Image via Michael McKinney
Michael McKinney understands the cultural importance of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci.”
To be frank, July was packed, so let’s get into it. DJ Marcelle—a real DJ’s DJ, and one of the most out-there selectors working—went wild at Horst Arts & Music 2025, turning in a set of rug-pulls and black holes. Loidis—who, as Huerco S., was, for a while, similarly wild-eyed—zoomed in on heads-down tech-house for a live set on the other side of the planet. Special Guest DJ offered up a head-spinning dubstep session over on LYL Radio, and Reptant stretched electro, techno, and house into beguiling new directions for Trommel’s podcast series. Roza Terenzi and Kin Ann Foxman cracked open time capsules of trance and tech-house rollers for Resident Advisor, and Maenad and Loveshadow did something similar with deep house and disco for Honcho and Bar Part Time respectively.
Kode9 and Tim Reaper, two leading lights in who-knows-what UK dance-music idioms, turned in a riveting back-to-back that throttles between jungle, breaks, and footwork; elsewhere, Sonja Moonear and Margaret Dygas—two critical names in minimal house—pushed each other towards increasingly tripped-out grooves. High Spirits cooked up a tape of blissed-out reggae and dub records, and Russell E.L. Butler used dub as a springboard towards all manner of dancefloor sonics. Vladimir Ivkovic, in both a solo session and in a back-to-back with ISAbella, blasted towards the stars at a snail’s pace, weaving between sludgy rock-and-roll and wigged-out breakbeats all the while. James K’s Truancy offering is a half-lucid dream of IDM, breaks, and ambient music, and a recent set from London’s Time Is Away saw the duo turning towards familiar pastures: traditional folk musics the world over, barely-there modern classical music, and mountains of stardust.
Here are some of the best DJ sets July had to offer.
DJ Marcelle—one of the most ambitious, wild-eyed, and inventive DJs alive—opens her Horst Arts & Music Festival set with a joke. After a few minutes of sound-collage turntablism, she pulls up “Kill da DJ.” (“If that DJ ain’t making you dance, throw some bottles at his ass.”) After that, it’s juke into—300-BPM singeli? Sure, why not. Confrontational, left-field, rhythmic, and wholly unexpected: that’s DJ Marcelle’s approach in a nutshell. Horst Arts & Music 2025 is packed with moments like this, where Marcelle vaults between styles, imagining connections in real-time, never exactly peacocking but instead working with a dream logic that requires a certain amount of audacity. How else do you explain a five-minute stretch that moves between bass-blasted Brazilian funk, bouncy hard-tech, “Taps,” slow-mo industrial, and field recordings? Horst Arts & Music 2025 rarely makes obvious sense, but it’s tantalizing nevertheless—a thrown gauntlet to dancefloors and a warning against getting too comfortable.
In a recent interview, James K summarized her approach to Truancy Volume 353. “The mixes I’ve made for my [NTS] Trip Lick show over the years are all about twists and turns.” (For what it’s worth, that show is reliably killer.) This set, intended as an extension of that project, makes that idea abundantly clear: scan around the set and you’ll find turgid ambient music, SNES-era drum workouts, post-Glassian dub-breakbeats, above-the-clouds choral selections, smoked-out dub techno—you get the gist. Where plenty of DJs would take that grab-bag approach and turn it all a bit muddy, getting lost somewhere around the twentieth pivot, James K pulls it off with flying colors here thanks to her undying focus on finding some sort of dream-state; no matter the sonic particulars, Truancy Volume 353 is reliably hazy and vaguely blissed-out, with backmasked vocals and sludgy drums and barely-there synthesizers all turning to a thick haze.
