Image via Michael McKinney
Michael McKinney understands the cultural importance of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci.”
April featured all manner of killer sets, but that’s to be expected at this point. Ayesha, a critical fixture of the Brooklyn dance-music circuit, dumped stardust on the dancefloor, and DJ Mum vaulted between all manner of high-energy club tools on the other side of the planet. DJ Travella dug into his hyper-specific (and hyper-kinetic) vision of singeli, and Kilbourne & Tripped upped the energy further with a back-to-back that’ll put a crack in your floorboards. John T. Gast & G Version III offered up a brain-bending pair of sets unified less by sound than by a shared interest in delirium, and Bristol’s k means did something similar with an eye aimed towards the dancefloor.
Julien Dechery, meanwhile, put together a rip-roaring ode to South Indian film music and Romi weaved dub, techno, and dub-techno together until any distinctions fell away. Significant Other turned in a masterclass of bad-trip chill-out music; elsewhere still, Fergus Jones & Huerco S. tunneled deep into their tech-house crates. DJ Screendoor blurred the lines between downtempo, drum-and-bass, and ambient music in a long-form stunner, and Djrum put together two hours of jaw-dropping hardcore wizardry for the BBC decks. Nema Hän turned in a bleary-eyed club set that used spooked-out R&B and house as springboards towards the stars, while DJ Lloyd did something similar but dove straight into the uncanny valley.
Here are some of the best DJ sets April had to offer.
In the interview that accompanies RA.983, Ayesha—a.k.a. Brooklyn DJ and producer Ayesha Chugh—cut to the quick. “I wanted to push the boundary a bit on what we perceive as tasteful,” she stated. “Could a track that some perceive as dated or outmoded be recontextualized and maybe even become a bit sexy in the moment?” DJing is no stranger to recontextualization, of course—it’s the mortar that holds all the bricks together, or at least one stripe of it—but it’s still something worth interrogating. On RA.983, Ayesha digs into the loopier end of goa trance and the headier styles of techno, blurring them together until they become more or less indistinguishable before jumping into all manner of nu-school dancefloor sounds: brain-bending dubstep, barnstorming hard-drum percussion workouts, lights-out acid-trance, and so much more. The throughline, here, is all in the drums. This is speedy and jubilant club-night fuel, with synths stretching towards the skies as a steady flow of kick drums keeps things grounded. Trance, tech, goa, breaks—the more things change, the more they stay the same.
There’s a funny sense of timelessness to Pacific Spirit No. 93, a real Rorschach test of a set from NYC spinner DJ Lloyd. Maybe it’s in the way its R&B vocals often feel ripped from some dollar bin from bygone decades; maybe it’s in the way its reverb-soaked instrumentals recall both Screw and Macintosh Plus; maybe it’s the fact that Lloyd literally doesn’t know when he recorded the thing. Regardless, it’s remarkable, a slow-motion pile-up of heartsick vocals, new-age synthesizer tumbles, and no-BPM string sections that’s somehow both heartbreaking and kind of joyous. (DJ Lloyd nails the vibe in the liner notes: “Feel good vibes for feel bad times.”) This focus on blissed-out heartbreakers is hardly new for DJ Lloyd, of course—it’s not uncommon fare at his Lot Radio residency—but it’s a remarkable trick nevertheless, and the glassy-eyed rhythm sections and reverb-soaked drum machines only deepen the uncanny-valley effect of it all: are these tearjerkers, three-a.m. ballads, tracks for dropped tops? Who knows? Who cares?
Technical ability is, perhaps, overrated in dance music, but it’s a critical part of moving a floor nevertheless. So it’s not meant lightly when I posit that Djrum is, quite possibly, the most talented turntable technician currently working. His sets are hardly clinical, but they are packed with plenty of moments worth busting out the composition notebook for. Take his Essential Mix, a two-hour & three-deck masterclass which sees the producer vaulting between umpteen styles and landing on his feet every time. There’s a bit half an hour in where he goes from barnstorming techno into spaced-out spiritual jazz with the help of what sounds like a bit of turntablism; there’s a segment fifteen minutes later where he plays Jenga with heavyweight jungle, acid-flecked techno, and head-nodding hip-hop before knocking the whole thing over; there’s a moment where he takes Sister Nancy’s “Bam Bam” and car-crashes it headlong into drum breaks that feel like they’re moving in four different tempi at once. There’s more, but, point is, his Essential Mix is one heck of a head-spinner, a light-speed exploration of hardcore dance musics that folds in all sorts of other styles along the way, always looking for a chance to complicate things but never forgetting that the point of this stuff is to make you move.
