On her debut EP, Christiana Vassilakis—known professionally as Madam X—delivers a masterful excavation of club music’s sonic genealogy. Homecoming is less a nostalgic trip than a surgical deconstruction of musical inheritance, reimagining foundational sounds through a contemporary lens.
The four-track release operates like an archaeological dig through dance music’s DNA. Copacabathens, a collaboration with DJ JM, transforms Barry Manilow’s Copacabana into a metallic techno meditation, stripping the original’s tropical kitsch into something razor-sharp and alien. Similarly, her track with Doctor Jeep reconfigures Boney M’s Rasputin into percussive abstraction, revealing how pop’s disposable scaffold can become experimental architecture.
Most potent is Watergate, a collaboration with Mexican producer Andy Martin. Here, Vassilakis constructs a bruising dub techno journey that mutates between industrial four-four kicks and syncopated half-time rhythms, generating a track that feels simultaneously mechanical and organic.
What distinguishes Homecoming is Vassilakis’s curatorial approach. These aren’t mere club tools, but sophisticated conversations between musical traditions. Having emerged from London’s post-dubstep underground and co-founded the influential BPM collective, she brings deep architectural knowledge to her productions.
The EP also serves as a celebration of KAIZEN, her label’s decade-long commitment to bass-driven electronic music. Each track feels like a personal manifesto—drawing lines between UK soundsystem culture, techno’s experimental margins, and global dance music dialects.
Vassilakis understands that truly progressive dance music isn’t about novelty, but radical recontextualisation. Homecoming doesn’t just reference musical history—it actively reshapes it.
Download / stream Homecoming here
