Photography by Zach Gold

For those in the know, Santogold is already here, already it. This summer, with her first full-length album on the way, she’s poised to take over America with her genre-smashing sound. Santi White is a bridge. She mediates the space between commercial pop and underground art. She partakes in the party scene but critiques it as well. She’s a practitioner of musical alchemy, spinning punk, dancehall, rap, and electroclash into sonic gold. Santi White is culture-clash, a walking, breathing, singing, and dancing mash-up of personalities and musical preferences. Even her stage name crosses the bizarre boundaries of late-night TV, bombastic jewelry, and wrestlers from a planet called Zoran.
     The first time we tried to interview the artist formally known as Santogold, on a Saturday morning in Miami, she forgot. And so, we waited a few hours. We hold no grudge, for this seems to be her nature. Santogold is no morning lark. But she’s no night owl either. “I was supposed to do a show at two in the morning,” she sleepily says, referring to a party thrown the previous night by DJ-cum-friend Diplo at Miami’s Winter Music Conference. “But instead I was asleep. I tried to but I couldn’t do it. I’m not really a late-night person. I don’t even know if my voice works at two in the morning.” Maybe there is some noontime avian option, for it is in such midway, transitional spaces that Santogold shines.