Black Meteoric Star: Wet

0.0

0.0

Reader Score

No score yet, be the first to add.

0.0

Genre:

Electronic

Label:

Ransom Note / Dark Entries

Release Date:

2026

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, East Berlin crumbled. Many residents flocked to the West, compelled by the promise of a more robust economy and a higher standard of living. On the city’s eastern side lay a constellation of factories and industrial buildings, abandoned in the scramble of reunification. With curfews abolished and noise ordinances ignored, these neglected spaces became playhouses through the ’90s. At clubs and raves that enshrined techno, kink culture, and queer exploration, youthful mischief-makers gained access to their every unintelligible desire.

In 2006, this is where Rhode Island native Gavilán Rayna Russom spawned Black Meteoric Star—before she joined LCD Soundsystem in 2008, before she came out as trans in 2017, and before she eventually left LCD to focus on work that felt truer to her. In the early aughts, Berlin was still a fleshy swirl of sonic freedom and sexual excess; jacking through electro, EBM, and freestyle, early Black Meteoric Star records reflected the erotic potential at her fingertips. Every rotten synthline and gravelly kick was a siren call to the dancefloor, directly inspired by her musings on dance music, drag, and the queer leather BDSM scene. The music’s trickster quality occasionally revealed glimpses of a life in deep transition—in Berlin, Russom was battling bouts of psychosis and traipsing through the concrete dens of the city after hours, emerging from techno-punctured darkness long after sunrise.

No score yet, be the first to add.

0.0

Today, Russom is back in the U.S., where she’s active as a DJ in the New York leatherdyke scene. Her latest album, Wet, which collects Black Meteoric Star tracks recorded as early as 2008, is a queer electro manifesto dripping in sex. “No amount of acting ‘respectable’ will humanize queer people in the eyes of this administration,” Russom writes in a press release. If that messaging weren’t already compelling, the songs are fierce, too, venturing deep into the smoky interiors of early-’80s house, electro, and rock. The imaginative exchange of pleasure and power in S&M spaces is encoded into the loose drum workout “S’weat” and the scruffy electro of “Control Top,” peppered with zaps that crack like leather against muscle. “Come on, speaker freak for me!” Russom growls through the minimal groove of “Subwoofer Speaker Freaker,” summoning images reminiscent of McKenzie Wark’s autofictional novel Raving, in which dancers open themselves up to being “fucked by sound.” Blunt and doused in funk, electro portals like “Subwoofer” spit out visitors and parachute them into fits of bodily ecstasy.

Like an ode to the sweeping influence of the Roland, Wet’s distorted drums carry the lo-fi crackle and pop of a song hastily recorded in ’82. Genres bleed together with off-the-cuff urgency—“5am Open Air Sunrise”’s soaring Chicago acid house chords melt into the industrial thrust of “The Calling,” which sometimes sounds only marginally dissimilar from the psychoactive minimal loops on “Squuezed Into These Jeans.” On “Feel the Energy,” Russom fashions herself as an erotic-film auteur, squelching out a fat bassline with the cheap swagger of vintage porno music. But this isn’t self-serious eroticism—interrupting the groove, she howls a cheeky announcement: “Emergency, emergency, emergency… Intruuuder aleeert!”

America might be an unerotic place, but committed deviants will always find a way to play. They’ll also find a way to walk off the injuries of oppression over a delicious beat, from LaTour’s 1991 AIDS survival anthem “People Are Still Having Sex” to Fever Ray’s 2017 song “This Country” (remixed by Björk in 2019 as “This Country Makes It Hard to Fuck”). Russom’s messaging in these songs isn’t as direct, but the beats speak for her, casting loose and inspired spells that wouldn’t be quite as effective from, say, a straight dude playing big-room techno. Across the tumbling toms of “The Calling,” Russom sings, “Darling, have you heard the calling/Begging you to change your thought perception?” Wet dreams of a world of fluidity, where queer people are still using their imaginations and expanding their desires.

0.0

0.0