Powder is an alchemist of time. Her ceremonious DJ sets invite listeners and dancers to extend their imaginations to abstracted spaces, while allowing the body to vessel the voyage in free, flowing style. Playful, thoughtful, and natural without knowing, Powder’s crates encourage abandonment of arbitrary boundaries and expectations surrounding genre, movement, schedule, and societal convention to revel, spirited and harmonious, in the passage of time.
Momoko Goto relocated from her hometown of Nagasaki, Japan to Tokyo in 2011. This is where the story of Powder, as the international dance music community knows her, begins. With the change in location came a change in lifestyle, where a balance of 9-to-5 office life and sacred, nocturnalo recording sessions invited Moko to reflect on music’s unique ability to “stop the clock” and “expand or shrink our sense of time.”
While many workers across the world feel the pressure of artificially controlled measurements of time, Moko’s musical mission to transcend these weighty associations, to shed light on the positive possibilities of passing time, resonates far past her island’s shores. Experiencing the pleasure that comes from physical and emotional transformation. Creating and nurturing memories.
In embracing these positive properties of time, Powder uses the hypnotic language of patterns to communicate with listener-dancers. Patterns represent the meter by which bodies are compelled to move; they also represent a method for collection and organization of sound, where the cohesive stylistic and historical narrative of different pieces of music are laid over one another transforming both intimate and universal moments into a dreamy, experiential, and endlessly interpretable whole.
Moko notes that patterns, “are always ancillary and never playing the leading part of things, and the patterns themselves recognize this fact and act low-key.” This interpretation of sound and rhythm mirrors critical aspects of underground club culture, such as collective energy-making and protection, togetherness over spectacle, the layering of multiple bodies, and narratives upon one another in ecstasy.