In a 2023 interview with this site, Kode9 dug into his interest in 160-BPM dancefloor musics, speaking less to their sound than to their pure physical heft. “It’s what I find most exciting to play,” he wrote. “When it works, it creates a dance floor frenzy unrivaled by anything else I’ve played over the years.” If any new(ish)-school name would agree with that sentiment, it would be Tim Reaper, whose own catalog runs the gamut of hardcore breaks, white-knuckle junglisms, and a million flavors of breakbeats. They make a natural dancefloor pairing, in other words, if you’re not so much interested in club music as you are in windstorms. So it is with their recording from San Francisco’s Parameter 10, which sees the two dancefloor dons pushing each other into ever heftier, quicker, and more delirious territories: the sound of Parameter 10 is the sound of Amen breaks and footwork triplets stretched to the breaking point, of deep-dive ‘90s hardcore slammed into circa-now firestarters. There’s all sorts of highlights if that’s your speed, but Parameter 10 exceeds any particular moment thanks to a sheer accumulation of momentum; this is a set about the way one drum turns to ten turns to a thousand, steamrolling through countless shades of hardcore along the way.
Last year, I sat down with Brain Leeds—a Philadelphia-based electronic-music producer best known as Huerco S.—and talked about his artistic evolution. He’d recently revived his Loidis alias to release One Day, a collection of luminescent tech-house tools that turned out to be one of last year’s finest LPs. Over the years, he’d moved towards playing stranger, wigglier, and more delirious club sounds, but, as he put it: “Sometimes I feel like I got caught up in playing out tunes, and [thinking], ‘do I even like this’? I’m appreciative of all kinds of forward-thinking dance music, but I wasn’t trying to become a global bass DJ.”
Since that conversation, he’s leaned ever deeper into playful and vertiginous dance music, all clicks-and-cuts minimalism and just-so four-fours. Good Work, a recent live recording from Leeds-as-Loidis, is a great an example as any: here, he mixes barely-there dance-music with a tossed-off kind of grace, moving between Villalobosian who-knows-whats, lighter-than-air tech rollers, and house tracks that sound like they’ve got half the channels on mute. This is the kind of stuff that really benefits from length; given he goes so deep here, Leeds spends the duration of Good Work turning a groove into a trance, finding endless permutations of mid-BPM kick-drums, never flipping the table but instead opting to reorganize it again and again. Leeds could have kept charging down dancefloors with windstorming percussion tracks; he could have kept making ambient music, too. Fortunately, he’s continuing to press on to new territories—and, as Good Work shows, he’s apt to master just about any of them.
In the liner notes for Honcho Podcast Series 136, Brooklyn DJ Maenad made their intentions clear: they intended the set to work as “a joyful invitation to dance” together. By that standard, they succeeded with flying colors. To put it bluntly, Honcho Podcast entries are typically anything but dour; and even by those standards, 136 is a jubilant affair, a rollicking ninety minutes packed with lockstep rhythm sections and just-so drum programming. To take a birds’-eye view, Maenad spends the session rocketing between joyful-noise drum workouts, hi-fi disco stompers, and disco-ball house records, but that’s overlooking so many great details: the string-blasted refix of James Brown’s “Sex Machine,” the vintage-Casio energy of Jovonn’s “Pianos of Gold,” the basically-Donna-Summer-circa-Bad-Girls instrumental of Terrence Parker’s “Deuteronomy,” and so many more. Put simply, this thing’s sunshine in a can.
If an hour and a half isn’t quite enough for you, it’s worth booking a flight from Brooklyn to San Francisco and tuning in to Loveshadow’s Bar Part Time session. Here, the critical California dance-music trio go deep on low-slung house and disco rollers. (At risk of complicating things, if Maenad’s session is pitched for a 2-p.m. drive, this one might work a bit better at sundown.) It’s a real thrill of a set, packed with all manner of sun-blasted grooves, with flutes and horns and string sections and an endless Rolodex of vocalists weaving in and out of the mix throughout. As with Maenad’s offering, there’s all sorts of highlights, but the set’s greatest joy lies in the way Loveshadow weave between melodies, rhythms, and traditions, making something that feels like it could have been plucked out of a ‘92 record bin along the way.
