French designer, artist, and musician Mai Lan emerged in the mainstream consciousness as the featured vocalist on M83's album Junk. Her cool attitude and charisma had been honed throughout childhood by a family of artists: she is the daughter of counterculture artist Christian Chapiron (aka Kiki Picasso), and her brother Kim is a film director. Her debut self-titled 2012 LP was a genre-smashing exercise in rap, sampling, and pop, echoing CSS, Feist, and Yelle. The stand-alone single "Technique" was released in 2016. A sparse electro track, "Technique" channeled the off-kilter, beat-driven spirit of Peaches and Jain and was co-written with Labarthe and Nick Sylvester (Shamir). In addition to touring with M83, she began recording her sophomore long-player that same year. ~ Neil Z. Yeung