OTHERWORLD PRESENTS: LADY STARLIGHT

On the surface, Colleen Martin’s arrival on the techno scene a couple years ago was a curiosity, the type of thing social media managers buzz over. Here was a former go-go dancer, fashion stylist and performance artist, best known for her work with Lady Gaga, performing live with Surgeon, one of techno’s most respected figures. But underpinning the story were some almost philosophical questions—questions about “who gets to do” techno, about how we perceive authenticity, and about the barriers we erect around culture. Martin was expecting this. “When I started doing techno, anybody that I would talk to that had some involvement in the scene were just like, ‘Ah it’s not going to work, nobody’s going to accept you, it’s not going to work with the pop star association,'” she told me at her apartment in Berlin last month.

As Martin pointed out, we may not have even been talking that day if it weren’t for a single fateful night a few years ago. Surgeon and his wife were at a Lady Gaga concert in Birmingham, and were surprised to find the support act, Lady Starlight, warming up with an uncompromising live techno set. Starlight told the audience how excited she was to play the hometown of one of her heroes, Surgeon, and the pair wound up meeting after the show. It was the start of an ongoing live performance collaboration that’s seen them play across Europe. Surgeon has called Martin “the techno sister that I was separated from at birth.”

For Martin, the switch to techno is just the latest in a series of left turns. She’s spent her career trying to challenge people’s expectations, fuelled not by a sense of arrogance but a natural curiosity and an appetite for hard work. She’s humbled that she seems to have been accepted by her new scene (her blistering debut has just been released on Stroboscopic Artefacts), but she sees it as her artistic duty to question techno’s established order.

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