On 23 September, Jamaican-born artist Dion McKenzie, better known as TYGAPAW, released Immigrant, a two-track digital EP via Tresor Records alongside the awesome short film Black Trans Masculine Experience. Born in Mandeville, Jamaica, TYGAPAW grew up in a conservative, patriarchal milieu where deviation from rigid gender norms was met with fear and hostility. As a child, McKenzie found refuge in CDs and MTV imports, cultivating an inner world of rhythm and distortion. At eighteen, McKenzie relocated from Jamaica to New York to study graphic design at Parsons School of Design where they discovered ballroom.
In the years since, they have become a multidisciplinary artist, electronic musician, music producer, and DJ, and are best known for founding Fake Accent, a Brooklyn-based collective and club night centring queer and trans artists of colour. McKenzie also launched the party series Shottas and later NO BADMIND, continuing their commitment to creating platforms for QTIPOC in electronic music and nightlife. Their 2020 debut Get Free placed Black trans life at the centre of techno, a rallying cry to “decolonise the rave”. Immigrant distils this ethos, condensing it into two tracks: one alarm, one declaration.
Their self-directed video layers slow-motion footage from tour life with intimate moments shared with queer and trans friends in New York. “At this point in my life, I’m never afraid to be vulnerable when vulnerability is necessary to express a truth,” they add. “I just hope that this film sheds some light in the shadows of Black Trans Masculinity.”
Meanwhile, the EP opens with M32 Riddim, an urgency-laced explosion. Synths crackle like sirens, the drums (boots on asphalt), this is techno with bloodlines. The title is a direct reference to the Mother 32 Moog synthesizer used to create the track, grounding the sound in the legacy of electronic instruments vital to techno. It also references Jamaican riddim culture, where rhythm is both ritualistic and a form of memorialising. You can hear in the percussive thrust the lineage of Detroit futurism, Drexciya’s submerged mythos, and Baltimore club urgency, refracted through TYGAPAW’s queer Caribbean lens.
In contrast, Black Trans Masculine Experience turns inward, building from loops and overdubs into a fragile, necessary testimony. The track opens with a searing admission: “People don’t believe that trans men exist […] we are so silent, in our position in the world. We don’t have that same visibility.”
This voice belongs to Kings Lee Rose, recorded in TYGAPAW’s living room in autumn 2024. Lee speaks about transitioning from being perceived as a Black woman to a Black man, and the isolation that follows. The fears spiral outward: the anxiety of feeling unsafe around cis men, the danger of trans identities being weaponised even after death, the fetishisation of trans men in queer spaces. “The only male spaces you can occupy are gay and queer ones,” they note, which can hold a lot of fetishisation. The track’s accompanying video heightens these tensions. Vignettes punctuate Lee’s speech, cutting between TYGAPAW moving through festival spaces, dancing bodies blurring around them, before returning to the solitude of their apartment. The oscillation between public visibility and private retreat stages the cost of being seen, and the ache of disappearing.
TYGAPAW’s score does not simply accompany Lee’s words but listens to them, shaping a path through the narrative. “Lee’s powerful narrative shapes the way, and my score aims to be a sonic guide to lead you through an insightful perspective of the Black Trans Masculine Experience,” they explain.
Together, the two tracks form a charged dialogue: the outward militancy of M32 Riddim balanced by the inward tenderness of Black Trans Masculine Experience. Where the first track demands motion, the second demands listening, in the face of erasure, risk, and fear, as the words of Kings Lee Rose make clear: “It is violent, because we are removed from community. That’s what happens when you choose to transition and medically step into a trans masculine experience.” In an era of accelerating trans erasure and backlash, Immigrant feels urgent, but it also refuses to collapse into despair. Instead, it builds space: for presence and a (literal) refusal of silence. This two track EP is the continuation of a longer project: reclaiming techno’s erased Black roots, queering the dance floor, transforming nightlife into a site of survival and solidarity.