A Private Odyssey

On Humans Become Machines, rapper Aristophanes shrouds her personal testimony with out-of-this-world musicality.

- Alexandra Pollard

Aristophanes’s stage name came to her in a dream. Before that night, the Taiwanese rapper, born Pan Wei Ju, felt no great kinship with ancient Greek playwrights. She still doesn’t, really. But a man, whose face she’s since forgotten, appeared to her and asked her to spell out “Aristophanes,” and she awoke with the overwhelming feeling that she should adopt the historic writer’s name. “He didn’t ask me in the dream to use that name,” she explains over Skype from her home in Taipei. “I just felt like I wanted to.”

Under this name, she began uploading her urgent raps over glitchy beats to SoundCloud, where they quickly caught the attention of Grimes. Their subsequent collaboration, “Scream,” from Grimes’s 2010 album Art Angels, introduced the world to Aristophanes’s intoxicating style of rapping—somewhat playful, somewhat sinister, lyrically impenetrable to many of its listeners (especially those who don’t understand Mandarin), and yet somehow crystal clear in its intent. Nearly two years later, her debut album, Humans Become Machines, set for release on February 24, reinforces her approach.