Art via Michael McKinney
Michael McKinney understands the cultural importance of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci.”
This one’s short and sweet. In September, plenty of killer DJs packed their sticks with heat, offering up club-night fuel the world over. DJ Lag, the godfather of gqom, went deep on the stuff for Dekmantel, and the good folks at Boomkat dug up an archival tape from Sonido Dueñez, the originator of cumbia rebejada. (It sounds just as good, if not better, thirty years on.) EMA, a critical selector on the frontlines of modern dubstep, went deep on the stuff at a recent party, and Faited went long on a million different shades of dancefloor jubilee.
Adrian Sherwood, an out-and-out maestro of dub music, turned in a brain-bending session for Resident Advisor, and deep creep & Richard Akingbehin kept the sirens running with their turn behind the Lot Radio’s decks — slow, low, and dubbed-out. miscmeg slammed on the gas down in Melbourne, looking towards trance and techno all the while, and Nooriyah hit an even more maddening clip, sprinting between all sorts of new-school club tunes. Yibing offered the lone reprieve here with a set of killer tripped-up downtempo tunes; over in Croatia, Nosedrip and Orpheu the Wizard, Odopt, and Vladimir Ivkovic & Sean Johnston turned in three can’t-miss barnburning sets: the weight of million-dollar soundsystems aimed at flipping the dancefloor upside down.
Here are some of the best DJ sets September had to offer.
Four minutes into RA.1001, Adrian Sherwood’s remarkable dub deep-dive, you can hear histories collapsing. It’s not particularly subtle, either: The first track, African Head Charge’s “Asalatua,” is hushed and insistent, a whirlpool of hand-drums and digital detritus that’s always a moment away from dissolution. Then Sherwood pulls the handbrake and launches into his own “Russian Oscillator,” a blood-boiling track that pairs dubbed-up piano lines with livewire synthesizers and pulse-pounding kicks. It feels like jump-starting between ‘95 and ‘25. It’s a remarkable moment, and it’s a neat encapsulation of RA.1001, which shows a dub-music maestro touching down on all sorts of styles of the stuff: industrial-strength drumlines here, compositions for voice and handclaps and echo there, sweltering dubstep elsewhere, and some dub that verges on full-on ambient music. Holding it all together is Sherwood’s unwavering focus on dub as a sonic framework: this is an hour of gossamer soundsystem music bound together by patient drums and a hefty low-end.
One week later, Resident Advisor handed the decks over to Nooriyah, a London-based DJ whose sets tend to feel like they’ve got as many styles as they do songs. The same holds on RA.1002, which is plenty impressive on sheer audacity alone: million-genre mixing is a thin tightrope indeed, and it’s awfully easy for DJs to take one big swing too many and end up turning the whole thing muddled, losing an obvious sonic identity in the process. RA.1002 avoids that fate thanks to Nooriyah’s ever-careful blends, which alternate between slow and sharp, always leaning into amp-crackling drum programming to weave between seemingly disparate styles. Here, she threads a needle between all sorts of Middle Eastern dance-music styles, UK soundsystem cracklers, and screw-face bass tracks the world over, turning everything-at-once mixing into a hurled gauntlet: why, she seems to argue, can’t a vision of dance music be a truly global thing?