If you were to just write it out, Soma Festival 2024 might sound a bit boilerplate: here, DJ Mum looks towards the UK for bass and breaks, takes a handful of detours towards São Paulo and Detroit and Philly, tending towards club-music idioms that are high-energy and wigged-out in equal measure. None of that is wrong, exactly, but that’s selling it short. In pan-genre sets like this, the devil’s in the details: in how the DJ folds different rhythms into each other, in how they cycle between a capellas, in how they make aesthetic jumps seem natural rather than laborious. Soma Festival 2024 is chock-full of tiny masterstrokes that push it over the edge—a bit halfway through where they tangle up pitched-up gqom and heads-down techno, a Gordian knot of brain-scrambling dubstep and aqueous R&B, an eleventh-hour swan-dive into shuddering sort-of-trap instrumentals that would make any GHE20G0TH1K attendee proud. Throughout the set, DJ Mum pulls off all sorts of why-not blends with a wink and a grin, jumping between umpteen club-night heaters without so much as a scuffed blend.
When DJ Screendoor was last in this column—just a month-or-so ago!—it was for a flabbergasting twelve-hour epic of a set, a long-form exploration of zonked-out house and techno idioms. In scope, size, and sheer precision, it’s a real hurled gauntlet of a thing, the kind of set plenty of DJs are lucky to pull off just a few times. But, well, here we are again. The trick to 2025-April-Vapourdubbass-vino-mix lies in the name: this is DJing that sounds the way a thick blanket of fog feels, somehow both effervescent and all-encompassing at once; it’s vapour, and dub, and, eventually, bass. He kicks things off with commendable patience here, blending aqueous ambience for over an hour before anything resembling an obvious beat starts to linger, and, even then, it’s rhythms aimed more towards the head than the feet, all muffled kick drums and pops and clicks and rattles and whirrs. From there, the set goes in all sorts of directions; it’s sly, playful, and eternally understated, shuttling between spaced-out vocal jazz, zero-grav trap records, and, eventually, an extended dive into whip-cracking drum-and-bass.
One of the greatest joys of singeli, a high-strung dance-music style born in Dar es Salaam some twenty-odd years ago, is also one of its simplest. There’s a lot of dance music that, if pitched right, makes you feel like you could snap rebar in half, but it’s rarely this light on its feet. As DJ Travella, Hamadi Hassani produces dexterous and fast—no, faster than that—dance music, all MIDI horns and just-so string stabs and mile-a-minute drum programming. It is unrelentingly energetic but never overbearing; it packs not one punch to the gut but a million jabs on the temple. RA.984 is as fine a showcase of the genre’s appeal as any: this is storming dance music purpose-built for sun-blasted raves, the dollar-bin synthesizers and just-lo-fi-enough drum machines whipping each other into a frenzy and the whole thing landing like a bit of a dare: faster, heftier, rowdier, more, more, more. (In that manner, the style recalls both footwork and gabber: if dancers are willing to fully submit themselves to the genre’s idiosyncrasies, they’re experiences like none other.) Dance music has long strained towards euphoria in all sorts of different ways, and RA.984 serves as an ode to singeli’s own specific style of sweat.
Tech-house gets a bad rap. Sure, the style’s paid host to all sorts of middling music, but that’s true of plenty of genres—plus, if you pitch the bass right, it’s tough to deny just about any low-slung bassline and four-four kick. On Ormside Projects, a limited-run tape that Huerco S. was kind enough to put online, the club-music experimentalist teams up with fellow journeyman Fergus Jones for ninety minutes of the stuff, tunneling ever deeper into heads-down grooves and finding all sorts of gems along the way. This set accomplishes the (somewhat) rare trick of landing directly between home-listening and club-night fare, with plenty of gut-rattling low-end to satisfy any would-be ravers and all sorts of pointillistic melodies on top to keep things dynamic. This is tech-house imagined as a playful and precision-engineered: take any one element out of any of these tracks and they’d fall apart, but as they stand, they’re practically confetti cannons. As Ormside Projects runs on, Huerco S. and Jones push each other ever further into head-trip dance music, pushing off from wigged-out tech-house to all manner of gut-churners, stringing a tightrope above the dancefloor along the way.
