“Music is Art, Art is Catharsis”: Enesi M. is the Soundpark Act of the Month

“I am this by design / Too complex for your labels“. Enesi M. says it first, before we can: you can’t grasp me – at least, not according to the categories people try to fit me into – so don’t even bother trying. The feeling of not belonging has been with her all her life, and honestly: not belonging has never sounded more interesting. Listen to Dystopia, and you’ll see what I mean.

Genre-bending, crossover, cross-genre – call it what you want, Enesi M. encompasses it all. That may have more to do with the survival strategies she developed growing up Afro-Latina in Linz than you might think: you get stuck with labels you might prefer not to be associated with. Fortunately, though, identity is never final. In the end, we are the ones to decide what to keep and what to discard. And sometimes you toss something only to dig it up later on, thinking: you know, that wasn’t actually that bad.

That was about how it went with Enesi M. Hip-hop, metal, and rock were her self-chosen genres, the dark, perhaps more serious sounds that inspired her growing up. In the course of the interview, she drops names like Scarlxrd, Cameron Azi, and ZillaKami – trap metal pioneers, not much older than Enesi herself. They throw everything into the pot together: the oppressively dense beats, the screaming vocals, the distorted guitars.

But there was also baile funk and reggaeton – the music that was in the air at family gatherings. For a while, it didn’t interest her at all, as she related in a 2022 interview on the release of her debut EP, “Corriendo“: “I was so serious; I didn’t want to make reggaeton or baile funk, no party music. But then I thought, actually it’s empowering, especially if I bring my own issues into it, like, when I queer it.”

It’s been a good ten years since artists like Tomasa del Real and La Goony Chonga appeared on the scene, bringing a style of music that would later come to be called “neoperreo” – queer, sex-positive reggaeton, freed from the male gaze, far removed from the genre’s patriarchal roots. For Enesi M., it’s all a little bit of a resistance strategy, music as coping: “Being Black is just awesome, and being Latina is super-awesome. I don’t want to be anything else. And I would never want to be straight – I’m so happy that I’m queer, and I want to put that joy into my music; I want to have fun, not just suffer. Because the fact that I do suffer – and that other people who are multiply marginalized suffer – that’s obvious.”

Twerking to metal

These days, her influences have melted together into the best mixture we can possibly imagine. Dystopia, Enesi M.’s debut album, is a 20-minute journey: spine-chilling synths, metallic hi-hats, and guttural screams share space with 80s cold wave, hammering baile funk beats, and dembow rhythms. It’s both progressive and dark, saturated with self-empowerment. Her live shows include copious amounts of fake blood and perreo. We could call it deconstructed club music, (neo-)perreo industrial, or gothic tropicália…or not. Enesi aims to transcend genre snobbishness: “When people say you can’t mix things – like heavy metal and reggaeton – because then it’s not ‘valid’ anymore, I am really strongly against that,” she says, laughing. “Normalize twerking to heavy metal songs!”

Music as a means of coping with the end of the world

Music as a coping strategy is probably the essence of Dystopia. The cover shows a forest in flames, and in the midst of it Enesi as a centaur with glowing red eyes, wounded and covered in blood. And in spite of it all, there are rabbits hopping around, flowers blooming, ferns growing. Shortly before the album release, she wrote on Instagram: “Believing in a future when the whole world seems to be deteriorating in front of our very eyes feels surreal to me most days.” Nothing for it but to escape into the supernatural. “It’s about enchanting reality, imagining everyday life as supernatural,” she explains. “Magic realism. Just to make life more interesting…or to help endure it.”

“Corriendo” was a homemade solo experiment, almost a joke (“I just made something on Ableton and I thought, heeeey, that sounds pretty good”), but there’s a lot more concept, more work, and more people power behind Dystopia. Vienna producers like fazo666fazo (of Baits and Bipolar Feminin) and MJ worked on eight songs, and the Berlin-based Cuban producer Isasi Isasi put the final touches on the album.

The guest appearances happened naturally – Enesi just chose people she liked and hit them up…or slid into their Insta DMs. “Like in real life, like flirting.” And it worked – New York artists like the trap-metal pioneer Cameron Azi and the experimental hyperpop trio Mother Cell guest on the album, so do the L.A. multidisciplinary artist Demi Yo’ko (big Yves Tumor vibes!) and the Georgia-based Brazilian rapper Really Snootie. A diasporical mix, unexpected, refreshing, and free. The way music sounds in 2024.

Melissa Erhardt, translated from the German original by Philip Yaeger.