mixmag netherlands
santa salut THE RITUAL AND THE RIOT
There is a moment in every Santa Salut set when the atmosphere tightens, as if the room suddenly remembers its own heartbeat. The BPM is already running high, the booth is vibrating, yet something shifts in the crowd’s collective posture. It happens when she lifts the mic and lets her cadence slip between the kick drums. The border between rap’s narrative force and the physical gravity of hard electronic music dissolves. Two cultures that once stood apart now inhabit the same pulse.
She has never treated this convergence as a reinvention. It is a return to something she has carried since childhood in Catalonia, shaped by radio stations that broadcast electronic culture into the domestic quiet of adolescence. What looks like a genre pivot is, for her, simply the moment when the path loops back to its origin.
“We began opening space for electronic music from the very beginning of the project. We freestyled depending on the room, the crowd, the energy, and suddenly it clicked. A DJ played a techno track, and I started rapping. It felt natural because I grew up listening to Maxima FM, Flaix FM, sets from Defqon1, Tomorrowland, and makina parties. It has always been part of my journey.”
That instinct continues to define her present. The shift into hard techno, schranz, and hardcore was not an escape from rap, but a widening of her emotional vocabulary. Her voice carries the weight of lyricism into a sonic field built for velocity, while the booth gives her something rap rarely allows: space to implode and expand in the same breath.
THE BALANCE POINT
The booth is a threshold, and Santa Salut treats it as such. She enters it not as a rapper trying to fit into club culture, but as someone who unders- tands that both traditions emerged from the same need to rewrite the rules of belonging. Her sets bridge two energies that share a political ancestry.
“Electronic music and rap come from the same places. They come from people who were outside the system, people who wanted to express themselves and speak up in their own way. I tell myself there are no rules, that my art is free and just as valid as any other. I like creating an atmosphere where everything blends and becomes a little punk, a little chaotic, always honest.”
She treats references as coded gestures.
Madonna, The Prodigy,
rap classics, queer culture, Catalan identity. They appear in fragments across her
sets like clandestine
signals. Sampling becomes a political act, a way to place her lineage inside a sonic world that did not historically make room for it. Each transition is an argument, each vocal entry a declaration of authorship.
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AUTOR SERGIO NIÑO PHOTOGRAPHY MARTINA TORRENT FERNANDEZ
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