What’s always made Taquwami’s music stand out from the crowd of similarly minded — and in most cases, very good — SoundCloud-orbiting producers is how he seemingly wants his music to sound genuinely alien. Most artists that could be generally tagged as “SoundCloud producers” come off as types who just like bending sounds, stretching vocal samples and synthesizers out to make things sound interesting, but ultimately familiar. Think of every downbeat-gone-skittery remix of a rap song that pops up in your feed — sure, the whole thing gets pulled around like taffy, but the core is still some super familiar single such as “Trap Queen.”
Taquwami’s music goes to strange places. The vocals that appear in his songs get warped into what sounds like alien garble — even when he was at his most chillwave (“Your Gems“), it sounds different, and same goes for the music itself, unafraid to travel down all kinds of roads. “Moyas” off of a forthcoming EP (“To be released once completed”) highlights everything that makes Taquwami’s music so captivating — the voices swirling around sound like no language, and the song itself nearly collapses in on itself with an EDM-ish passage that sounds nothing like a typical EDM song. Listen above.