Techno tintypes: Tyler Blint-Welsh is on a mission to document dance music’s Black pioneers

It is the year 2025 and I’ve just had a Back To The Future time travel moment. Mixmag call me up to revisit the roots of my techno past, when I travelled to the city of Detroit to photograph some of the original electronic music pioneers 38 years earlier in 1987. Then still relatively new and underground, I was one of few photojournalists from outside the USA privileged to have the opportunity to cover this electronic music movement born in the state of Michigan. But this time I would be asking the questions in an interview that is focused on the past, present and future generation of the scene, following the continuation of the now-global techno lineage through the eyes of a talented journalist, investigative reporter, creative artist and now photographer, Tyler Blint-Welsh.

Born in Brooklyn 28 years ago to his Jamaican mother and dad from Grenada, Tyler has managed to as much in under three decades that many might only wish to achieve in a whole lifetime — and he’s really only just getting started.

His passion for journalism runs deep, as does his interest in covering issues surrounding race, justice, equality, homelessness and sports. In 2014 he started a four-year major in journalism at North Eastern University in Boston, where his natural writing skills and lust for learning were accelerated, and by 2018 he was recognised with a fellowship at the New York Times.

His journey has also led him to working for the Boston Globe as a sports writer, a content strategist in San Francisco, coverage for the Los Angeles Times, investigative reporting at The Bangor Daily News, a fellowship at the Washington Post, and reporting at the Wall Street Journal. In recent years, photography has been his foremost focus.

Tyler is currently deep into his latest photography project capturing at least 100 portraits of techno DJs, but not on regular film or a hi-tech digital camera. He’s working with tintype photography techniques invented in the 1850s, capturing physical images that will survive for generations.

I got on the transatlantic vibe line inspired to find out more, catching with Tyler while he was shooting in Detroit, working towards a forthcoming photobook of his techno creative tintypes. In this conversation he shares insights into his creative process, the technical aspects, and discusses the significance of documenting Black culture within the techno music scene.

NORMSKI: Good morning, nice to meet you Tyler.

Tyler Blint-Welsh: It's great to meet you as well. I'm a huge fan of your work; it was a huge inspiration for the project. So this is very cool.

NORMSKI: I'm hugely honoured for you to shout me out like that.

Tyler Blint-Welsh: I saw your stuff in the documentary God Said Give 'Em Drum Machines, and it just stuck with me ever since. I think about your work a lot. When I was thinking about how I could document the culture, I was thinking how could I build on the stuff that you kind of started.

NORMSKI: That is a huge full circle! The continuation of the evolution. When did you see that film?

Tyler Blint-Welsh: It was May of 2023. I was at a festival taking photos of DJs, and part of the festival was a screening. And then I was just sitting there like, 'Oh, fuck, this guy Normski is different!'

NORMSKI: I'm going to start with the main reason why we're talking at this particular time, which is this Detroit techno project. You're shooting, I believe, 100 artists. You're shooting Kevin Saunderson who I also shot in 1987. I flew to Detroit like a news reporter, photojournalist, to photograph these guys. I don't know who they are, what they look like. We meet and take pictures. So here you are on a similar journey. How has this come about that you're doing this particular project about techno DJs?

Tyler Blint-Welsh: I think as a journalist, I've always had this desire to tell a big story. It was something that was very hard to do, working for those big outlets in the mainstream media, because there's never the time and the space to really dedicate all this energy into one topic like this.

Over the years as I kind of moved away from mainstream media journalism and just started exploring other things. I got really into electronic music, and techno specifically, and going out dancing. I never really had a conception for the genres, like the history of the culture or anything, but I had this moment at this exhibition at Kraftwerk in Berlin. It was this big retrospective on the 30th anniversary of Tresor and they had all this documentation. It was a crazy audio-visual soundscape experience. But they also had all these primary source documents from the early days of Detroit artists going to Berlin for the first time to play, and that was the first time where it hit me! That there's actually a really big Black American connection with this music.

From then on it kind of set me in this curiosity spiral of learning about these artists and reading about the history. At that time, I was in between jobs, so I made this decision to go hang out in Berlin for a little bit. That exhibition was the first thing I did when I got to Berlin, and from that point on I was like, ‘Oh, this is our thing’, you know? Because the perception is techno is that it's a white European thing, and it's white people music, so getting that bit of information really had me curious to learn more.