Years ago, Lwazi Asanda Gwala, a.k.a. DJ Lag, helped pioneer gqom, a Durban-born style of ultra-minimal and rhythmic house music: MIDI strings, heaving bass, a rolodex of vocalists, and little else. Even as all sorts of sounds have sprung up in its wake — 3-step, Afrotech — it remains singular for its sheer focus on heft; this is dance music purpose-built for leveling apartment stacks. The greatest joy of Dekmantel Mix 496, the latest offering from the self-stylized “king of gqom,” is that he doesn’t complicate that idea at all. Throughout the session, he storms between umpteen styles of bone-shattering drums: low-end that could crunch a car in two, a mid-range dominated by maddeningly elliptical loops of strings and synthesizers, and no treble to speak of. On paper, it’s a remarkably simple proposition, but there’s so much textural variety on display that it turns to a kind of flex: one rhythm stretched into infinity, the amps loaded with lead the whole time.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about subglow/Live 6, EMA’s steamroller of a dubstep-et-cetera set ripped live from the pe:rsona decks in July, is its sheer heft: this is a mix that presents low-end, rightly, as the kind of thing that could crack the earth in half if you pitch the EQ just right. EMA has been working with screw-face bass tools for years at this point, so the focus comes as little surprise, but this set, which takes dub-adjacent dance music to a logical extreme, shows her working with a mixture of heft and dexterity that is nevertheless captivating. The set opens up with quarter-time dub rollers, all tectonic-plate basslines and static-encrusted hi-hats, every drum line promising to break the amps; for the next two hours, she takes that same textural intensity and just (“just”) dials up the tempo until she’s found her way towards white-knuckled hardcore. And then it’s back — as ever — to dub, the genre that she spends the whole set sprinting circles around. No matter how heavy and manic you get, it’s tough to escape your roots.
If you’re not quite ready to quit the dub explorations but you’re looking for a bit of a comedown, it’s worth looking towards a recent session at The Lot Radio. Here, deep creep, a critical anything-goes selector and the mastermind behind Brooklyn’s pi pi pi, teams up with Richard Akingbehin, a Berlin-based DJ with enviably deep dub-techno crates. The session is more on Akingbehin’s turf than deep creep’s — it’s slow, patient, and dubby, indebted more towards headphone-purist dance music than kitchen-sink traditions — but that’s hardly something to complain about. Understated grooves are the name of the game here, each selector blending long and carefully, refusing to let so much as a seam show. The result is a session that works like one long dub-techno tool, a slow-motion pile-up of aqueous synthesizers and waterlogged kick drum. There’s an occasional intrusion, sure — about halfway through, there’s a track whose shuffle-and-skip groove comes dangerously close to UK garage — but those moments just underline how through-composed it all feels. Then it goes away, dissolving into a pile of four-fours, and it’s back into the murk.
Sometimes, you just need an hour of sunshine. Fated’s stint for Amsterdam’s Polychrome Radio podcast series encapsulates her ethos to a tee: chunky, playful dance music aimed straight at the floor, moving quickly enough to feel modern but laced with plenty of sounds that feel beamed straight out of 1992. Scan around the set and you’ll get a solid impression of that M.O. — Faited spends the session backflipping from wiggly acid techno to shuffle-and-skip breaks, from steamrolling industrial-techno tracks to jacked-up minimal house, from windows-down electro to souled-out deep house. On paper, it’s anything-goes and unpredictable; in practice, it’s hyper-focused and locked-in, a deep exploration of jubilant dancefloor numbers with a healthy dose of four-by-four kicks to boot. Here, Faited promises to stretch summer for an hour longer, stuffing the amplifiers with confetti in the process.
Miscmeg, a.k.a. Melbourne mainstay Meg Meldrum, has built her reputation on the back of killer downtempo and left-field chill-out sessions, but, as pi/live shows, she’s capable of plenty more than that. This session, which was ripped live from the Miscellania decks for their fourth-year anniversary party, shows her taking her trademark approach — blissed-out, a bit outré, and relentlessly considered — and applying it to no-shit floor-fillers, cranking out all sorts just over seventy minutes of sweat-soaked house, tech, and trance tunes in the process. It’s a fitting choice — the set’s sound has a parallel in much of Melbourne’s contemporary dance-music scene; the city’s turned into something of a mecca for ‘90s progressive-house and trance enthusiasts in the past few years. The set is pounding and playful with plenty of skip in its step, shuttling, as it does, between acid-trance come-ons, trance-inflected shoulder-rollers, and all manner of alien tech-et-cetera grooves. Here, miscmeg leans into her home city’s principal style and shows she can hang with the best of them.