In his work as Reptant, Lucas Hatzisavas makes bag-of-tricks electro, pairing each eight-bar loop of club-ready four-fours with a fistful of glitter. Trommel.223 is as fine an example as any: a rollicking ninety minutes that feels half that thanks to canny blends and a million different why-not sound-design choices. The best part, though, is less in any particular track than it is in the set’s overall sense of verve: chest-rattling basslines and slamming kicks act as a solid enough foundation for the high-end to go bananas here, squelching and jumping and rolling around in a way that feels less like a straight-ahead DJ set than it does a freewheeling jam session. There’s real joy to be found in tracking the way Hatzisavas shoots these acid-laced keyboards across the sky, their arcs inverting and flipping inside out before changing shape altogether. Here, Hatzisavas pulls off that trick again and again, taking well-worn dance-music tropes and twisting them into something that feels both vital and new.
For better or worse, it’s easy to take a historiographer’s angle on dance music: to track the ways histories circle back on themselves, to map ‘20s breakbeats on top of ‘90s ones, to turn the whole timeline into a Möbius strip. Sometimes, this is a bit disheartening—the serpent can only gnaw on its own tail for so long before something breaks—but, every now and again, the ever-contracting timelines in dance music yield thrilling results.
See also: RA.998 and RA.999 (and RA.998). For her latest turn behind Resident Advisor’s mix series, Roza Terenzi—a critical figure working at the intersection of trance, progressive house, and breakbeats—cooks up a whip-cracking hour of percussion rollers, turning in something that feels like it could have been ripped out of a ‘92 record crate in the best way: acid-techno slammers next to lighters-up progressive-house, skip-and-shuffle kick patterns crashing into veritable steamrollers. On the flip, Kim Ann Foxman takes a similar approach and laces it with capital-B-H Big Hooks: M.C.s and diva-house vocals abound here, every vocal line gliding atop a bed of pulsating and bouncy techno (and house, and trance, and breaks, and—) tracks. It’s a playful and archetypical dancefloor session: confetti-cannon jubilee mixed to precision.
Not long after, two other icons grabbed the decks for a markedly different set. Sonja Moonear and Margaret Dygas are veritable legends of minimal house, and RA.999—recorded live at fabric’s 25th birthday celebration—catches them in top form, bouncing from one just-so groove to the next, playing Jenga with kicks and claps all the while. Throughout, they lock in on a one-of-one mood: playful but studious, tranced-out but plenty wiggly, locked-in but loose-limbed. It’s an impressive trick—the set is both specific and broad at once, with every drum keeping the dancefloor moving even as the synth lines and vocal chops promise something a bit more starborne. Scan around and you’ll find all manner of hits here: a shot-in-the-arm of house-music history here, a bit of Perlon-via-Chicago there, blippy electro-trance elsewhere. The whole thing’s shot through with electricity, though: this is the sound of two critical minimal-et-cetera maestras pushing each other ever further.
Sometimes, it’s worth saying it straight. Whether they’re behind the boards or the decks, whether they’re working with house, techno, dub, or something in between, Russell E.L. Butler is one of the most remarkable musicians working in contemporary dance music. Their work, at its best, is hefty and sensual at once; to get lost in a Butler work is to find a world of sandpaper and stardust. On Mind Alignment Process, recorded live in New York in early summer of this year, Butler makes good on those promises, stretching a line between brain-bending techno, zonked-out dub, and miles-deep house, turning out something obviously suited for the dancefloor but offering a cavern’s worth of sonic depth for any headphone purists in the audience. The session starts out quiet with a mixture of static-encrusted ambient and lovelorn R&B, but it quickly turns a bit rollicking; by the end, Butler’s built a veritable kaleidoscope out of dance-music histories.
If you’re looking for something a bit lower-key, then Sweet Tapes 005 — the latest in an every-now-and-then mix series based out of London — ought to hit the spot. Here, High Spirits, a duo from Newcastle, go deep on two highly specific styles of reggae rhythms, offering up two hours of sun-kissed rhythms along the way. The sides are refreshingly straight-ahead — A, “Lovers Rock,” is an hour of what’s on the can, and B, “Nigerian Reggae,” is even more on-the-nose. On each, they lean hard into their selector bona fides, pulling up plenty of deep cuts and prioritizing slow-and-low blending over anything too flashy; this is about individual tracks, not the acrobatics between them. By and large, the first half is tender, laid-back, and plenty blissful; flip it over and you’ll find something a touch rowdier, replete with air horns and gravelly MCs and carefully laid harmonies.
