI’s prolific, sound design–forward work is arguing the case for her induction into the pantheon. There might be a time in the near future when newcomers under her influence make a name for themselves; hundreds of people have purchased her 2021 sample pack. PLAGUE MUSIC, KAVARI’s debut EP for XL Recordings, condenses a sound she’s been honing over the past decade into four concise (albeit incendiary) tracks, reconstructing the over-the-top brostep of MOODY GOOD with a bit of Northern gothic flair.
The year 2023 was a breakthrough year for KAVARI. But even before Aphex Twin began demolishing stadiums with her bulldozer tracks like “Attachment Style (VIP),” she was your favorite DJ’s favorite producer, breaking down pop music into its constituent elements and reassembling them into club tools that skulk in the long shadow of GHE20G0TH1K, Fade to Mind, and other pioneers of so-called “deconstructed club”. Those bootlegs make up her colossal Lost Cuts edit packs on her Bandcamp, with titles that blow the character counts of Fall Out Boy’s songs: the longest might be the SEO-friendly “KAVARI, Skrillex, Disclosure, Flume, Knife Party, Avicii, Foreign Beggars, Aphex Twin – Someone Loved It, Kyoto, You & Me, Internet Friends, Cinema, Levels, Scatta, Avril 14th (KAVARI Attention Deficit Mix),” on Lost Cuts Vol. 2. After the Aphex Twin nod, however, anyone who was into the harder end of hardcore breaks could attest that KAVARI’s original productions, heard in basements from Seoul to Vienna, were as electrifying as her edits.
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It might seem that the possibilities for noise have been exhausted by everyone from Playboi Carti to Chuquimamani-Condori to teens making jugg edits on TikTok. KAVARI’s genius is to go beyond loud for loud’s sake, creating symphonies of texture out of redlined mulch. Much of her signature comes from the creative application of hard clipping and other distortion techniques, saturating samples to create raw material that she later whittles down. When a sound wave is hard clipped, parts that are louder than a certain threshold are sawed off; the result creates a sort of asphyxiated buzzing that can decorate the edges of a synth, kick, or snare—listen to the crunch of the sub bass that lurks beneath “PULSE.” In moments like these, KAVARI carves intricate filigrees out of monolithic blocks of sound, keeping the spiky moments from devolving into overly indulgent harsh noise (for fans of the latter, try her side project EEL BLOOD). The natural crispiness of a timestretched breakbeat is thus augmented by the crackle of its truncated waveform; the frisson of a track like “IRON VEINS” is like taking the first bite into a piece of Korean double-fried chicken.
PLAGUE MUSIC masterfully teeters on the contorted borderline of pleasure and pain. In a recent interview, KAVARI spoke of channeling the “happiness, peace and love” of EDM while remaining mindful of the demons looming after the comedown. The guttural growls and apneic whispers that take the place of “put your hands up” ad libs seem to gesture at intrusive thoughts that might strike on a night out, when all you can think about is the world burning down while you’re in the club. A track like Skrillex’s “Bangarang” might help shoo away such thoughts with stupefying wubs; on KAVARI’s “SERPENT CHAMBER,” however, there’s only a voice that purrs with ASMR closeness: “I want you to become aware of the darkness behind your eyes.” The multi-vehicle pile-up that ensues might go even dumber than a Rusko drop, yet there’s no escaping the anxiety that remains in the static hiss that closes the track.
KAVARI’s best moments might be when she somehow transforms apocalyptic sounds into danceable belters, but over the years she’s also shown a remarkable talent for conjuring subtler ambiences. Those appeared on 2022’s Lost Cuts [B-side], a collection of blissed-out United in Flames-esque trance edits, as well as in the quicksilver glitches of yeule’s “bloodbunny,” which KAVARI co-wrote. Yet the pandemic atmosphere of “SCYTHE” feels like a distillation of the ritual horror explored on her 2023 mixtape Against the Wood, Opposed to Flesh. A kick drum thrums and echoes in the background like a heartbeat fighting to hold on, as field recordings of an anonymous street and sounds of people coughing, first timidly and then violently, establish a tableau akin to a plague-infested 14th century town. If the names of KAVARI’s mixes have often included images of blood and breath, vital fluids that give us life, PLAGUE MUSIC reminds us that death is never too far behind.
