ATM is the Philadelphia collective breaking club music boundaries

Deep in the city of brotherly love resides a collective diametrically opposed to dance music’s homogenous dude-bro culture. Based out of West Philadelphia, ATM agitates for an alternative: its members, under various guises, rub sandpaper across preconceptions of what’s acceptable to play in the club and their parties, which happen monthly, are places where they and their congregation can perform and dance whichever way they want.

Right now, the squad is comprised of: Dj Haram, also known as Abdul Kadir; performance and sound artist Marcelline Mandeng; E. Jane, who steps out as Mhysa as well as one half of SCRAAATCH, and lawd knows, formerly known as plus_c and the other half of SCRAAATCH. They all explore what happens when pop, noise and club music collides, their individual output and the assorted soundtrack to their gatherings an ever-shifting collage of feel-good bangers and black holes full of distortion.

IRL actions in Philadelphia happen frequently and take place wherever’s suitable to set up a soundsystem and an assortment of laptops and controllers (keep informed by diving into the #ATMdata trail). The ATM party is haven and practice ground; a chance for the collective to group together away from their respective burgeoning arts and music careers.

At the end of March, there’s an ATM at an Eri-Ethiopian restaurant on Baltimore Avenue. The venue is a 20-minute cab ride from Philly’s downtown, which feels copacetic and consists of public spaces, luxury buildings and a number of colleges. The general metropolitan area is progressive and, at times, arousingly futuristic. But this sheen dissolves quickly the further you move away from the city center and this evening’s party is even further still.

By day, Dahlak Paradise serves traditional dishes like doro wat and fit-fit and by night, its 2am license gives room for karaoke and jam sessions. For music, it’s a modest, make-shift place – tables and chairs are cleared away from one corner of the restaurant in order to host events – though one that’s warm and intimate. There’s no designated dancefloor; you dance where you stand. And at ATM, everyone dances.

Dj Haram opens with an Abdul Kadir set, actively handling hardware and software for hardstyle-like drones that are driven into ever grittier versions of themselves. Her metronomic rhythms combined with doom-brandished synths push the set forward into a retrofitted idea of techno – danceable, just in reverse. Despite her knack for experimentation being at the fore, the crowd peer on with interest, chatting to each other and Haram herself. She converses with the audience between suites, explaining what she’s doing and why, and they respond with questions and friendly jabs. ATM takes the notion of experimental music at face value and, as a response, everyone in attendance is completely in agreement, willing to travel the distance with the squad.

“I feel like experimental is a word I use to tell people that they have to adjust the expectations that they would usually bring to a dance party/club night,” Dj Haram says. ATM is an environment in which performers utilize the space in whatever way they please with a hope of expanding their audience’s understanding of what can be played in a night club. But don’t get it twisted; New Jersey-raised Haram is versed in bangin’ club and lawd knows will draw for UK funky without giving you a second’s notice. ATM pushes to the outer limit and parties there ‘til the lights come up. It’s completely DIY, an incubator for new expressions of music as well as a safe space for a crowd made up largely of people of colour and people who identify as LGBTI.

Being a self-proclaimed work in progress, ATM is an “ongoing effort” and platform that enables what the collective call “relatively unrestricted expression”. DJ Haram suggests that the ATM model is scrappy, but tactical in its execution: “We negotiate resources and hold space for each other as a crew and as a party and scene.” They invite fellow Philly natives like Yung Nila, precolumbian and Javascript to play and make links in nearby Baltimore, New Jersey and New York, bringing through club DJs and performance artists like Ase Manual, SHYBOI, Killbourne, DJ Kala and Noelle Tolbert.

One of this evening's special guests is Femmesurrection, who comes on after the Abdul Kadir set. She creates gnarled Musique Concrète full of symbolic samples, a cappellas and loops that dominates the space in sheer volume.

While dancing/absorbing ATM, it's clear that the sound of the outside filters into the party. Disruptive police sirens and mediated blasts of noise cut through and bleed into the kind of ubiquitous pop songs that get blasted out of passing car windows or from tinny speakers hung from the ceilings of liquor stores. The environment inside Dahlak is reminiscent of Burial’s stark and short-breathed warning in the opening of the episodic “Loner” track: “There’s something out there.”

SCRAAATCH’s live sound design plays with the notion of the outside the most obviously tonight. The duo spend time toying with the recognizable and the triggering. Splicing and reclaiming, employing Arca-esque symphonies of industrial sounds and beats often implied by the timing and layering of dictation in vocal samples, SCRAAATCH show themselves to be capable of dissecting the inner workings of dance music both structurally and ideologically.