Through going to events and reading about it and seeing this documentary featuring you, and seeing how you were documenting the origins, I just was thinking for a while about some way that I could contribute to the documentation of this really unique story about Black culture that I think is kind of undertold. There's a rich history that not that many people know about. It's a lot of oral histories. It's a lot of stuff that was written in magazines that don't exist anymore. It's a lot of pre-internet stuff. It's a lot of people that aren't on the internet.

Then there was this moment. There's this techno festival in New York called Dweller that's all Black organisers and they book all-Black line-ups and they like take over all the biggest venues in New York for like a week. Robert Hood was the big headliner last year, and I think Jeff Mills did it the year before. As soon as I saw the line-up on Instagram I was like, ‘Shit! I wonder if I can combine’, because I was already taking tintypes, learning how to do this medium, and wondering if I can combine the tintypes with documenting the artists at this festival. So it kind of started there and then it snowballed really quickly.

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NORMSKI: It's a synergy at the right time and the right place, a moment where, actually, a lot of people are going through the same experience, but they're not you, who's interested in a particular, I don't know, a magnetism. Obviously you were into electronic music before knowing about Detroit techno, but I mean it's just amazing and a fantastic moment for you to be able to go, hang on, I could be part of this journey.

Tyler Blint-Welsh: Right, exactly.

NORMSKI: So you're doing 100 portraits. Why have you chosen a fixed number?

Tyler Blint-Welsh: I think if you tell someone that you have a book of 100 portraits, they're like, okay, let me see what's going on in there, it feels like you can really get comprehensive in terms of capturing people across generations. I'm not limiting it to 100, but 100 is the minimum goal.

NORMSKI: And why are you shooting the particular DJs that you're shooting? Because it's not by commission is it?

Tyler Blint-Welsh: Yeah, not by the commission. Of course, it's going to be a little arbitrary, these kinds of decisions. But what I'm trying to do is look at the the history of the DJs coming through the industry, trying to understand who were their contemporaries are that they feel should be in there, maybe those who didn't get proper due in their time, some up-and-comers that they're aware of that they think are making their mark. I think there's obviously names that this project couldn't exist without. So people like Kevin Saunderson, Robert Hood, DJ Minx, Stacey Hotwaxx Hale, Delano Smith, artists that are legendary in their own right that are must-haves.

It's a lot of doing research, asking other artists who should be in this. And then also if I see a name on a bunch of line-ups and I look into them and I'm like, their music's tight, I like what they're doing, I might just be like, let me reach out to them. So I'm sure that in the end maybe some people might not be in it that should be; some people also don't wanna be in it. It's not a perfect science.

NORMSKI: I love the fact that you give yourself a project concept so that either way you're always going to win, because, you know, there you are celebrating the people of the culture. I was wondering how many tintypes you have so far in your collection?

Tyler Blint-Welsh: So Dweller festival is where I got started. I think that was the last week of February, 2024, something like that. By the end of today, I should be at 50, so I'm halfway there. It's been my big focus for the last year. Once I took the photos at Dweller I was like, okay, there's definitely something here, because at Dweller, I was able to meet Robert Hood, which is a really big deal to me because he's one of my all-time favourite DJs. My first goal when I started taking photos of DJs was that it would be sick to be able to take a portrait of Robert Hood, and then I was able to do that at the beginning of this project. That was able to get me access to Movement. The producers of Movement gave me some space to set up there, so I could go backstage and link up with artists and tell them about the project and all that.

Then I was in Berlin for three months and I rented an apartment and made a home studio there and reached out. Whenever artists are coming to play Berghain or Tresor or just touring through Berlin I would reach out. And I have a studio and darkroom in New York, so when artists come to play Basement, Nowadays, all these New York clubs, I'm reaching out every week to see who's gonna be around, who has time when they come.

NORMSKI: So you just put yourself on the map. Anyone's in town, you need to step up! You need to get shot by Tyler before you go on. I like that.

But let's talk about the tintypes. I mean, you're a real photographer's photographer. I say that with respect to the love for techniques and traditional photography, what it really means, what it stands for.

I saw with your book about Mexican wrestling subculture luchadores Any Sunday in Coacalco published on Blurring Books, that you shot with a few rolls of film. You shot that on 35mm film. I think that was a Nikon camera that I see, because I know you like to show behind the scenes of what you're doing, which is a very cool thing. I wish I could have seen more behind the scenes when I was starting out in the game.