Sometimes, when DJs team up for a pair of mixes, their similarities are immediate and obvious: a shared interest in a particular genre, common geography, particular stylistic tics. But the ones that are a bit more left-of-center are, often, more interesting. That’s the case with a recent edition of 5 Gate Temple, a critical NTS residency hosted by who-knows electronic-music experimentalist John T. Gast. For Gast’s section—the first hour, more or less—the DJ fidgets between umpteen styles, creating a fever-dream of spaced-out post-minimalism, lighter-than-air footwork records, billion-ton funk brasileiro, vertiginous chamber music, and a whole lot more. It feels kaleidoscopic by design, each selection deepening the delirium via yet another left turn.
G Version III’s turn behind the boards, by contrast, is a blinders-on kind of session, a deep dive into oddball dub tools. Here, the Kyoto DJ-producer pulls up an hour’s worth of solo productions, slowing the tempo to a crawl and serving up a million flavors of psychedelia: haunted-house organs suspended over pitter-patter hand drums, reverb-soaked buzzsaw-bass tones, pan-flute jazz workouts, medieval-music dub-trap (or something like that). It’s all bound together by the slow-and-low heartbeat of dub music, keeping things moving even as they turn stranger by the minute. For all its aesthetic differences with John T. Gast’s offering, as the set runs on, their pairing starts to make a kind of sense: these are DJs bound not by genre, form, or sound, but instead by an unending curiosity and a willingness to rebuild the wheel.
There’s a lot of special moments on READYAA?, a remarkable new tape from Julien Dechery, but the best might come halfway through. After a twenty-odd-minute sprint through a million shades of South Indian pop music—shuffle-and-skip trip-hop, filmi hand-drum stompers, head-in-the-clouds balladry—what feels like an old-school trance tune cracks in half to reveal a storm of breakbeats, the snares rattling away underneath a duet for voice and string. It’s a real timeline-collapse moment, the kind of thing that plenty of great DJs spend their entire careers chasing, and, here, it arrives more or less without any sort of showboating: Indian folk-music traditions crashing into ‘90s hardcore and early-aughts hip-hop and nu-school kitchen-sink attitudes and a clarinet solo, too, because why not? A single moment like that would be enough to get READYAA? on this list, but it’s straight-up stuffed with them. The tape is careful and playful at once, an album-length celebration of oft-overlooked Indian filmi musics that nevertheless complicates it in all manner of ways, tossing a capellas on top of sounds you might find in club nights and radio stations all over the world. How’s that for a diasporic music?
If you’re looking for left-of-left-of-left-of-center electronics that still light up a dancefloor, there’s, of course, no shortage of spots to turn, but you could do a whole lot worse than booking a flight to Bristol. Over the past several years, k means has built up a reputation as a wild-eyed architect of the stuff, pumping out all manner of head-spinning DJ sets aimed straight at the club-music explorers, all lickety-split drum programming and galaxy-brain synth lines blended with remarkable acuity. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Dekmantel Podcast 487, then, is how quietly it starts off: scraped-metal keyboards and horror-flick drum lines don’t exactly make for easy listening, sure, but it’s a far cry from the full-on dancefloor mayhem they typically aim for. It’s a canny way to set the tone, though—barring a mid-set blast of out-and-out dancefloor slammers, this set is a creeping and disoriented thing, a pile-up of skittering drums and depth-charge synth blasts. The result flits between umpteen styles—footwork and IDM and hard-drum and million-BPM breaks—but it is defined, more than anything else, by its restless approach to rhythm. Bristol’s home to some of the most exploratory mixing on the planet right now, and Dekmantel Podcast 487 is a great example of why.