As the night pushes on, it’s clear that there’s a sense of familiarity between dancers in the room, an unspoken culture of how to move and interact; and it seems as though the relationships on the floor have been brewing long before Mixmag arrives. At one point, a dancer distinguishes themselves from the crowd, taking front and center. A full-on, unofficial ballroom session breaks out. The dancer leaps and performs the iconic death drop; everyone cheers, then fills in the space as the dancer meshes back into the mass. There are several moments like this, where one or two of the crowd feel the music, have a personal moment with it, their dancefloor family around in full support.

Indeed, ATM is driven by a critical discourse with the collective’s surroundings and the members’ support for one another. Dj Haram’s moniker speaks to the complex context of her second-generation Muslim and queer identity, which is effectively haram (an act that’s forbidden in Islam). SCRAAATCH see their own project as a way to excavate the existential constructions of the spaces they reside in, whether they be online or off. And Marcelline describes her process as slipping “between hyper visibility and obscurity when performing in public, constantly mobile with a sense of not belonging anywhere, to anyone but to myself and not fully identifying with anything. Sound is used as an immediate way to communicate those realities at the same time.” ATM at a glance feels like a think tank, a meditation room, a group therapy session, a turn-up, a platform from which brave new music is fired.

Marcelline closes out the session: she triggers samples, manipulates entire songs in a raw, material way that distorts their content and context for a singular narrative that’s reflective of her own social statements and critiques. When she finishes, it's time for us to leave the periphery and return downtown.

The collective have high hopes, plans drawn up in abstract but fully intended to be filled and fulfilled over time. Marcelline denotes a range of potential directions for the group as being “a fully mobile entity both in physical space and online with rolling programming of varied conceptual parameters (sound based healing retreats, radio shows, club nights, youth workshops, etc) set to happen anywhere at any given moment.” lawd knows’ vision for ATM is similarly communal when he says: “You know Fela [Kuti]’s old venue, The Shrine? Where it was a living space, performance space and sovereign protectorate and shows would go on regularly all week? That.”

The cozy incubator model that ATM has in place is a far cry from large festivals like Ultra, Time Warp and so on, and the dynamic is altogether different because of it. The idea of emergent visibility is a tantamount theme for the collective as they work through limitations, dreaming in large-scale scope out of necessity. “We want to remain consistent. We think a lot about sustainability and it’s really important that we can sustain ATM,” they write collectively via email. “We want to continue to be a platform for fellow fugitives. We’d also like to pass ATM on in Philadelphia so that it continues later down the road when maybe we’re in different places (years from now hopefully).”

Undercutting the idealism is reality, as Dj Haram points out: “Our dream project is ATM. The unrealized part of the dream is the material foundation: a venue with its own adequate soundsystem and CDJs, a bigger budget to book/pay every artist we love, more time to connect with the scene and meet new Philadelphia artists/musicians, an audio studio to hustle our craft and invite collaborators.” The collective and their network contains raw talent and the fuse of their ascendency has been lit, but they're having to work with the practicalities of any for-the-love, DIY project (here's their Amazon wishlist, btw).

Saying that, things fall into place. ATM agitations have aligned the collective with Discwoman (DJ Haram is a recent signee to its booking agency and has played its showcases), NON Worldwide (through which Mhysa released her debut EP) and Halcyon Veil (SCRAAATCH recently constructed a mix for the label). Their SoundCloud accounts are hives of activity, displaying the fervent experimentation that takes place between parties and gigs. Marcelline recently performed a work inspired by an Audre Lorde text in New York while SCRAAATCH played the NON Worldwide showcase as part of Red Bull Music Academy. DJ Haram has forthcoming tours of the US and EU planned.

Before the festival, before the VIP, there were familial spaces like ATM. The open-door policy for those who were genuine in their love of music and dance culture at ground level would gather in the most unlikely of spaces and experience the innovative sounds of electronic music together. ATM in a lot of ways is reminiscent of that foundation and is a healthy reminder that the music and spaces that we love came from an unassuming place built on soul and confrontation. There is a heavy focus on reality outside of the four walls enclosing the collective’s performances. While most electronic music veers towards the euphoria of escapism, ATM looks directly at the circumstances of their own lives and the issues of Philly’s general metropolitan area. Put simply by Mhysa, “I mean, if you can’t twerk to bomb sounds and sirens, I can’t save you.”