SAIAH Caps Off the Summer With the Idyllic "radio.fm"
Photo: Valence
Love is fucking magic, so much more powerful if you believe in it but always ready to sneak up on you with its splendor. Any artist that conjures up love like magic has a diablerie quality to their sound, and SAIAH’s most recent spell is "radio.fm," a track that arrives as the introduction to a blood-pumping night where anything and everything is possible.
Hailing from Arizona via Pittsburgh, SAIAH admits to not being communicative as a child, using music and dance to find a place in their transitional world — that and a love for skating and Tony Hawk: Pro Skater. Embodying the supernatural energy of music, after a fractured relationship with a mentor producer, they started a path of creation that cross-pollinated between genres and influences. The results are immensely rich, a queer black voice that pervades genre descriptions, scripting a sound that feels like magic.
SAIAH will be the first to tell you that their creative process is a form of alchemy, a process of taking lesser elements and making them sonically special, if often contrary in their delivery, “sounding sad but not sad.” In "radio.fm," the celestial good vibes of a night in Atlanta are encapsulated into this hi-hat-driven pop gem that shockingly came as a freestyle at the studio prior to a Travis Mills premiere.
Punctuated by guitar plucks, trap beat breaks and contemplative pre-choruses, the song spurs forth a feeling of liquid optimism and group hugs. The celebratory satisfaction, in accordance with SAIAH’s nature, is about propelling love into the atmosphere, like a radio wave, not always visible but heard and felt at a great distance. The forces that SAIAH conjures are indeed magical, but even if we don’t fully see what is happening, we’ll always been tuning in.
Listen to "radio.fm" below:
