Kavari at The White Hotel

When Aphex Twin describes your tunes as “some of the most brilliant, most interesting kicking electronic music I’ve heard recently”, you know you’re doing something right.

KAVARI was born in Birkenhead and raised in a rural corner of the Highlands, where she started organising her own club nights because the local scene didn’t offer much that she wanted to hear. Her early tracks surfaced in 2020, self-released and shaped largely in isolation, before word of mouth carried them further than expected. Aphex Twin found her 2022 EP Suture online and began playing it in his own DJ sets; Ethel Cain and Yeule were soon citing her too.

While you might file some of her earlier music neatly under ‘challenging’, her new EP Plague Music, and particularly the lead single ‘Iron Veins’, slams hard enough that it becomes something different. It’s still plenty dark and uncompromising (probably more so now than ever), but it’s laced with more adrenaline; this is bodily, exhilarating stuff.

It features four tracks of dubstep, drum & bass and noise strapped around a single, merry idea: the world is collapsing. And it sounds like it, too, tearing familiar club sounds apart and rebuilding them into what Mixmag call “Frankenstein creations of overwhelming noise and crunch” – vocals, kicks and snares hard-clipped and pushed to distortion, breakbeats stretched well past their ‘normal’ texture.

You haven’t thought about Salad Fingers for a while, have you? Well, the cult Flash animation from 2004 lives on in sampled form via opener ‘Pulse’, its narrator’s bizarre, faltering voice punctuated by the bleep of a heart monitor before a fully-fledged beat finally emerges from the mire. ‘Iron Veins’ follows, fusing breakneck breakbeats with guttural cries, its video – directed by longtime collaborator Game Nova and shot in stark monochrome on infrared film – twisting Alice in Wonderland into a psychological horror.

That whole end-is-nigh vibe continues into ‘Serpent Chamber’, which features recordings of literal snakes, before closer ‘Scythe’ ends the EP on gnarled drones and the sound of someone seemingly coughing their lungs out. To misquote Umberto Eco, it ain’t pretty but it ain’t boring, either.

The White Hotel, a venue built on the same instinct that got KAVARI started – people making their own scene because the existing one wasn’t good enough – feels like the perfect spot. She’s joined there by Kamixlo, Dazegxd and Ship Sket, extending a bill built around intensity rather than genre.