Tyler Blint-Welsh: Thank you.

NORMSKI: When did you decide on photography? Did you just go: “My God, this is me. I gotta keep doing this. I wanna carry boxes and bags on airplanes and set up in the corner and find a mains so I can plug my lights in”.

Tyler Blint-Welsh: Honestly, I guess like anything it was a journey. Some of my best friends from high school were photographers so there are these moments when after school we'd be walking around in Manhattan or whatever and some of them would have their cameras, and they would just be documenting us doing dumb shit around the city. But it'd always be so cool to be able to see the photos after the fact.

NORMSKI: Can you remember what that camera was? That first camera that you got?

Tyler Blint-Welsh: I got my first camera a little bit after high school, and I was just making photos on travels and stuff like that. My mom got me a Canon Rebel T3i, so the most basic, beginner digital camera. So I started on a digital camera, and then a little bit after I did a trip with one of my friends who was a photographer, we did the Eurail thing and we took the train from Spain to Finland where his family is from over a couple weeks.

NORMSKI: Okay, so you're on some travel doc stuff. You're traveling, looking at everything, capturing it, taking pictures of everything. I'm trying to get a makeup of how you got into photography and decided on film?

Tyler Blint-Welsh: It started there with the digital. My camera actually got stolen on that trip, so then I got back and had no camera. Then I guess my mom recognised that I was really into photography, so she bought me a new camera. She bought me that Nikon film camera that I've been using ever since. I've been using that camera for 10 years now almost. I started there with the film, and I was like, this is kind of fun. In college I was always taking photos. I was traveling a lot because of the way my school worked. It was like an internship program where everyone would take two or three semesters away and go work full-time in different cities. So I worked in San Francisco, DC, Maine, and I was doing journalism, I'm into photos, so let me see if I can merge them and try to do photos and writing together. But at this point it was still mostly all digital. And then my last year of college, I was like, okay, let me take a photography class, because I'd never gotten any training or anything like that.

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NORMSKI: Right, okay. That was like a secondary that always came along with what you did. You'd write in your reporting and you got a camera, but now you're like, let me actually focus on the actual photography bit and do a course.

Tyler Blint-Welsh: Exactly, and then there were some other moments too before that. I did this student journalism program at the New York Times. The thing with traditional media is, if you're a writer, you have to just be a writer, and if you're a photographer, you're just a photographer. So it was very hard to convince these editors and mainstream media people to let me do both. But I was at the student journalism program and one of these editors was a former photo editor for the New York Times. I was begging, ‘Can I take some photos for this article I'm writing?’. And he was really into it, he saw something in my photos and he was like, 'Oh you know, you kind of have something here.' So there was that moment where I was like, okay there's something. And then I took this class, it was cool because it was my first formal training around photography.

We were learning. I’d never looked up other photographers, I never really looked at photobooks like that, I'd never really had a photo critique, all those things that I feel like if you go to art school are the things you start with. So I took this one class and it was the senior level photo class. It was cool because it was a bit higher level. Because I had shown them some of the stuff I'd just been making and I was like, ‘Hey I think I know how to use a camera’. I just never took a photography class.

It was cool because every week we'd have to go out and make photos according to the prompts. For the final project, you get to make a book, it could be about whatever you want and it could be whatever medium. At the time I was really into ideas around mass surveillance, overreach and technology. My book was about security cameras and the idea we're constantly being watched, and nobody's really paying attention to where we're being watched from. So all these photos of security cameras in situations and environments where people are totally oblivious. It was like me documenting the documenters and then asking questions about what's going on. Who is this for? Where is this data going? But it was all shot on film and I printed all the photos myself. We had a darkroom on campus and with my friend Rio, we were in the darkroom constantly.

NORMSKI: I knew it! The darkroom that was always vacant and you were like, ‘This is a playroom guys!’. I imagine you never left it?

Tyler Blint-Welsh: Exactly. So the photo teacher would just give us materials, and paper and stuff is pretty expensive, especially when you're in college. I was making $10 an hour working some bullshit campus job, and I had another side job, but it was like, I couldn't afford to make 30 prints a week in the darkroom. So he was just giving us free chemicals, giving us free instruction. So I was spending a lot of time in the darkroom this senior year of college, and I made this pretty cool book of all these darkroom prints I had made myself. Once I got home from college, I was like, that was kind of fun, and then I started developing film in my bathroom at home.