In an interview I conducted with Kilbourne this year, the hardcore dance-music maven cut to the quick of her approach. “I think most people who attend a DJ set can feel when they’re being coddled,” she said. “If every sound just feels good, that’s a warning sign that you’re going to get a relatively uncomplicated feeling out of it. I’d much rather something that pushes you towards discomfort and allows you to come out the other side with some hard-fought pleasure and elation.” No kidding. In her work, Kilbourne stuffs the amps with teeth, moving records and tectonic plates and heart-rates with equal force. You could say the same of Tripped, a critical figure in Belgium’s industrial-hardcore dance-music scene — so, of course, you know what a team-up would feel like: how about an hour of club-night steamrollers?
Part of the thrill of Ground Zero Festival 2024, then, is hearing how these two complicate that idea, presenting a hard and fast and rigorously dynamic vision of techno: windstorms of kick drums and static; walls of bass that could level an apartment stack; light-speed acid-industrial records; happy-hardcore synth blasts locked in an arms race with billion-ton 808s; and anything liable to set the dancefloor alight. They spend the session ratcheting up the tension, speed, and weight, cranking on the dials until the whole thing’s turned to an out-and-out barnburner, all gut-churning drum programming and sample chops that sprint past the sound barrier. It’s a remarkable achievement, a set that tangles up sonic ideas of what hardcore dance music can sound like without sacrificing any of the heft that makes it so appealing in the first place. This one’s for the sweat-soaked crowd.
Here’s two critical things about Osmosis in the Trees 2024: First, it’s tagged as #R&B & Soul on SoundCloud—the kind of thing that’s frequently a bit of a joke, but, here, isn’t at all. Second, by the time you’re half an hour in, you’ve heard spoken-word segments from people claiming “the secret to joy is resistance” and, far more mystifyingly, asking: “if God created only men, demons, and angels, what’s the explanation for all the extra stuff?” Call it R&B & Souls, if you will. Nema Hän spends the bulk of this set digging into left-field funk, wigged-out R&B, and haunted-house house (ahem) records, conjuring all sorts of spirits along the way, stringing a tightrope between the dancefloor and some far-flung plane. All that table-setting is, perhaps, burying the lede: this also has some of the best no-shit grooves you’re likely hear to all year, like a slo-mo soul flip of Tweet’s “Oh My,” a steamroller of tenor saxophones and hand-drum slammers and motorcycles that hits halfway through, an extended survey of minimal-electro R&B and organ-house screamers, and so—so!—much more.
There’s something to be said for dancefloor minimalism. That’s hardly controversial, of course — entire traditions have been built around kick-drum patterns stretching into the horizons, on tracks tossing stones and watching the ripples, on repetition as a form of change. But, as any lifelong raver will tell you, there’s still something about it’s that’s worth emphasizing: slow-and-low club music, if pitched just right, can take on a uniquely transportive quality; drawn-out grooves can act as shuttles towards the stars. If Romi’s contribution to The Observatory is any indication, the Berlin DJ knows this all too well. Here, they keep their eyes focused on deep-trip rhythms, emphasizing reliability over spontaneity, trusting long-form rollers to carry the day. The most obvious trick they pull is one of aesthetics, not structures. Throughout the mix’s two-plus hours, they slowly weave back and forth between club-night pumpers and headphone-session material for the morning after, creating something that would work comfortably in each — neither too heady for the club nor too hefty for a walk in the woods. This is the sound of dub-techno (and dub, and techno) minimalism mixed to a tee.
When Roddy Parker, a.k.a. Significant Other, was last in these pages, it was for Dripping 2024, a remarkable seven-hour opus from last June that used dub music as a springboard towards the cosmos. Live @ Sustain-Release 2024—released on Parker’s own Pain Management label—might be best imagined as a sister set of sorts. Recorded three months after hitting up Dripping, Parker went back to the east coast for round two. Listening back, it’s clear he’d not yet returned to earth. The first hour-or-so of this alone is worth the price of entry, a masterclass in bad-trip chill-out music: bleary-eyed ambient and acid-soaked jazz freakouts and sludged-up dub records suspended atop a black hole. But Parker’s hardly content to let that lie, instead twisting the knife and cutting all sorts of sigils along the way—over the course of Live @ Sustain-Release 2024, he finds space for a rough-and-tumble percussion workouts, truckloads of dub sirens, no-shit Screw tapes, nightmarish breakbeats, and so much more. With this set, Parker offers exploratory ravers an invitation to tune in and black out.
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