I'm from man, you're from white,

perfect strangers in the night.

It took a lot of balls to play some boleric to this crowd,

and little did I realize this was the next thing.

Welcome to the New York Times Popcast, your warm breeze of music criticism. I'm your

host Ben Ratliff. Like Firestorms, Stones, and when they strike,

we feel the love.

Sparks are fly, ignite our most

when they strike, we ignite of the wind. And you're hearing Firestone by the Norwegian artist Kigo. Our guest today is Michelangelo Matos. Hey Michael, hey.

You wrote a piece about Kigo and about the larger tendency that he's presently part of.

Tendency is a good word.

A called Tropical House.

Yes.

Michael, you were present at the sort of Dylan Goes Electric moment of Kigo, except instead of loud

electric guitars, it was the sound of synthetic marimbus. It would be more like Dylan goes soft scint. Tell us what

happened. You were in Atlanta? I was covering 2014. Yeah it was two years ago I

was covering or a year and a half ago more properly and I was covering the tomorrow world festival for Beatport and I was watching the main stage, the sun is setting, it's probably about 7 o'clock, and suddenly they've

got this new guy on. The stage looks like Castle Grey Skull from the He-Man cartoon. like,

like there's fire belching out of it on the side, there's fire belching out of it on the sides, there's a waterfall, it's ridiculous.

And suddenly there's this guy up there, you know know it looks like every other guy up there

He's playing stuff and I'm like I'm sort of drawn to it because I'm thinking this sounds really weird what is this doing here because it's really slow it's about half the tempo or it feels half

the tempo of what had been playing before which is mostly very Bosch-Bosh stuff.

...