And then, I don't know, it just kind of developed, I wanted to try something new with the tintypes. so I took a course at this photo foundation in New York. I was like, okay, I think I could figure this out. I started doing that in my bathroom, and then I was working on a totally separate kind of project about using tintypes.

NORMSKI: Okay, stop for a second. The tintypes! What did you see? You went to an exhibition, you were looking at something and you saw something to do a tintype and you thought, let me try that?

Tyler Blint-Welsh: I think this Brazilian photographer named Driely Carter, who I'm a huge fan of, did in fact make a series of tintypes at the AFROPUNK festival in NYC in 2016 that stuck with me and served as inspiration for years. It's a pretty wide eclectic range of music, but it's mostly or all Black artists. She made these tintypes of some of the artists backstage and the photos had just been in my head for all those years. For a long time, I would just think about these photos. There was one particularly of Kanye West that she made, and I think maybe it was on glass or something, but that format is so cool, the imperfections are so cool, there's something about it. The photo just stuck with me for years and years. I still think it's the reason that I started tintypes for sure. I would think of that photo and be like, I want to make something like that.

When I finally had enough money where I could spend $500 on this weekend course just to learn something new I ended up being really into it. I was asking all these questions about how I could do it at home and the professor was not really convinced that I was really gonna learn how to do it. I was telling him the ideas I had and he was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, let me know when you get started on that.’ So even that was like, ‘Okay, fuck you, I'm definitely gonna get started on it now.;

NORMSKI: I don't think people understand that each photograph is completely unique. What are you shooting per person?

Tyler Blint-Welsh: Usually it depends on how much time I have with these people. With Kevin [Saunderson] I got two-and-a-half hours which never happens. That was a big blessing. So with him I was able to get a few attempts in, like five attempts. But I usually go for three photos per person if there's enough time and then I do like a short interview after.

I explain to everyone the process, because for them it's a lot of sitting and waiting for me while I'm in the darkroom. Once they see it, they kind of understand that it's a very involved thing. I take one, if I'm not enjoying it, I'll be like, all right, let's try another one. And then as long as they have time, I'll like keep trying more. Then when I know they have to leave, I'm like, all right, let's transition to the interview real quick.

NORMSKI: But the tintype thing is quite a long process, I'm imagining what that’s like going through airport customs?

Tyler Blint-Welsh: I'm figuring out the best ways. It's a big thing! When I came last year for Movement I flew, which was a big thing. This time we drove, ‘cause it's way easier to carry all the things. For the lighting setup you need like 4,000 watts at least, which is a lot of light, so you have these big power packs. I need two of those which weigh 25 pounds each, and they go into a Pelican case, which is 20 pounds, so already that's a 75 pound bag. I need my lighting heads. I need my large format camera, my tripod. I use a hydroponic, like a weed growing tent, as the little darkroom. Funnily enough it's the best solution. Any tintype photographer that does it outside has a weed-growing tent.

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NORMSKI: Dude, you must need some certificates to go through customs with some of that stuff. Do they not say, ‘Hey dude, what are you doing here? What are you making? What is all these chemicals for?’

Tyler Blint-Welsh: It's funny actually with the chemicals, yeah, it's hazmat only shipping. So with Detroit last year, I shipped them to Detroit ahead of time. The people that ship the chemicals, they have all those certificates. And then when I went to Berlin, I found a place in Spain that also sold the chemicals. So I flew with all the gear to Berlin and then shipped the chemicals from Spain to Berlin. But this time when I drove, I was able to just bring them all with me.

But I did have this experience in Berlin. When I was leaving, I was on the plane, five minutes from takeoff, and I get pulled off the plane by airport security. They're like, ‘We need you to come off, some people need to talk to you.’ I was like ‘I wonder what this is about?’. And they thought that my lighting gear was a bomb because it looks so old and big and bulky. I see where they were coming from if it's an X-ray. I guess I set off a bomb alert at Brandenburg airport. So they pulled me off and were asking me all these questions. But then as soon as I showed the police my Instagram, and I was like, ‘Hey man, I'm just doing this photo stuff.’ They laughed it off and let me back on the plane.

NORMSKI: That's crazy! People don't realise what it's like going through an airport with a whole heap of kit. Wondering, do I get harassed more than the next guy?

How do you feel about being a Black man as a professional photographer? Is that working for you? Is anyone making a big deal out of it? Or are you using that to your advantage?

