From the grasslands to the dancefloor. Back to the grasslands. And back again to the dancefloor.

There were many unexpected discoveries on the Redshift corporate retreat to China: you can have stunning clubs in office buildings (Rest in Power .TAG); the Xianyou music festival had a hotpot food stall; and people have partied at the Great Wall.

A full scene review is due to hit the mailing list soon (subscribe here if you haven’t yet!), so I am going to focus on just one illuminating experience: Taiga.

Taiga, so hot right now.

Now based in Chengdu, Taiga have a cult following of sorts in the Chinese scene. It wasn’t hard to see why. On both occasions that we got to see the duo’s live set, I was completely captivated by the genuine synthesis of their Mongolian roots and electronic influences. This comes neatly packaged in their Nomadelic release from earlier this year.

One reason why Nomadelic is so striking is that it defies the recursive tendencies of so much contemporary trance, that longing for a 90s experience that so many of dance music’s new guard were too young to experience. Sure, we might feel familiar with the dubby groove on ‘Gobi Hermit’, or the nostalgic chords on ‘Lament’ and ‘Sheepskin Carpet’. But in the vast ecosystem of unique soundscapes – a phrase that risks falling into platitude territory – Taiga’s feels earned. Husle’s polyphonic throat singing (khoomei) pairs with the intertwined spirals in ‘Teve khya’, generating an expansiveness that spans the record. That depth feels emotional, spatial and temporal.

Nomadelic moves between more contemplative parts in tracks like ‘Lament’ and ‘Gezil keerimm’, and rolling trance cuts like ‘Sheepskin carpet’, mirroring the nomadic fluctuation between settlement and departure. When ‘Teve khya’ drops, you realise that you have been Taiga’d within the first four minutes of the record: suddenly, you’re on horseback, riding, nay, gliding, over the grasslands. You’re bare-chested, but for the electric guitar slung around your back. You are witnessing the ‘nomdadelic’ – not some psychedelic bardcore but rather a reflection of cultural change and the modulation of both sound and identity across contexts. In this way, Taiga join the refined company of electronic musicians – think Burial or Cio d’Or – who treat geography as a malleable sonic architecture. Tracks like ‘Sheepskin carpet’ that use instruments like the morin khuur don’t just treat Mongolian instruments as some inherited sample pack; they call forth futures where trance has branched outwards into distinct, localised hybrids.

Time moves multi-directionally on Nomadelic: it barrels towards a future of exciting possibilities; it calls us to the present to enjoy the moment; and it brings forth sweet memories of the Chinese dancefloors that Sam and I – two lucky nomads – managed to find ourselves on.

★★★.5/4

Joe Negrine

16 September 2025