The world first met gyrofield because of a joke. It was 2019, and Kiana Li was a teenage music producer making beats on her computer from her bedroom in Hong Kong. She had 2,000 Soundcloud followers. “That was a good time,” she says with a smile. “I was feeling like anything could happen. I just had to make the music to see.”
So they made a track designed to take the piss out of the burgeoning tech house scene, built on eighth-note basslines, minimal melodies, and occasional spoken vocals. They took the formula and recorded their own voice talking into a cheap microphone. Then, for a laugh, they ramped up the bpm and added a beat more like something you’d find in drum-and-bass, a genre they knew little about. “I was a complete outsider to dance music,” they say. “I was like, drum-and-bass? Fast rhythms, lots of synths, high energy and all that. I didn’t know the roots of the culture.”
The result, “Out of My Mind,” was a simple romp of a track with a seesawing rhythm that could cause whiplash in the uninitiated listener. “I thought it was, like, hilarious, but also kind of good,” Li says. “I wasn’t completely serious with it. This wasn’t something I wanted to do.” The track took off, with drum-and-bass DJs like Sub Focus and 1991 picking it up, streaming numbers rocketing, and gyrofield receiving messages of interest from EDM labels like Monstercat. “It’s both funny and a little bit discouraging,” they add.
If this is your entry point to the gyrofield story, beware. Their catalogue is dense with curveballs, handbrake turns, hellish atmospheres, and batshit beats. They make drum-and-bass, ambient, techno, hyperpop, grime, dubstep, and all sorts of other category-resistant stuff, cosigned by some of the biggest names in all electronic music and likely to make your head spin off your neck if you listen without due care. At 22, she’s the kind of talent that only comes along so often.
Li grew up in Hong Kong to the sound of their parents’ CDs, music by the Carpenters, singer-songwriters from Taiwan, and Cantopop stars from China. They discovered Skrillex at age 10 and decided they wanted to be a musician. “I was finding a lot of difficulty in relating to other people,” they said in an interview with JellyBones last year, adding: “I think that had to do with the interests that I had, and also growing up autistic and not having enough social support regarding that. I was left to figure it out on my own. Music came into the picture for me like a great wave of escape.”
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At school, Li gave a presentation about what she wanted to study in college, choosing to talk about sound design in music composition. Nobody understood, including her teacher.
Eventually the internet provided a community, in the shape of like-minded teenage hopefuls producing music for SoundCloud. By age 16, Li’s early d’n’b productions had earned them a few online fans, and they began to find common interests with other producers doing similar things, artists like underscores and Jane Remover. Comments sections birthed excited conversations about EDM, anime, Japanese ambient, and Berlin techno labels. “I was a slightly odd-one-out in this internet scene, but I didn’t mind because I thought they were cool people,” Li says. “I’m still in touch with a number of them. Some of them have become my closest friends.”
Soon Li discovered another artist who would redefine what she thought music could be: Sophie. “It was like a cognitive dissonance,” Li says. “The first track I heard of hers was ‘Lemonade,’ and I was just completely speechless.” The Scottish producer’s 2018 full-length debut, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, was even more inspiring. “I think it helped push things into a way more diverse place, because it was a big step for this queer dance music subculture,” Li adds. “So it was a really big moment for many of us who were having struggles with our identity. It was a hit of motivation for all of us.”
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In 2017, Sophie dropped the video to “It’s Okay to Cry” and revealed her unobscured face on camera for the first time, in the process becoming visible as a trans woman. Meanwhile, Li continued to struggle with her own identity. She eventually dropped out of school and went days at a time without speaking to anyone. Then, in 2019, shortly before the release of “Out of My Mind,” she came out as trans to her mother.
“I was in a really bad state,” says Li (who asks that I refer to them using she and they pronouns in equal measure). “I completely broke down and never really went back to school again. It was quite difficult for my mum to understand, because I tried to hide everything from her, and it was difficult to actually break the news. I think she didn’t really understand. I was scared of communicating. I used to write everything to her on WhatsApp and just not speak much. It was a weird time.”
Li has said in the past that their mother was ultimately supportive, including when Li decided to move to Bristol, England, to study at university. While there, their music career took off in earnest and they soon abandoned studying. “I laugh at it sometimes,” they say. “How I’ve managed to drop out of both high school and uni.”
In subsequent years she was co-signed by drum-and-bass legends like Noisia and Kasra, both of whom released gyrofield records on their respective labels. There was also an EP on Deadmau5’s mau5trap and, last year, the incredible These Heavens on XL. She finished 2024 with Flower Burial, a dizzy sprawl of an EP filled with vertiginous atmosphere and addictive, rolling rhythm. Moments of ferocious, wall-of-noise intensity come interspersed with passages of beautiful calm, like vape breaks between stints inside a dungeon rave. “It came from a very challenging period for me,” she says. “Dealing with repercussions of trauma.” She hints at a trip to the hospital during the record’s conception. “I had an emergency appointment with the NHS … It was this mental weight hitting me in a way I was not prepared for… I’d rather not go into it.”
They speak with confidence and enthusiasm on a video call from their new home in Utrecht, Holland, where they recently moved with their partner. They say their voice still causes them anguish, but it seems music has offered an interesting way of dealing with it. “I’ve always had struggles with my voice and I still do,” they say. “It’s a big part of the experience of being trans.” You can hear them processing their vocal ambivalence on “Downpour (Cold Summer Mix),” a track built around a recording of Li singing at 16. “It’s quite interesting to capture a really old part of myself.”
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A vast archive of gyrofield music exists already, with dozens of tracks available to stream, some exclusive to Patreon and some as yet unreleased, teased in their excellent DJ sets. Countless gems lie within, like their scuzzy “Distant Relationships Mix” of Camelphat & Elderbrook’s “Cola”; the grime-adjacent “Missed Call(s)”; the celestial downtempo of “cthtchthcthcthc”; and their artful treatment of an Alicia Keys sample on “Ones and Somehows.”
It’s a treasure trove that suggests an artist who may be around for years. Their prolific, chameleonic hit rate will invite inevitable comparisons to iconoclasts like Sophie, Aphex Twin, and Ryuichi Sakamoto, but — like the greats before them — gyrofield may soon be a genre unto themselves.
