25 spiritually-attuned electronic artists that should be on everyone’s conscious music radar

In an ever-evolving universe, the art of maintaining complete and total fluidity is the most necessary key for survival. Renowned for his metamorphic capabilities and expertly crafted sonic adventures, Liquid Stranger (Martin Stääf) has mastered his ability to slip in and out of genres all while honing his own personal style.

Liquid Stranger has earned his reputation for exuding incommensurable talent and taking audiences on a soul-stirring aural journey of genre-bending beats on the dancefloor. Enter: WAKAAN in 2015. Since the label’s humble beginnings, Martin Stääf’s vision for the imprint was strong from infancy. When Stääf booked the label’s very first North American tour, WAKAAN’s message was simple: to spread the left-field bass movement across the world. Little did Stääf know at the time, but Wakaan’s mission would spread rampantly across an electronic community that was thirsty for conscious bass music.

A mere four years later, Stääf’s vision finally culminated with 2019’s sold-out WAKAAN Music Festival, which was considered a huge success on all counts. CE even named it our Top Breakout Festival of 2019. But rather than basque in his accomplishments at the festival, Liquid Stranger announced mid-performance the birth of a new sub-label, SSKWAN.

Liquid Stranger said the following of the two label’s yin-and-yang relationship: “WAKAAN is Native American for ‘Grandmother Earth,’ for the female essence of God. SSKWAN is similar, for ‘Heavenly Father,’ the male essence of God.”

The idea was to house more downtempo, chill bass releases on the new label, while keeping WAKAAN up as the home for all things weird, wonderful, and wonky. The feminine precedes the masculine, in other words, which certainly holds true to real life.  After all, no man can exist without his mother’s gift of birth. “So together when we have these two components, I feel we have something pretty unified,” Stääf elaborated during that very same headlining set.

The radical thing about this dichotomy, however, is how it flips the male and the female upside down by way of the label’s distinctive sonic stamps. Grandmother WAKAAN was always hard and heavy from the beginning, for instance, with its weird wubs and beats that always hits you out of left-field. By equating the softer side of bass with SSKWAN—the male essence of God—it seems Stääf and his new roster of artists have set out on a mission to change the way we think not only about music but how we may subconsciously assign gender roles to sounds.

Fast forward through 2020 and Liquid Stranger’s SSKWAN vision has materialized in the form of a soft, serene Alchemy LP from Au5. So it would seem the “weird and wonderful world of WAKAAN,” as Liquid Stranger always liked to refer to his sound movement, is being thrown back into balance by the soft and soothing sounds of SSKWAN.

Those who are unfamiliar with Liquid Stranger’s music often tend to categorize him as only a heavy dubstep artist, which is anything but the truth. The most effervescent quality of Liquid Stranger is his ability to shift from genre to genre all while maintaining a sense of smoothness and consistency, which in turn makes him one of the most unpredictable artists to date. In a sense, he has ended genre barriers for the sake of musical storytelling taking whatever sounds he needs to put forward the intended vibe.

Liquid Stranger’s omnifarious approach to music has led him to stand out amongst a pack of artists desperately trying conform to a commercial demand. Proven to be a timeless staple to the world of electronic dance music by bridging the gap between mellow and heavy, Liquid Stranger has also tethered bass music to consciousness.