Now disturbing San Francisco, California, since 1996 Ripley has careened through 17 countries and three continents with no sign of stopping, causing total dance mayhem at events from Berlin to Boston to Bristol to Brussels to Brisbane to Belgrade, Riga to Rotterdam to Rennes, Halle to Helsinki, Cambridge to Cholula, Scezczin to San Francisco to Sydney, Tallinn to Toronto, Linz to London, Paris to Prague, Melbourne to Mexico City.
Ripley's wreckstep raggaphonics slice through genres of street bass, dubstep, baltimore club music, UK garage, kuduru, hiphop, jungle, dancehall, breakcore, d'n'b, glitched-out breaks, juke, baile funk, bhangra and dub, sprouting new life on the dancefloor. On sunny afternoons, Ripley spins rocksteady.
Ripley has caused total dance mayhem in spaces like a re-purposed public lavatory underground in East London, a former commercial fishing ship off the cost of Rostock, an (initially) laid-back lounge in Oakland California, a half-squatted office space in downtown Riga, a former military airport in eastern Germany, the basement of an Indian restaurant in Bristol, the Boston Children's Museum, alongside a riverbed in Mexico, as well as warehouses and clubs across America and Europe and Australia, in most places you'd think and some you wouldn't. Ripley's used her dj skills to support the Revolutionary Afghan Women's Association, Medical Activists of New York, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Creative Commons.
Ripley's been voted "Best Dance DJ 2009" by the Sf Bay Guardian Readers' poll, and her monthly Surya Dub won "Best Club Night 2008" in the same poll, and one year later the Guardian named Surya Dub "Best Ambassadors of Dread Bass." In 2010 she was nominated for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's SECA (Emerging Contemporary Artist) award.
She's played alongside art-music luminaries like Kaffe Matthews, noted thereminist Pamelia Kurstin, as well as beat maniacs like Asian Dub Foundation, The Bug, Drop The Lime, Vex'd, Dub Gabriel, Dizzee Rascal, Plastician, Dr. Israel, Flying Lotus, Toecutter, Mike Slott and many more.
In the world of letters, Ripley examines global and subcultural property systems through the lens of law, especially investigating how people come to think they can own music as if it was a thing and not a practice. She is a columnist on technology & rights issues for Wiretap online youth magazine. But really, Ripley wants everyone to dance.