Tyler Blint-Welsh: I think that all these artists and their teams are responding really positively to the fact that I'm a Black man trying to document the history of this kind of Black contemporary art form. I think they respect what I'm trying to do. I think that me being Black probably helps in this specific context because it's a Black story.

NORMSKI: What do you think you're really trying to do telling stories through mediums like photography? Why do you do it?

Tyler Blint-Welsh: It just feels like a really big privilege to be able to have these experiences. I feel like photography, for me at least, it's a really perfect conduit to be able to connect with new people, to be able to explore the world, to be able to learn things about the environment, to be able to learn things about myself. I've been able to push myself mentally, physically, and intellectually, through photography. I feel like I've found things I'm really passionate about. I've been able to meet really cool people. It started out as just a thing that I did with my friends because we were walking around abandoned buildings in high school. But then it turned into something more, it's opened up a lot of doors for me.

Photography has given me a way to put myself out there. It's given me a way to connect with people. It's given me a way to give people opportunities to share about themselves. I think all that is super special. It's definitely not something I take for granted. It's hard not to really want to do more of it, especially when it starts to get momentum like this, where I'm going places and people recognise my work and they respect what I'm doing. So there's no single why, but over the years it's become a big part of my identity, and a big part of the lens through which I have experienced the world. Like this, for example, you know? I was exploring it because I was curious, and then now chatting with you, who's one of my inspirations. It's just a big blessing for me.

NORMSKI: How inspired are you creatively when you're in Berlin compared to the States?

Tyler Blint-Welsh: It's funny because I feel like there's very two different mentalities, the German mentality and the American mentality, especially the New Yorker mentality. It's just like a grind to be in New York all the time, the environment, the people. You really have to be on your shit pretty constantly to make things happen. There's this constant feeling of pressure and things need to get done. In Berlin I feel like it's a bit of a more free-flowing head space, and it's nice to be able to have that balance.

In Berlin I find that, because I have this New Yorker sense of drive, I'm still able to get things done relatively easily because I'm putting the energy out there and I'm trying to make things happen, but it's also not this overbearing sense of pressure that comes from living in New York. There's just more balance, in terms of my work, my creativity, my leisure, whereas New York, I feel like it's pretty work-focused. So I like Berlin because I just get to explore different sides of myself, and I get to live in the world in a way that is kind of impossible to do in New York. It's nice to be able to have that perspective, especially when I lived in New York my whole life, essentially. That mindset kinda becomes your mindset, so it's nice to have a place where I can go to step outside of that a bit and discover new things, but also still stay on your journey.

NORMSKI: I saw you once had a darkroom in the street somewhere?

Tyler Blint-Welsh: It was at Washington Square Park in Manhattan. I think in that moment I was just lacking inspiration. I was like, let me just go do something a little different, let me just go set up in the middle of the park and just offer free photos to people. I didn't really expect much, but there was a line of people and they were really interested in it, people waited for an hour-plus while I made it all the way through the line.

NORMSKI: It's the revisiting, the style of photography you do is the classic 1800s tintype style. It very much would have been quite a spectacle to have had the photographer with his grand tripod and his square box. A camera with bellows, one shot at a time. You'd have to look your finest and sit still for a certain amount of time, and there you were, forever immortalised. You still do that in 2025.

Tyler Blint-Welsh: I feel like there's this connection too between this format of tintype and the art of DJing. I'm looking to tell a history and this medium is inherently archival, it's inherently historical.

The idea is this story that a lot of people are aware of, like techno's Black history, but it's not necessarily the predominant narrative around this music or this culture. So using this historical medium and using these physical artefacts, they're pieces of metal you know, once you take a tintype, it lasts for a hundred years.

NORMSKI: It's like a master tape, right?

Tyler Blint-Welsh: Exactly. When we're all dead, the tintype will still be in pretty good condition. The idea was, you have this physical archive of this very important cultural history, and you're using this historical photo format to tell it.

I think there’s a connection in the way that a lot of these artists talk about trying to take someone on a journey when you're playing a set, and they talk a lot about this immediate feedback between them and the audience. You know, they're putting stuff out there and they're looking for feedback to help them determine where to go next. In the same way with the tintype, you make this photo and right away you're told, is this a good photo? Is this a bad photo? Does this work? Does it not work? And you can kind of adjust on the fly from there. So I feel like there's this sense of immediate feedback. There's this level of raw intimacy that I think tintypes and DJing both share. And the fact that it's a Black history and tintypes are also the same medium that some of the first free Black men had their photos taken on. So there's a lot of links between the history of photography and the history of this art form.

