Born Gavin Blair and professionally known as Gavsborg, the East Kingston artist is one of the central architects of Equiknoxx/Equiknoxx Music, the Jamaican collective and label that pushed dancehall's experimental possibilities into a global underground conversation. Based between East Kingston and Berlin, he will join Black Rhino Radio's 5th anniversary celebrations at Control Club on Saturday, May 16.
Gavsborg has described himself as a teenager who learned by looping, editing, rapping, and making beats at school. "Step Out" gave that adolescent discipline the industry with its success, showing that Blair's ear could operate inside commercial dancehall, while tilting toward stranger shapes with a cartoonist's exaggeration.
Equiknoxx began in 2005 as Equiknoxx Music, initially producing for vocalists including Shanique Marie and Kemikal Splash, with Gavsborg and Bobby Blackbird handling production. Around 2009, Gavsborg met Time Cow, who helped expand the project from a label into a fuller collective. Equiknoxx emerged from Jamaica before it became a name circulated through European festivals and record shops. The later collective included figures such as Shanique Marie, Bobby Blackbird, Franklyn "Bubbler" Waul, Kemikal Splash and Time Cow.
International exposure came with the 2016 Bird Sound Power on DDS. Colón Man followed in 2017. Later Equiknoxx releases, like Eternal Children and the 2021 mixtape Basic Tools, would also expand the collective's interaction with the ghosts in the machine of Jamaican music.
As a solo artist, Gavsborg began clarifying his own production approach in 2020 with Kevin From Ivory Coast, Quality Time Sound System, and Jamaican Drum Machine. Of this series of releases, Quality Time Sound System is especially revealing as it places Kingston in conversation with New York, Chicago and Detroit. Inspired by Bobby Konders, Larry Heard, Third World and a tweet from Manchester DJ Joey B, the two-track project grew after Riddim Writer introduced Gavsborg to Kumina drummer Nicholas Allen.
Kumina, with its West African roots, ceremonial drumming and non-patois utterances, became the rhythmic portal. Franklyn "Bubbler" Waul, Delroy "Pele" Hamilton, Nicholas Groskoph and Shanique Marie joined the sessions, turning the release into a small social gathering of bass, organ, percussion, and voice.
The 2021 EP Domestic Audio Workstation added another layer. Originally shaped from living-room melodies, the release included percussion from Jody-Ann Brown, organ from Franklyn Waul, and vocals from Shanique Marie, Summer Eldermire, and Riddim Writer, neatly capturing Gavsborg's method. The studio labor remains entangled with home life, stray memories, animals, and uncertain histories before it becomes product.
In 2022, Gavsborg and Time Cow released Writings Ov Tomato as Gav & Jord, a project that folded their friendship and production chemistry into a more eccentric collaboration.
His debut full-length, 1 Hour Service, arrived in February 2023 as the launch-release from Cassette Blair, his tape label. The album launched a series of one-hour showcases for artists near and far. Recorded in Kingston and Berlin, it features Shanique Marie, The Shiny People, Tóke, Kat7, Franklyn "Bubbler" Waul and Everol "Stingwray" Wray. Its titles read like miniature fictions, from "The Jamaican Pesto Manifesto" to "Disgorge Your Colonized Sample Packs". That same year, Gavsborg adopted the vocal alias unkle G for an honest meal, a record that placed the producer's working conditions at its center.
The next major turn came through groundsound, his collaboration with Dr. Isis Semaj-Hall, also known as Riddim Writer. Working Progress, released in 2024 on Equiknoxx Music, brought together dub, broken beats, futurist dancehall, natural sound described as "black space, memory, magic," and decolonial dub. Vocalists included Gavin Blair, Isis Semaj-Hall and Olivia Wilmot, while musicians included Courtland White on guitar and Ordean Francis on drums.
In 2025, Gavsborg's work took theatrical form with the A/V experience everything upful. The new performance concept premiered at Berlin Atonal and featured Kat 7, Tóke and groundsound.
His most recent release under his own artist listing is Recorded in South London, a 2025 EP with ItA, issued by Equiknoxx Music. The project came from South London sessions where the two artists worked through 5 tracks shaped by Kingston, reunion and shared feeling, while its pieces observe South London culture with affection and wit.
Equiknoxx has hosted a monthly NTS show since July 2017. Specific broadcasts, including "Equiknoxx w/ Gavsborg" from London in May 2024, show an informal education in dub, dancehall, house, and leftfield techno. Resident Advisor selected Gavsborg's Kiosk Radio set from Woodblocks Festival in Brussels as a September 2025 Mix Of The Day. Other appearances through EDWIN, Kiosk Radio, CDR and specialist music-production conversations reveal how Gavsborg has become a translator of process, explaining how Jamaican sound moves through software, scarcity, jokes, and happy accidents.
That same mobility has carried his music into screen, advertising, gaming and public sound art. Gavsborg collaborated as a co-writer on the theme song for Get Millie Black, the HBO and Channel 4 series, and produced Equiknoxx's "Last of the Mohicans," which was also featured in the show. He composed music for a Beats by Dre advertising campaign featuring Spanish footballer Lamine Yamal, contributed music to the Patta x Marshall limited-edition Emberton II speaker campaign, and composed for the iPhone Main Stream Video campaign for EU/MERT. His work has also appeared in installation and game contexts: he was presented as an experimental sound artist at The VoiceLine, a public sound installation in Soho, London, and produced "Elephant Man" and "A Wah" for Still Slippin Radio, which featured in GTA V.
Gavsborg has built labels, aliases, radio trails, collaborations, and records, all while resisting the museumification of Jamaican music. The resulting body of work maintains the question of what dancehall can be when its future is entrusted to someone who knows the ghosts inside its unfinished business.