Nosedrip and Orpheu the Wizard have both built up fearsome reputations on the back of seemingly bottomless crates; part of the appeal of their work is that it’s a fool’s errand to guess where they might go next. With Live from the Adriatic 2025, the two selectors go into unprecedented territories yet again, this time by looking straight at the dancefloor and slamming it with no-shit club tunes. It’s a truly joyous session dominated by ‘90s trance-music chuggers, bass-blasted house tracks, and steamrolling breaks, with just enough left turns to remind you who you’re listening to.
Odopt, on the other hand, used their set to aim for something a bit more heads-down. Here, the dance-music duo goes deep on trance tunes and tech-adjacent chuggers, tripping towards the stars all the while. (“Our slowest in a while,” an Instagram post about the set reads, “but we miss slow.”) It’s most remarkable for the pair’s patience; their Live From the Adriatic 2025 is both a bit impish and awfully understated, full of long blends and devilish drum patterns. Trance, both as a genre and as an idea, has long promised infinities, but as a dance music, it too often falls apart at the seams. With their latest live rip, Odopt make those ideas manifest.
Vladimir Ivkovic & Sean Johnston’s session from the same festival opens in a way that’s a bit on the nose: a hi-NRG synth line dances around for a few bars before a car crash slams the whole thing into high gear. Ivkovic & Johnston are familiar sparring partners at this point, and both are delightfully unpredictable behind the decks; when they team up, you can practically feel them pushing each other into ever wilder territories. That’s the case with their Live From the Adriatic 2025 entry, too, which sees the two dancefloor dons cooking up all manner of hair-raising grooves, lacing their four-fours with old-school acid, timeless house-record synths, and nu-skool deliria of all stripes.
Spend enough time talking with sonideros and it’s bound to come up: Gabriel Dueñez, a.k.a. Sonido Dueñez, invented cumbia rebejada by accident, so the story goes, when he was spinning cumbia at a party on heat-damaged equipment, causing the music to slow to a crawl. Its neatest analogy is, of course, chopped and screwed, itself an entire musical tradition that finds infinities in pre-existing material by drenching hip-hop in syrup and smog. Just as that style is endlessly rich, full of surprises and disorientations, so, too, is cumbia rebajada, and Rebajadas Tape 1 is as fine an example as any. This is cumbia imagined as something deeply psychedelic and plenty wigged-out, familiar voices turned to something a bit more alien and rich harmonies stretched past their breaking point. It’s not “mixed,” at least not in the way you might expect most contemporary mixes to land, but its worldview and sonic aesthetics are so thoroughly one-of-one that it’s tough to complain about that too much. Here, a genre originator and a killer sonidero presents a take on folk-music traditions — screwed, dubbed, warped — that sounds awfully prescient. Thirty years later, there’s very little like it.
In a brief Q&A that accompanies MDC.314, New York DJ Yibing outlines her opinion on the contemporary Australian dance-music scene: it’s “playful, psychedelic and beautiful.” It’s a descriptor that would, conveniently enough, apply to her best sets, too, which see the selector vaulting between new-school dubstep, old-school house, and all manner of who-knows-whats. On MDC.314, she pulls that trick off with aplomb, whipping up a killer ninety-minute set of exploratory dance-music selections. She spends the bulk of the set threading a tightrope between downcast and floor-ready tracks, leaning further on either side depending on where you scan: sometimes, it’s Boards of Canada-esque downtempo, all gauzy synthesizers and tear-stained snares; elsewhere, it’s screw-face bass workouts split somewhere between Miami and Bristol; elsewhere still, it’s chiptuned breakbeats, or dimly-lit ambient house, or sweat-soaked garage records. MDC.314 goes awfully far for such a short session, but Yibing holds it all together with a focus on what she points out in the liner notes: playful, psychedelic, beautiful.
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