For club kids, having a spiritual awakening on the dance floor is a rite of passage. Music-induced, out-of-body rapture has been the foundation for movements across electronica. Whole traditions are built on the conviction that music can heal.
Her weekends were spent in old warehouses on the outskirts of the city—rooms filled with blaring techno and young Czechs lost in their own transient states of bliss. The record opens like an invitation to join her: a beating heart of bass underlies synths that bubble up like champagne and unfurl into a burst of cosmic energy. The accompanying music video was nominated for a Grammy. The dancing is a tell. Twigs calls her body an instrument, honed by a lifetime of training.
Twigs and I first met the night after Christmas, at a cozy, reservation-only teahouse in downtown Los Angeles. We left our boots—hers, hoofed Tabis—at the door, in keeping with house rules, and claimed the end of a shared bench at the sole elevated table in the room. This cocoon of mindfulness had been chosen as a kind of holiday respite. Twigs stars as one of dozens of besuited office drones who hit a glitch in the matrix and shed their rigid work personae—and their clothes—to reveal something primal.
Bleak rows of cubicles warp into a minimalist landscape before that, too, gives way, this time to a strobe-lit void, where Twigs navigates a throng of contorting bodies. At the teahouse, the Zenlike energy was beginning to prove overwhelming. Twigs and I were situated in front of watercolors, a cup of brushes, and sheets of paper—items so coveted that, when we stepped away to get mochi and clementines, a fellow-patron discreetly swapped our brand-new paints with her well-worn set.
A friendly server beamed at us as she approached, teapot in hand. Twigs and I were debating whether to move to a private room next door to talk when she paused, considering her words. The British electronic duo the Future Sound of London played as we set off in search of something livelier; Twigs, snuggled up in the passenger seat, recounted our narrow escape. Born Tahliah Barnett to a British mother with Spanish roots and a Jamaican Egyptian father, she characterizes her upbringing as working class.