NORMSKI: Yeah, I hear that

Tyler Blint-Welsh: I would love to drop this book next year at some point. That's best case scenario. But I also want to shoot the World Cup, that's on my list. I want to somehow try to find a way to make that happen. I also want to focus on a story that's maybe a bit more socio-politically relevant. I started out in sports journalism, I did some culture stuff, but I also covered a lot of homelessness for the Wall Street Journal, policing, protesting. I covered education for the New York Times and for this newspaper in Maine called the Bangor Daily News. All those things are tied to economics, to politics, to opportunity, to identity. So I want to find a photo story that kind of touches more on those three lines, because I think that it's important to have photographers and artists focused in that space.

I think that a lot of photography and art is kind of geared towards selling products, which is a necessary part of it too. But I think there's enough people making photos about sexy people looking cool in nice clothes and all that stuff. I think there's a big dearth of work that's really focused on trying to show people things that they can't see, that's what I'm thinking about it.

NORMSKI: Excellent stuff man! So Kevin Sanderson, have you already photographed him or are you about to?

Tyler Blint-Welsh: Yeah, I shot with him on Wednesday morning. We had a great shoot, great interview. He was a nice guy. I was nervous as fuck though, my God. The first two photos I took actually didn't come out at all and I was like, fuck, no way. But after that it was cool. We got some nice ones, but the first two was like, okay, got to keep the game face on. I think with Kevin I was especially nervous because he was the tent pole reason for this trip. His team actually reached out to me, which was very cool. They happened to see my work and they reached out, and at first I thought it was like a scam text message. I read it fully and I was like, wait, like no, this is actually serious.

We were discussing trying to make a time happen from like October, November, so it was three months of buildup and anticipation. There's a lot of nerves with that. Usually the shoots are only a week or two out and then, you know, not everyone's Kevin Saunderson. Respect to all the artists, you know? But there's only one Kevin Saunderson. Once that went well, all the physical angst left my body, and it's been pretty enjoyable to meet all these people and have these conversations.

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NORMSKI: I went to Detroit in '87. I was there with a journalist, he was doing the interview. He was way ahead of me on what was going on and who was who. He was a writer in techno, he was all in the Berlin scene. I was this hip hop photographer, Black guy. But this is the opportunity they gave me and I went for it.

Next thing I know is I'm recording in the studio with techno Godfather Juan Atkins. I end up hanging out and recording a track with him. A year later, Kevin comes to London, he asked if I know if anyone can design an album sleeve. I said I could do it, even though I'd never done one. He said, well, you know, do it on spec, if you do something good, I'll use it. So I came up with something and he fucking used it. I was like, guys, I only came out here to take photographs. That's what happens when you immerse yourself. You become a part of the historical journey.

What we have to do is we have to contribute something. What bit of advice would you give to other people that might try and get into the arts in some way?

Tyler Blint-Welsh: I can only talk about what’s worked for me to this point, and I think there are infinite approaches to finding success creatively. But I would say there's two things.

I think it's disingenuous to talk about getting into the arts without acknowledging you need to be able to fund your ideas, otherwise you're not gonna be able to do anything. For me at least, I was able to progress the most creatively once I was able to separate my job from my art. I realised my job doesn't need to define me and my art can be totally separate. Tintypes are expensive and traveling costs money, so all these things wouldn't be possible if I wasn't also working something separate.

And, I don't know, I'm only 28, so I don't know what the advice is worth, but sometimes you just have to do it, you know? We underestimate how much agency we have in this world. Like it's all really just one big game and you can just push the buttons you want and see what happens, see what you get out of it. All the things that have been flowing into me, that's how it all started. I was just like, you know what, fuck it, let me just see what's up!

Tyler Blint-Welsh’s techno photobook is planned for release on Blurring Books in 2026, follow him on Instagram

Normski is an artist, photographer, broadcaster and DJ, follow him on Twitter and Instagram

Blackout Mixmag is an editorial series dedicated to Black artists, issues and stories, first launched in 2020. Our 2025 features are co-guest edited by Kevin Saunderson and Kwame Safo (AKA Funk Butcher). Read all of the previously published pieces here