Special Guest DJ—a.k.a. Shy; f.k.a. uon, Caveman LSD, Final POV, DJ Paradise, and plenty more besides—is a critical member of Berlin’s dance-music scene. Whether he’s spinning, producing, or running shop at 3XL, he’s maddeningly difficult to pin down, and it feels as though he’s in a new band about every six weeks. The most pleasant surprise, then, about Live at ABSORBED, is its simplicity: here, Special Guest DJ turns in two hours of no-holds-barred dubstep, prioritizing gut-wrenching basslines over all else. Given the runtime, it’s to be expected that the set takes a wide view of the genre—at times, he’s wheeling up neo-grime rhythms, all ice-cold synth blasts and just-so hi-hats; elsewhere, it’s white-knuckle almost-riddim scorchers—but he holds everything together thanks to that big-tent kind of focus. Live at ABSORBED is both exploratory and hyper-focused, a club session that takes the billion-ton weightlessness of great dubstep seriously before launching straight into the dark.
In their work, Time Is Away—a.k.a. London duo Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney—tangle up timelines with a quiet smile, using the medium of DJing to explore universes in the process. While they do have some club-friendly sets, they seldom return to those pastures; instead, a typical Time Is Away set—to whatever extent such a thing exists—is aimed straight at the head-trippers, a gradual smearing of smoked-out IDM, fifth-world spoken word, and folk musics the world over. Their latest offering, recorded in anticipation of 2025’s Rituale Festival, takes that approach to some kind of end-point; it moves less like a traditional DJ mix (whatever that means) than it does like a scrapbook, an assemblage of the sounds that move the duo: tabla-slammed kind-of-krautrock, lucid-dream rock-and-roll, 2-a.m. jazz. Its subtitle, “Vivid Moon,” may just give away the game: nocturnal but nevertheless vivid to the point of being a bit hallucinatory.
At this point, Vladimir Ivkovic is a column favorite, and for good reason. Ivkovic’s sets are rarely just one thing, but they are reliably exploratory and disorienting; even when he’s looking straight at the dancefloor, he’s liable to coat the whole thing in mud. He tends to mix slowly, in both senses of the term—long blends, low BPMs—which lend his sets a kind of cosmic heft; every move feels premeditated, making even the wildest swings eventually click into place. This month, we’ve got two sets from the master. For his set at Naturalis 2025, the latest edition of a dance-music festival recently hosted in Naples, he takes his slow-and-bleary approach to a logical extreme: There’s plenty of drums to kick things off, sure, but they’re trudging, not stomping. Over the course of three-or-so hours, he covers a tremendous range: spoken-word soapboxing and glitched-out white noise; sludged-up new-wave and proto-proto-electro; chopped-and-garbled folk musics and head-in-the-clouds dream pop; and so, so much more. Eventually, he takes to the stars with a raucous selection of full-on breakbeats—the kind of crescendo that makes all the pianissimo beforehand fade into the background.
Elsewhere, in a live recording ripped from Berlin’s Climate of Fear, he teamed up with ISAbella, a Barcelona selector with a similar who-knows-what attitude. Notably, this isn’t their first time connecting; a jaw-dropping recording (eight hours!) from last year’s Draaimolen Festival is still one of this year’s finest live sets. While ISAbella only joined him for three hours that time around, here, they run it back for four, and it’s a fascinating document. While the set is undoubtedly packed with Ivkovic’s typically-atypical flair—fuzzed-out rock-and-roll Z-sides, ambient breakbeats, and a million flavors of 3-a.m. psychedelia abound—it’s also unusually sensual, featuring a few dips into straight-on ‘90s R&B rollers and snare-drum sounds that might crack a tooth or two. Beyond that wrinkle, the back-to-back also presents a straight-up masterclass in slow-and-low mixing, featuring a BPM crawl so gradual you’ve got to scan around to find it in the first place. Eventually, they lock in on something approaching full-on rave ballista, locking light-speed sample chops and scorched-Earth acid lines in a seemingly double helix. Four hours, it turns out, ends all too quickly.
We rely on your support to keep POW alive. Please take a second to donate on Patreon!
